“Peace Meal Supper Club™ is a unique evening of fine food and progressive discussion, focused on strengthening ourselves as agents for positive change. I create a 4-course menu focused on a theme, such as Pollination, Fair Trade, Cacao, or even humble-but-life-giving Dirt. I share my research into the topic via in-depth essays on my website, which will hopefully inspire the conversation during the meal. It’s like a concept album which you can eat.”
Art is an expression of dissatisfaction with the state of one’s world. Or stated another way, an artist struggles within their dissatisfaction with the world around them. Like many other art forms, mine is meant to illuminate, challenge, and suggest.
I explore the dissatisfaction side of the equation through a multi-media inter-disciplinary examination of intersectionality: “the study of intersections between forms or systems of oppression, domination or discrimination,” applying it beyond studies of gender and race, to include undocumented agricultural workers, dirt, seeds, and the Mississippi River.
My diners and I have explored social movements, such as Labor, along with the subversive empowerment of Border Radio, and the celebration of freedom and self-improvement embodied in the African-American celebration of Juneteenth. Peace Meal Supper Club™ has provided a lens to explore post-Columbian-Exchange globalization, the status of Fair Trade cacao, and the humanitarian tragedy of successive and worsening refugee crises.
All of this with food as the primary medium. The taken-for-granted is often the most impactful.
On the other side of the artistic equation is the hoped-for outcome. The goal is to re-imagine our world, to once again envision Utopia, and to offer Gratitude for all who helped us find it.
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”
We iteratively establish Utopias as stepping stones, mile markers to which we can refer when our course needs correction. With each new stone, we are more resilient and capable, winnowing ourselves into the core of what matters. As the powers-that-be successively nudge us closer to calamity, we revert to the soil and the sun and the simple. In this sense of recursion, Utopia–and Peace Meal Supper Club™–is Tao: returning to the simple sustaining forces that cannot be named, neither can they be dormant for long.
Recurring themes, regardless of any supper’s stated topic, have been several:
- Our significantly artificial food system
- Diminishing habitat and diversity, among animals, plants, and culture
- Reduction of keystone species and other signs of systemic collapse
- The overwhelm of industrial agriculture
- The overall struggle for fairness, reaching through civil rights, gender equality, and the rising awareness of animal rights
- Identity, dominion, imperialism, exploitation, extraction, displacement, and the silencing of dissent
The overlay is complex and intricate. Peace Meal Supper Club™, with its multi-sensory qualities, offers everyone an access point and therefore hope.
Click here to read more about the project. (Kindly scroll down past the gallery on that page.)
Peace Meal Supper Club™ events currently available for reservations:
CONTENTS