170: Ingredients for Building a Community Through a Cottage Bakery with Teresa Finney

What does it take to make the most out of the internet when you’re building a micro or cottage bakery? My guest today, Teresa Finney, is here to explore this through her journey building At Heart Panadería. Teresa is a pastry chef and writer from the Bay Area in California, with family roots in Guadalajara, Mexico. Now based in Atlanta, Georgia, she runs At Heart Panadería, a contemporary Mexican bakery. She is also the author of Panadería: A Cookbook Zine, which contains five thoughtfully crafted original recipes from her cottage bakery. 

In today’s discussion, we explore how she began her cottage bakery in her at-home kitchen, the shifting relationship with the internet to spread the word of her new bakes, the importance of sourcing seasonal and local ingredients, the relationship between baking and the body, and the role she sees bakers playing in serving their communities.

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169: Do Food Justice Movements Understand Community Needs? with Dr. Hanna Garth

My guest this week, Dr. Hanna Garth, is here to speak to how food justice movements are affected by long-term misconceptions and assumptions about the communities they work with. Hanna is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, who studies food access and the global food system. Drawing on 15 years of research on the food justice movement in South Central Los Angeles, her second book Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement is out now with the University of California Press.

She draws on this ethnographic research to understand issues related to justice and equity in multiracial communities. She studies these questions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States. Out of her food justice movement research she also published the co-edited the volume Black Food Matters: Food Justice in the Wake of Racial Justice. She has also published the book Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal based on long-term research in eastern Cuba, and several articles in top journals in her field and won a wide variety of awards for her research and service. 

In today’s conversation, we’re discussing some of the central themes in her latest book, Food Justice Undone, such as the roles of liberalism and whiteness in maintaining power structures and dynamics in food justice movements, the racialized differences in food justice work, and the power of language, statistics, and small moments in shaping the landscape and politics of food movements. 

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168: What is the Relationship Between Nutrition and Intuition? with Stephanie Voytek

My guest this week, Stephanie Voytek, is a registered dietician here to walk through some of the key issues around nutrition and anxiety in our current social media landscape. She has with a range of experience working in the field of nutrition, from providing education to the community through food access programs, working in the fields and kitchens on farms, and counseling folks with eating disorders. Her range of work experience allows her to understand people, and find the entry point for nutrition-related behavior change in each community and individual. Her work emphasizes pleasure as central to nutrition education, replacing nutrition prescription with food connection as a central intervention. 

In today’s conversation, we’re diving further into the idea of pleasure and intuition as it relates to nutrition. These are terms that can get thrown around a bit willy-nilly in wellness spheres, but as Stephanie points out, there’s actually a lot of scientific and evolutionary value in these concepts as they relate to our appetites and eating behaviours. We also speak to the significant impact that industrialized and post-WWII era food systems have had on our modern reckonings with food, and she provides tips on finding a supportive and good match when you’re looking for a dietician service provider.

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167: Rethinking Cultural Food Insecurity in UK School Systems with Sarah Oresnik

My guest today, Sarah Oresnik, is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Their research interests centre around food insecurity and its impact on our health and wellbeing. Within their PhD, their focus is on how youth navigate food insecurity, looking at youth experiences in Southampton, UK. Sarah grew up in the kitchen learning recipes from their parents and grandparents, which has translated to their continued investigations and reflections on their own food environment.  

In our conversation, Sarah shares about their current research working with teens in the UK to explore the merits and challenges of their school nutrition programs. They highlight the limitations of daily food allowances and electronic payment options, the impacts that food insecurity and cultural experiences have on shaping food preferences and values, and does a brilliant deep dive challenge the very idea of what “cultural foods” can be for teens in diasporic communities.

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166: How Daily Bread is Tackling Toronto's Food Insecurity Crisis with Mike Greenberg

Here in Canada, we have a food security crisis—and a cost-of-living crisis. While there are many, many factors that are shaping this continued issue across the country, one of the challenges of navigating food insecurity here is that we rely primarily on non-profit food banks to support those in need. One non-profit food organization in Toronto, Daily Bread, is on a mission to eliminate food insecurity and advocate for solutions to end poverty. Daily Bread prepares over 250,000 meals annually, including more than 43,000 heat-and-eat meals delivered through the Red Cross Mobile Food bank to individuals facing barriers like mobility challenges, inadequate housing, or mental health conditions that make traditional food access difficult. 

In 2024, Toronto food bank visits hit an all time high of 4.1 million, and Toronto declared a state of emergency about food insecurity. In response, Daily Bread has seen their visits increase, with their Food Services Manager Michael Greenberg overseeing a kitchen that produced more than 270,000 meals between 2024-2025. Mike is on the show today to speak about the work he and his team do at Daily Bread to ensure that their food bank kitchen can logistically maintain itself with such high demands, the nutritional and social impact of food insecurity for clients who cannot prepare their own meals, and the vital role food banks play in advancing equity and dignity in food access.

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165: Terroir, Taste, and Wine Pairing for the People with Cha McCoy

To kickstart the second half of AnthroDish season 10, we’re shifting to a topic I generally feel very intimidated by: wine. But, as my guest Cha McCoy reveals this week, there is a lot to unearth in making sense of why wine feels intimidating or harder to access. Cha is an entrepreneur, educator, and event producer. As a certified sommelier, she developed The Communion, a wine dinner series that offers an inviting, accessible approach to gathering and enjoying wine. This experience inspired her to open her first brick-and-mortar store, The Communion Wine & Spirits. 

Today, Cha talks about her new book, Wine Pairing for the People: The Communion of Wine, Food, and Culture from Africa and Beyond. This book is unique in how it approaches the concepts of terroir, and the pairing ideology of what grows together goes together. Cha expands wine pairings, where traditional foods and cuisines from Africa, Asia, and the Americas are given pairings of wines that celebrate heat, tang, spice. In our conversation, Cha shares her refreshing approach to terroir for regions of the world that aren’t known for their grape wines, and describes how certain taste preferences are shaped, what flavours are valued or looked over under colonial approaches to wine pairings. 

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