Flavors from Our Earth: An Interactive Workshop Exploring Food, Culture & Climate
Join us for a community workshop to reflect on and share our food memories. Guided by the simple prompt: “What is a family recipe or ingredient that tells a story about your culture or ancestry?” — this gathering invites us into a collective recollection that recipes are more than instructions. They are vessels for memory, carriers of ancestral knowledge, and threads of connection across lands and generations.
In a climate-changed world, preserving our food memories—and the special recipes that shape our identities—becomes an essential act of adaptation, cultural resilience, and collective nourishment. Together, we’ll explore how food stories can illuminate pathways toward a just and livable future.
What You’ll Experience:
A welcoming space to connect and build community through storytelling
Guided process to reflect individually through journaling on an ingredient or recipe that carries cultural meaning for you
Conversations at the intersection of food, identity, and climate change
An invitation to record your 60-second video or audio food memory as part of the Flavors project
About The Flavors Project:
This workshop is part of a larger project, Flavors from Our Earth: Cooking Up Stories of Culture and Climate, a community-sourced living archive that celebrates our food memories, cultural identity, and ancestral wisdom. Launching during NYC Climate Week 2025, Flavors will engage individuals through a mobile story station at public venues, events, and an interactive workshop. Individuals will reflect on the prompt: “What is a family recipe or ingredient that tells a story about your culture or ancestry?” Select participants will be invited to contribute further to the project’s next phases, including a community-sourced cookbook, dinner series, and social media campaign. Each of these will be paired with research into the climate impacts of the featured ingredients, exploring environmental intersections, particularly in relation to pathways to our future survival.
About the Facilitators:
Flavors is a collaboration of Ivanna of Ecoluminary and Jothsna of Change Narrative. Learn more about us in our bios below, including our food memories.
Ivanna Morales Mercado is the founder of Ecoluminary, a studio dedicated to expanding the scope of voices that get to share their food and climate stories. For the past 4 years, she’s worked as a pastry chef and sustainable food writer. With a BA in Environmental Analysis and years of experience in sustainable food, she bridges climate science with the culinary arts. She started her career as a pastry chef in 2021, ending it 3 years later to pursue food storytelling. During 2023, she became a Creative Works Fellow, which allowed her to write a cookbook that explores food globalization in Puerto Rico. From 2023-2025, Ivanna was named an Obama-Chesky Voyager Scholar for Public Service, becoming a part of the second cohort of 100 young changemakers committed to a career in public service. Today, she honors that commitment by using food and storytelling to foster critical dialogue around climate and sustainability. A food memory that Ivanna cherishes is the first time that her grandmother, father, and she got together to record and bake the family’s secret flan recipe; it was a moment of intergenerational cooking that reminded her of the value of food in cultural preservation. Above all, she was bursting with excitement and couldn’t contain her smile when she finally recreated her grandmother’s flan perfectly.
Jothsna Harris is the founder of Change Narrative LLC, which exists to build capacity in the climate justice movement through the power of our stories. With over a decade of experience, Jothsna has designed and implemented award-winning climate change programs rooted in community, centering personal stories and other values-based ways that resonate, coaching thousands of people to find compelling narratives to share at live events, on radio, and in print media. Jothsna led the creative process and co-edited the 2020 book, Eyewitness: Minnesota Voices on Climate Change, is the Producer of the 2022 MN Fringe Festival ‘Venue Pick’ show Changing the Narrative: Climate Stories for Justice, and the recipient of the 2023 Creative Climate Communications Award from the Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership. Jothsna is named a 2023 Obama USA Leader, as part of a cohort of 100 changemakers across the Nation working to strengthen democracy. Jothsna currently serves on The Great Northern Festival Board of Directors. A food memory that Jothsna savors is growing up, the kitchen more often than not was alive: steam rising, pots bubbling, the air thick with aromatic spices—windows would be cracked open, the stove fan humming. Just thinking about it evokes anticipation, because it always meant something delicious was on the way. When her mom first arrived in the U.S. from India, she arrived with a suitcase full of spices, knowing that the ingredients for her favorite dishes would be hard to find in Minnesota. A suitcase full of flavor—carrying memories of home.