Getting people together to celebrate, mourn, pay tribute and experience joy: It’s all part of queer culture, and it’s all part of food culture. So, how can folks connect the two? The (QFF) is a place to start. In July 2020, Vanessa Parish, Jona Beliu, Mavis-Jay Sanders and Gabrielle Lenart founded QFF as a mutual aid resource.
Though lavish and joyful dinner parties have been a known part of queer history, several have found that at significantly higher rates than non-LGBTQ+ folks. says it’s partially due to increased poverty rates within the community, which make its members twice as likely as others to face hunger. What began with these four industry professionals — majority based in New York — wanting to use their culinary prowess to address the inequity has since grown into a not-for-profit hub with a 25-person board of directors.
(Sanders and Beliu are no longer actively involved with the foundation and Lenart currently serves as an advisor.) “We started during the George Floyd movement,” Parish, now QFF’s executive director, tells TODAY.com, adding that their origin story is something the team takes a great deal of pride in.
Then, in 2021, the foundation started to form a board of directors, which Parish says is when things really took off. “We started making project plans,” she explains, citing the Queer Food Directory as one of the first major endeavors. The directory is an online database for LGBTQ+ folks in and around the food industry to find ta.
