What We Eat at the Rave
Welcome to our Tuesday edition, where we feature great writing about food. Thursday is for recipes.
IN THIS ISSUE: What Minnesotans are cooking for the homies standing guard in the cold, and a brief history of eating while dancing.
Appetizers
Hold the ICE
Thousands of Minnesotans have spent the past week on the streets in bone-chilling temperatures to protest, observe, and push back against ICE’s invasion of the Twin Cities. Federal agents have killed two of these Minnesotans, Renée Good and Alex Pretti. The people have not backed down.
But they need to eat. In a city under siege, Gourmet wondered: how is everyone staying fed in the cold? One friend of Gourmet who runs point on her neighborhood Signal chat told us, “one group has been feeding me and my team with chili and cornbread—they ask preferred spice level! It’s Midwest cornbread which often has sugar in it (I’m Southern so there’s always the sugar vs no sugar debate and I’m no sugar, but try to get a Midwesterner to eat cornbread without it).” [Editor’s note: Gourmet has no official stance on whether or not sugar belongs in cornbread.]
Another source said that they’ve been making the most of their pantry by cooking for others with “creative soups, homemade pretzels, rice and beans” to hand out on the streets, and said that “If we need an ingredient we are focused on supporting Hispanic groceries.” Another home cook in Minneapolis’s northern Columbia Heights “has been baking up a storm—mostly sourdough breads and cinnamon rolls to keep folks fueled.”
As they stand against masked men with guns stalking their neighborhoods, people have also taken the opportunity to try out some new recipes: our source says that across the effort, “members are cooking with local ingredients and recipes from Minneapolis communities being targeted, including Somali, Hmong, and Latino cultures.”
In some cases the Minnesota hospitality is going sweetly overboard: Rabbi Grace Oedel told us that she bought a boatload of chocolate bars to share with her religious comrades as they prepared to hit the front lines, “but when I arrived at my room with four Christian reverends, they had brought me chocolate.” (Along the same lines, she also shared that a local pho spot insisted on comping her fellow clergypeople’s meals once they realized they were part of the movement.)
Not everyone can hit the streets: Emily Witt at the New Yorker reported that a volunteer network of twenty-two churches and twelve schools has formed to organize grocery deliveries to 27,000 largely Latino families who can’t take the risk of going to the store themselves when ICE is on the loose. Stacy Brooks at the Heavy Table chronicled the ghost town of the East Lake Street district, where Somali, Mexican, and other immigrant-owned restaurants have cut hours, locked their doors, and posted anti-ICE signage in their dark windows.
At least one café, Misfit, stayed open during the general strike last Friday to pull espresso shots free of charge for protesters, the New York Times reported. Thanks to a donation from a Texas woman, they also had a bottle of bourbon and Bailey’s on hand for people who needed a little extra warmth. Solidarity forever, and fuck ICE. —N.S.
Potluck for the People
Have a favorite protest recipe of your own? Reply to this email or send it to editors@gourmetmagazine.net to share it with us! —The Eds.
What We Eat at the Rave
By Hyunjee Nicole Kim
An ethos of collective care has transformed the role of food in New York’s nightlife
In our wayward youth, eating at the rave was unthinkable. Perhaps for some, it still is. My friends and I ingested substances in pill, powder, and tab form to stay awake, and most of these drugs would curb our appetites as our bodies arrived at altered states. Alcohol, too, was involved, often combined: drinks topped off with successive pulls of nicotine, marijuana—which might later stir some pangs of hunger. After an evening of dancing from dusk to dawn, we had to replenish the calories that were sacrificed to pouring sweat and ceaseless movement, or else comfort the pain of a remorseless hangover. The memories I have of meals from this time are few and far between. Mostly, after the sun came up, we would stumble into one of the then more numerous twenty-four-hour diners in New York and fall asleep into our scrambled eggs, waking up to embark on our long journeys home via subway.
I left New York for Los Angeles in 2015, and I acclimated myself to different weather patterns of listening to music, dancing, and enjoying food. Once in a while someone would drive me from a bar to the afters. I’d take a turn in a warehouse in South Central and shuffle to a bit of techno before stepping outside for a breath of fresh air. Maybe a taco truck would be parked outside. Or a few women would wheel up makeshift planchas, bacon-wrapped franks and peppers sizzling on the flattop. Occasionally, someone with a small cooler full of steaming tamales would plant herself at the venue’s entrance. If my nose wasn’t too compromised, I could smell the incoming aromas and my belly would gurgle, reminding me that I had a body.