In “Beyond Deficit: Writing Commensality and Home in South Central,” Hanna Garth rejects media depictions that show South Central as overrun by crime and violence, and a food desert, full of fast food and liquor stores. While, to some extent, the violence and corporate divestment are very real, South Central is home to nearly a million people. Garth’s research illuminates love, joy, and community building in South Central--backyard barbeques, the post-church meal, family reunions. Focusing on in-depth household-based ethnographic research, she draws on several South Central household stories to argue that at the most basic level, a home is a stable, safe space that provides for basic human needs. Centering the role of food and commensality here, Garth argues that if a home is necessary to build anything beyond that, we must attend to the multiple meanings of home as a polysemic concept with various social and political ramifications that should not be taken for granted. Written in a life-writing narrative style that foregrounds the stories of South Central residents, and the intimacies of their home spaces, this research reveals how home building and access to basic needs can lend themselves to the possibility of broader forms of mutual aid, social support, and community building.
In “Global Black Dining in the Apocalypse,” Cherene Sherrard-Johnson notes that Global Black cuisine is thriving in Los Angeles, even as fascism spreads and ICE agents swarm the freeways. She asks: Why are Black folks eating out while the city burns? Is it a form of disaster tourism, or an Afro-pessimist bar crawl? In response, she explores Black-owned restaurants of varying elegance in distinct neighborhoods to discover why this dining niche is thriving in the sunset of late capitalism. This celebration of African diasporic cuisine is not escapism, but part and parcel of what it means to pause, regroup, and prepare for the challenges each morning brings. Lucia, Two Hommés, Bridgetown Roti, and Somerville are Black, diasporic restaurants. They join the rich tradition of established venues like Alta Adams, but they also map a sea-change in Black LA’s food culture from the down South to the Global South. Thinking alongside food writers, food studies scholars, and food scarcity as depicted in Octavia Butler’s Parable series, Sherrard-Johnson’s paper explores this transition as a dynamic process of innovative exchange and creative fusion.
In “Freedom and Fusion: Black Angeleno Foodways in the Last Century,” Corrine Collins reminds us that from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, Los Angeles was considered a relative safe haven for African Americans in comparison to the Jim Crow South. Chef and writer Toni Tipton-Martin reflects on this history in her historical cookbook Jubilee, wherein Black Los Angeles cuisine is influenced by her family’s migratory histories, personal investments, and their local community (10). In her 2025 cookbook Africali, Kenyan American chef Kiano Moju defines California cuisine as an “approach to cuisine” that “embraces the flavors of its immigrant communities while celebrating the state’s agriculture and the flavor of fresh produce” (4). Between Tipton-Martin and Moju, California cuisine is theorized as both distinct from and connected to other Black diasporic food cultures, routed through an access to vibrant local produce and the various ethnic cultures that occupy the city’s neighborhoods and cultural enclaves. While neither Tipton-Martin or Moju use the term “fusion,” Collins’ paper analyzes the recipes and headnotes of Jubilee, Africali, and the Negro Culinary Arts Club of Los Angeles’ Eliza’s Cook Book (1932) to investigate the ways that Black Angelenos’ foodways reflect the multiculturalist narratives of the Golden State. In doing so, she traces the emergence of the term “fusion” to argue for specific attention to the ways that Black chefs have negotiated their relations to their Blackness and non-Black neighbors through food as a site of belonging and exclusion.