Welcome to Seeds & Receipts an ongoing, multimedia project honoring elements of my food story and how it is (and sometimes isn’t) interconnected with larger stories of food in the African diaspora.

Here you’ll find three main galleries:

1. Food Personal food writings alongside recipes from my past, present and future;

2. People Dedications to the people who’ve fed, cooked with, or influenced me;

3. Plants & Animals Ingredient profiles that will be linked in some of the receipts for those who are interested in going there. (check out Deep Routes)

This ongoing project is also a call for your engagement, and I welcome you to share what resonates or comes up for you as you read via comments, written thoughts/critiques, or video responses that can be sent to mayamarie.food.edu@gmail.com. With the possibility of me posting it in a fourth gallery (P.S.), with your permission of course!

Anywho, enjoy!

Warmly,

Maya

Q & A

Why Seeds & Receipts?

seed/sēd/noun

1. 1. a flowering plant's unit of reproduction

For me seeds represent and encourage life, death, growth, patience, strength, tenderness, gratitude, adaptation, and legacy. I want to express these elements through this online collection in a playful and venerable way.

re·ceipt /rəˈsēt/noun, verb

1. the action of receiving something or the fact of its being received.

Recipes were originally called receipts because they were meant to record and transfer information in the case of its original creator not being around, and one might add that it was also a way to profit off of knowledge (e.g. white slave owning mistresses publishing receipt books based on the recipes developed by many black cooks and only giving them credit if they were represented as caricatures*). Many receipts were originally a paragraph or so, with very minimal directions and the ingredients were in the directions rather than being listed. Receipts in some ways required you to do more than read, you had to know another cook and/or have some experience, or a desire to gain experience, in the kitchen.

Thinking about both these words, for me, illustrates how cooking is more than reading a list of ingredients and following directions, and that farming is more than just the work of planting and tending to seeds.

Both are vehicles for communicating and sharing the moments in-between and during life and death with other people/beings. I want this collection to be a site of that sort of sharing and communication.

Although no judgement if you’re just here for photos and recipes. But . . . you might get more out of it if you read a story or two, and play the music/sounds/or videos provided to create a shared experience.

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How often is this place updated?

2-3 times a season there will be a new profile, writing, and/or feature. I’ll post it on the Seeds & Receipts insta.

Update (2.1.2021): This site will be updated quarterly at most now that I’m shifting to focusing on developing and launching Deep Routes. Don’t want to damper the quality of the galleries, and the ones I have slated for Summer and Fall 2021 are just taking longer to materialize/produce.

Update (3.30.2021): Ok, so I’ve decided to make the frequency of galleries be one per year. Gallery #5 is slated for Fall 2021 and Gallery #6 for Summer/Fall 2022. In reflecting on the process of making Gallery #1, that took me a whole year to create, whereas I made Galleries 2 through 4 in 3-4 months each, however I think the quality of them was poorer and think presenting one gallery per year makes the most sense.

Update (1.25.22) Ok, last frequency update, lol. The next gallery is slated to release at the conclusion of my Saturn return, which is technically March 2023, however, I’ll observe the conclusion following my birthday, so October 2023. It is a deeply complex gallery, with themes of learned self-flagellation, internalized phobias/isms, as well as sorting through the basement of my life so far in an effort to age tenderly, all related to and channeled through foodways as per usual. More details to come later this year in an interlude posting.

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What made you create this?

Not to get too too dark . . . but in my experience as a farmer and cook, life and death are often at the forefront of my mind, and I’m interested in creating spaces that celebrate the living and the dead while I’m still here. I feel like food is a great place to celebrate the living (cooks, farmers, mothers, fathers, scientists, coworkers, friends, plants, water, etc.) and honor the dead (animals, grandparents, plants, friends, etc.) who continue to give life and guidance in obvious as well as subtle ways.

Also, I’m interested in making information about food history widely available so that more Black and POC are empowered to learn about their own rich food histories and build on them. Alongside that I believe my own food story is apart of that history and might maybe be meaningful to someone else’s story.

*For more on this check out The Jemima Code by Toni Tipton Martin, especially the forewords and introduction but the whole book is a phenomenal record of Black food writing; also They Were Her Property by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, it’s not about food, but in-depth about how White women slave owners benefited from upholding slavery and have never been powerless bystanders in the institution of White supremacy. As no one really is.