So much more than just a cookbook, Queers at the Table: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food with Recipes (October 7th, 2025, Arsenal Pulp Press) is also an essay and comics compilation, and history lesson, all centred around contributors’ various interpretations of what queer food means to them. Add to that, it’s a call to action: Revolutionize kitchens now!

In anticipation of its imminent publication, we went deeper into the concept of queer food with a recent conversation with Queers at the Table‘s co-editors, Dr. Alex Ketchum and Megan Joanna Elias. Read our interview below:

First of all, please introduce yourselves to Scout readers! Who are you? What are your backgrounds? How did you two meet? And what is currently keeping you busy?

Megan: I’m the Director of Food Studies Programs at Boston University. I’m from Brooklyn, New York and I got my PhD in history at the City University of New York. We met when I invited Alex to give a talk about her wonderful and important book, Ingredients for Revolution, about Feminist coffee houses and restaurants. What keeps me busy is trying to convince everyone everywhere to think both seriously and playfully about food.

Alex: I’m an Associate Professor at McGill University in Montreal and the Director of the Just Feminist Tech and Scholarship Lab. Currently I’m busy planning lots of events about queer food and curating an exhibition about Montreal’s 2SLGBTQIA+ food and drink history.

In the intro to Queers at the Table, you describe your aim with the publication of this compilation as such: “The goal of the Queer Food Conference and now of Queers at the Table is to gather a bunch of people who are enthusiastic about questioning norms and who have experience defying them to share their insights. We hope to get a picture of a world without the restrictive norms happening now and that may expand in future.” How do you feel about the finished result?

Megan: I’m so proud of it and grateful to the contributors and the press’ design team for producing a thing of joy, beauty and dignity. Especially in this moment when there are (in my country) ridiculous attempts to erase queer history and trans existence, I am so glad to have this big bright book to wave around.

Alex: Working on this book has been such a positive experience. We worked with 38 contributors who demonstrated the power of queer food, and Arsenal Pulp Press was really supportive of our goals. Since we won a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Engage Grant, we were able to partner with the LGBTQIA+ comics organization Prism Comics to work with amazing cartoonists, pay every contributor for their labour, and use this book project to strengthen networks between queer farmers, writers, chefs, cooks, artists, activists, and scholars. This book is not an end point but rather through its creation we are able to continue to foster community and connection and hope to inspire others to do so, as well.

The idea for this book correlated with the Queer Food Conference, which you facilitated back in Spring 2024…any plans for another Conference? And, if so, how would this one build on the concept, expand, and be even better than the first one? Any advice to people interested in facilitating their own similar concept?

Alex: Yes! The next conference is May 1-3, 2026 in Montreal. Like the last one, it will also be hybrid. One of the beautiful parts of organizing these conferences has been bringing people together in person and online, and partnering with local restaurants, bars, archives, bookstores, and community organizations. We hope other people are inspired to host their own conferences about queer food. To facilitate other peoples’ organizing, I’ve actually written a zine about how to organize conferences and in January 2026, my book How to Organize Inclusive Events and Conferences will be out with Microcosm Publishing. I think it’s important to share the lessons we’ve learned to make it easier for others to do this work and improve upon what we’ve done.

Megan: I can’t wait to see everyone at the next conference and I encourage folks to read Alex’s excellent guide and to host their own queer food conferences.

How did the event give shape/inspiration to Queers at the Table? What are some standout moments, conversations, ideas, opinions, interactions/people from the event that made it into the book and/or influenced it in some way?

Megan: We actually knew we wanted to create the book before the conference happened. While we were planning the conference, Alex proposed creating a book from the event that would be something much more exciting than the usual conference proceedings. As soon as she said ‘comics’ I was totally convinced.

Alex: I was also inspired by Rose / Reo Eveleth’s Flash Forward book that brought together cartoonists to illustrate Eveleth’s essay themes. We also knew that we had to have recipes in a book about queer food. One of our agents, Rob Firing, suggested having the cartoonists also illustrate the recipes.

When did you first realize that food could be queer; or, what was your first encounter with queer food/dining?

Megan: In the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco. I moved to the city when I was 21 and I noticed a restaurant in the Castro called Hot ‘n’ Crusty – it was a burger place (delicious) and I thought “Aha. That’s gay food.”

Alex: When I was an undergrad at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, I was really involved in the food politics scene and majoring in feminist studies. A friend suggested I visit Bloodroot Feminist Vegetarian Restaurant in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Going to that restaurant founded by a collective of lesbians in 1977 changed my life.

What significance did food have in your upbringing? How did that relationship evolve to what it is today?

Megan: Both of my parents enjoyed diverse foods and cooked a lot. They were divorced and lived on opposite coasts of America, so I grew up eating and getting to know foods from many places. I definitely learned that food was a source of joy.

Alex: Learning how to cook for myself was empowering. It taught me that I could take care of myself and also use food to connect with friends.

What are your individual cooking skills like? What’s your favourite, go-to dish to whip up for yourself and/or someone special; and/or what’s your ‘signature’ dish?

Megan: I love to cook, but I’m not very skilled in the kitchen. My favourite food to make is a galette. I love making pie dough – it connects me to memories of my grandmother, my mother and my aunt. And I love the way you can throw anything into a galette and it comes out delicious. Freeform cooking is the best.

Alex: Oh, I love to cook. For a couple of years I worked in a wedding cake and special events bakery. I still love to bake. For many years I was into brewing my own beer and have loved experimenting with different fermentations. I grew up in Southern California, so that has really influenced my approach to cooking.

Probably an unfair question to ask, but: what is your favourite recipe of the ones included here?

Megan: Corinne DaCosta’s wild variation on the traditional king cake (“Kween/Quing Bread with Creamy Coconut Greens Filling”) is just so much fun to read – I laugh out loud every time I look at it. It’s so fabulously defiant of cooking rules, too, and of course delicious.

Alex: Oh please don’t make me pick favourites. I will say that the avocado drizzle and pesto from Tobi Abdul’s pizza recipe is addictively good. And I made Lauren McGowan’s Earl Grey Lavender Menace Layer Cake for a birthday party and it was a big hit.

What was the last memorable meal that you two shared together?

Megan: I think the last one must have been the fabulous pasta with green sauce that contributor Pri Aguilar cooked for our event at the Museum of Food and Drink in New York. It was certainly delightful to eat that together with everyone at the event. It felt like the book came to life!

Alex: A lot of our collaboration is virtual since we live in different cities, but every time we are in the same room together we are eating something.

If you had to pick just one food or dish that symbolizes queer food to you, what would it be and why?

Alex: Megan and I often talk about cakes. While I can point to many different dishes such as the lesbian green salad dressing embroidered on a banner at the Lesbian Herstory Archives and nutrient and calorie dense pot brownies people baked in San Francisco to combat wasting, a symptom of HIV/AIDS, on a personal level, it always comes back to the cakes cooked at queer restaurants, by queer people throughout history, and in the personal moments in life.

Megan: My godfather was a Gay Rights activist in San Francisco who also owned a coffee company in the 1980s, so I’ve always considered coffee to be gay!

How is a table of queer people coming together over a meal different, or special?

Alex: Food is key for community building. Food can encourage people to linger. In addition to survival, it meets an emotional and social need.

Megan: While we still live in a society that can be hostile to queer people, queer commensality is affirming and community-building.

What, in a nutshell, defines a queer kitchen?

Alex: On the one hand, professional kitchens are often filled with queer folks, yet there are many professional kitchens that still feel like very masculine spaces and often are not the healthiest work environments. The labour of a queer kitchen is to serve the greater community.

Megan: In one of my classes on food and gender, we spent some time pondering this question. One student said, “Well, we have a rainbow flag fridge magnet,” and we laughed and agreed that was a good sign that the kitchen was queer. Then we wondered what would make a kitchen not queer. There is no simple answer.

From feeding music festival crowds, to queer farming and inclusive feeding; from facilitating and solidifying new relationships, to eliciting eroticism and pleasure; from inspiring autonomy and creativity, to acting in resistance…and so much more – the essays and comics exploring the concept of queer food featured in Queers at the Table cover a lot of terrain and different angles/interpretations. What was the most eye-opening discovery that you made while compiling Queers at the Table?

Alex: Even if sometimes people seem surprised when we mention “queer food,” after a pause and a reflection, people just start sharing their own stories about how food has connected them to queer culture.

Megan: I agree with Alex that even if at first people don’t think they know what we mean they quickly come up with examples.

How can a broader knowledge of queer food history, more queer food and queer commercial/restaurant kitchens help benefit a city’s f&b community? Bigger picture: how can it help revolutionize the world?

Alex: We are currently living in a period of increasing hostility towards 2SlGBTQIA+ people. Queer food history is a great avenue for people to start learning about queer history more generally. It’s powerful when people understand that sexual and gender diversity has always existed, across cultures and across time.

Megan: Queer food history is definitely empowering. Just knowing that ancestors persisted to feed each other and express themselves culinarily gives us hope. Aino Pihlak’s work about trans women’s supper clubs, for example, affirms that food –what we eat but also where and with whom – is central to our understanding of self. Everyone can relate to the need to be yourself at the table.

What is the bottom line (or three bottom lines) that the average reader should take away from Queers at the Table? What about those working in/running professional kitchens?

Alex: Queer food is key to queer community building.

Megan: Thinking queerly about food is for everyone!

Besides bringing together people to create this book, how have you personally witnessed or experienced food bring people together to inspire or facilitate change?

Alex: Food is serious business… and can also be seriously fun. Food is culture and a vehicle for connecting across cultures. As I said, this book has been a starting place for lots of other types of programming, events, and we are excited to share has already fostered and inspired other projects.

Megan: I’m really inspired by what students in the Food Studies Program do after they leave us. They are out there running farmers markets, opening public kitchens, winning prizes for their pies, making the world better in many ways.

Lastly, I’d love it if you could please recommend some supplementary reading to Queers at the Table, for those interested in going deeper into the concept of queer food.

Alex: Definitely! Check out the books by Combo Press – this press has an excellent series on queer food. Rachel Hope Cleves’ Lustful Appetites (Polity Books, 2025) historicizes queer food across centuries. Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot (NYU Press, 2024) uses the lenses of fermentation, intoxification, gelatinousness, and putrefaction to theorize how the modern state seeks to manage “deviant populations.” John Birdsall’s What is Queer Food? (W.W. Norton, 2025) examines how modern queer identity is shaped by food cultures; and Erik Piepenburg’s Dining Out (Grand Central Publishing, 2025) shares the history of gay restaurants.

Megan: I just finished Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press, 2024) by Yáng Shuang-zi. I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that it’s a beautiful queer food novel.

Avocado Drizzle by Tobi Abdul

¼ cup mayo
¼ cup sour cream
1 tbsp milk
1 green onion
1 garlic clove
half a ripe avocado
a handful of cilantro
a squeeze of lemon or lime juice
sea salt and pepper, to taste

Combine all the avocado drizzle ingredients in a food processor and purée until smooth.

Recipe credit: Excerpted from the recipe “Cilantro and Cashew Pesto Pizza with Avocado Drizzle” in Queers at the Table: An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food edited by Alex D. Ketchum and Megan J. Elias (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025).