Cooking and baking as protest

Just as a cake can have many layers, the act of baking itself can contain multiple meanings. These meanings can be personal, like when you bake your friend her favorite cake for her birthday, or they can have a broader message. Just ask bakers like Paola Velez (author of Bodega Bakes) and Natasha Pickowicz (author of the award-winning More Than Cake), both of whom have used bake sales to raise awareness of (and money for) various social causes like civil and reproductive rights. The New York Times Style Magazine recently interviewed these two pastry chefs and others who have used baking as a form of social protest. (gift link)

This activity is by no means novel; the history of baking as a social messaging device goes back to at least the 18th century, when women in the colonies of North America baked “muster” cakes for soldiers being mustered to fight in the Revolutionary War. In the 1910s and 20s, suffragettes published cookbooks partly as a means to get out their message and partly to appease men, many of whom thought that if women got the right to vote they would no longer be cooking dinner for their husbands (gasp!). Similarly, the civil rights movement in the 1960s also saw bake sales used to fund bus boycotts and a decade later, cakes and cookies were part of an effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment.

The current crop of baking activists are using similar tools, in addition to harnessing the virtual megaphone of the internet, to raise money for specific actions like delivering feminine hygiene products to women in need, or to bring attention to topics like climate change. Individuals and collectives have also published cookbooks as fundraisers for people affected by war (#Bake for Syria Recipe Book and Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate Our Shared Humanity), to raise money to combat homelessness (A Taste of Home: 120 Delicious Recipes from Leading Chefs and Celebrities), or to bring awareness to multiple topics (Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Butter, Sugar, and Women’s Voices). Far from a passing fad, using food as a tool for protest is a long established tradition that continues to be effective.