On Ancestral Recipes and Diasporic Foodways

In collaboration, C& selects a series of podcast episodes by The Museum of Black Futures. 

When we speak about repatriation, we often think of cultural objects, sacred items, artifacts returning to the communities that they once belonged to. In its fullest sense, repatriation is and must be more than the material. The concept of rematriation encompasses the immaterial, restoring spiritual balance by reconnecting people, places, and traditions. It invites ritual and ceremony to create safe passage for what is being returned.

This episode explores how these ideas take root in the work of chef, author, and food activist Lelani Lewis. Her cooking, lectures, writings, and workshops return us to the produce of the soil, the sacred mother, in ways that transcend recipes. Her work draws us back to the ingredients, practices, and foodways that have carried ancestral memory — such as cassava for example. It is a reminder that food is not just sustenance, but it is ceremony, archive, and purpose. When we treat this as a living practice — when we cook together, share the table, pass on the methods — it becomes a form of spiritual reparation.

Can a museum be a place where you taste history? Where exhibitions are also meals, and where recipes are treated as heritage documents? Where the return of culture also happens on the tongue, in the body, and in the soil?

This conversation speculates on what it would mean to design a museum experience where food is its beating heart.

Listen now on C& Sound

Production & Sound design: Marcellino van Callias with La Fam Productions

Introduction Music: Oshunmare

Visuals: Illest Preacha

Trumpet: Peter Somuah

This text, originally published on The Museum of Black Futures channel, has been edited for clarity.