The Food Stories Project Manifesto

The Food Stories Project is an archival and storytelling practice grounded in matriarchal knowledge, care, and the lived experiences of women and marginalized communities.

We believe what happens in kitchens matters.

We believe recipes are not just instructions.
They are evidence.

They are memory, labor, migration, adaptation, survival, creativity, and love.
They hold the shape of a life.

They carry what families know in their bodies, in their hands, and in their habits long after paper is lost and voices go quiet.

We believe the knowledge carried through food has too often been diminished because it has so often been carried by women, working people, elders, immigrants, and marginalized communities.
It has been treated as ordinary when it is in fact foundational.
It has been treated as domestic when it is also historical.
It has been treated as informal when it is deeply intelligent, skilled, and culturally significant.

We reject the idea that only certain stories deserve preservation.

We reject the hierarchy that treats official records as truth while dismissing the knowledge held in kitchens, gardens, porches, church halls, break rooms, backyards, farm stands, and family tables.

We believe domestic labor is labor.
We believe feeding people is cultural work.
We believe oral tradition is knowledge.

We believe the people who held families together through food belong in the record.

The Food Stories Project exists to help change that record.

Our work lives in three connected parts

The Food Stories Project
the umbrella, the archive, and the gathering place. It is where recipes, oral histories, family memory, and lived experience are documented with care. It holds the full body of this work.

Hoggtowne Heritage Kitchen
the living kitchen arm. It is where preservation becomes practice—where recipes are cooked, tested, translated, and shared. It honors regional foodways and the understanding that some knowledge can only be learned by doing.

A Woman’s Place
the heart of this project. It names the kitchen as both a site of burden and a site of power. It honors the women whose labor, ingenuity, endurance, and care shaped families and communities while rarely being credited as authors, historians, or knowledge holders. It insists that these stories belong at the center of the record.

Together, these three parts allow us to preserve food not as trend or performance, but as inheritance.

We approach archiving as an act of care, correction, and repair.

We work to lift the voices of women and marginalized people not as an afterthought, not as decoration, and not as branding, but as a core commitment. Too many histories have been filtered through white patriarchal frames that decided whose work counted, whose labor was visible, and whose stories were worth keeping.

We are not interested in repeating that harm.

We are interested in listening differently.
We are interested in documenting with rigor and tenderness.
We are interested in preserving the voices that history has too often spoken over.

This work may look like a daughter recording her mother’s recipes before memory fades.
It may look like a handwritten card turned into a usable recipe for a modern kitchen.
It may look like a cooking lesson in someone’s home, a dinner where stories are passed down between courses, a lost dish rebuilt from fragments, or a family archive shaped from notes, photos, stains, instincts, and voice.

What we preserve is not only the food itself, but the life around it.

We believe preservation should not flatten people.
We believe stories should be gathered with consent, context, and care.
We believe memory work should be relational, not extractive.

We believe the goal is not to turn lives into content.
The goal is to honor them, hold them, and keep them in a form that can be carried forward.

We believe a woman’s place was never only in the kitchen.
But we also believe that what happened there has never been small.

In kitchens, women taught, stretched, soothed, negotiated, invented, survived, nourished, remembered, and made something out of not enough.

Entire worlds were held together there.
Entire identities were passed down there.
Entire histories waited there to be taken seriously.

We take them seriously.

We believe what was carried should not be lost simply because it was not written in the language of power.

We believe stories told over cutting boards and stovetops are worthy of record.

We believe food is one of the oldest ways people say:
this is who we are,
this is how we survived,
this is what we loved,
this is what we refused to let disappear.

The Food Stories Project exists so more of it survives.