Visit theallusionist.org/breadroses to hear this episode and check out an abundance of extra info about the topics therein
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, stockpile language for the coming winter.
Today’s episode is about a particular genre of restaurant and coffee shop, the words they used to describe themselves, how they signaled to their clientele in overt and covert ways, how they demonstrated their politics and principles, and how they described their food.
Content note: the episode contains references to anti-trans movements of the past. But never forget: The Allusionist is a show for all genders, and I direct you to some past episodes about that, like No Title, Parents, Fiona, and Name Changers.
I’m a guest on the new season of the podcast Making Trouble, hosted by the marvellous writer Molly Naylor - I was never very into poetry until I read her collection Whatever You’ve Got. So I was very excited to get to be on her podcast. We had a big chat about creativity and ideas and career fears and such, and you can listen to Making Trouble in the podplaces. You know where they are!
On with the show.
HZ: Bread and Roses Feminist Restaurant
Artemis Society Women’s Café
Mother Courage Feminist Restaurant
Sappho’s
Boulder Lesbian Network Coffeehouse
Susan B’s Feminist Restaurant
Crone’s Harvest Radical Lesbian Feminist Coffeehouse
Gaia Restaurant
Dapper Women’s Restaurant
Peachstreet Dining Club for Women and their Friends
Old Wives’ Tales Restaurant and Women’s Center
Mahogany Black Women’s Club
Women’s Coffee Coven
Anywoman’s Coffeehouse
Everywoman’s Coffeehouse
Lysistrata Feminist Restaurant and Cultural Center
Sisterspirit Café and Bookstore
Gay Woman’s Liberation and Lesbian Coffeehouse
Lavender Prairie Collective
Mama Peaches
The Neon Chicken
Three Birds Feminist Bookstore and Coffeeshop
Lesbian Separatist Potluck Brunches
Red Dora’s Bearded Lady Café
A Woman’s Place
A Place of Our Own Wimmin’s Bookstore
A Place of One’s Own Restaurant for Feminists and their Friends
Crescent Moon Women’s Coffeehouse
Sister Moon
Sister Moon II
Full Moon Inc, Coffeehouse and Bookstore
Moonrise Café
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, there was a lot of repetition of words. It was really that like your local community knew. So it didn't matter if there were a few places called Artemis. There's a lot of focus on kind of moon imagery, goddess imagery.
Some are a bit more creative with their names and some of them are really, really explicit. So Bloodroot's full name is Bloodroot Feminist Vegetarian Restaurant and Bookstore of Bridgeport, Connecticut. It is very explicitly there. They're like, “We are going to mark this space and let you know what we're doing.” Whereas sometimes it could be just something that's a hint of it, and then if you knew, you knew.
Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Alex Ketchum. My pronouns are she/her. I'm an assistant professor of Feminist, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Justice Studies at McGill University, and I'm the author of Ingredients for Revolution, a History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses.
HZ: When are we talking about?
ALEX KETCHUM: From 1972 to 1989.
HZ: And about how many were there in - I guess the US we're mostly talking about?
ALEX KETCHUM: The book is really focused on the US. My doctoral work also looked at Canada, but it meant that I was describing a lot of different tax structures, and I wanted to save readers from all of that.
HZ: Wooooo!
ALEX KETCHUM: We're looking about 230 or so spaces - possibly 400 if we're allowing for a bit more vagueness.
There was never a directory or database made of these spaces until I decided to make it. And I cobbled it together by looking through thousands of periodicals and articles and advertisements and travel guides and like lesbian travel guides and gay travel guides and women's travel guides and oral histories and ephemera like posters and business cards and stuff.
Ssometimes all that remains from the business's history was an address and a name and maybe like a note or an asterisk that's like feminist in a travel guide, right? So that's a little harder to verify, versus for some of the spaces like Bloodroot they have a lot more material.
HZ: Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Connecticut - founded in 1977 and still going today, with the tagline "A feminist restaurant & bookstore with a seasonal vegetarian menu."
ALEX KETCHUM: So I was really interested in spaces that explicitly called themselves feminist in either their title, or in their marketing, or in their publications, or in kind of oral history interviews. And so I chose this: 1. so the project could be manageable; 2. so I wasn't defining like, “This restaurant counts, this doesn't count,” just on my own opinion. And I didn't want to be prescriptive in my definition of feminism, nor prescriptive in my definition of what made a feminist restaurant, or cafe, or coffeehouse.
But also I was really interested in what were the stakes of calling your restaurant feminist? What were you holding yourself accountable to? What were you trying to signal to potential customers? What were you trying to say to staff and so forth?
HZ: What were the consequences? Because there were a lot of like upsides and downsides to having 'feminist' in the restaurant's name.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, for sure. Some of the upsides were that you were signalling to other likeminded folks or curious folks that this could be a space for them to gather. There was an indication of the politics of the space. So it was an indication of what kind of events you might find, speakers you might find, artwork and music you might see and hear in the space.
There were also ways that people might feel more invested in the space, that they might contribute time or money or energy, or be just interested in visiting. Calling it a feminist space oftentimes was also one of the many code words, during the 1970s and 1980s, to also signal lesbian space or questioning space; or a term we might use today, but would be anachronistic at the time, as kind of like a queer women's space. So, this was a way of marking like, "Hey, you might be welcome here, your sexual orientation might be accepted, you might hear a poet you're interested in hearing," and so forth. So, there were a lot of kind of benefits in building community and interest in the space by indicating the term.
And then the downsides could also be, you know, there's bias against the word 'feminism'. Some people would feel uncomfortable with it or push back on it. There was also a concern from many of the people who founded these spaces that they might be targeted for violence. They might get rocks through the windows and so forth. Generally, that wasn't the case with a few exceptions, but there was also kind of a heightened level of fear in choosing to mark your space so explicitly.
Some of the challenges with using this term is that by, saying that you're a feminist space, as folks probably know, there's lots of different types of feminism, there's a lot of different opinions on feminism, as well as branches of Marxist feminism, radical feminism, liberal feminism, anarchist feminism, etc. Lots of people have different interpretations of what it means to be feminist and what it means to do feminism and enact feminism. So there could be debates about, "You're charging too much for this thing," or, "How have you organized your kitchen or your labour practices?" or, "You're not giving enough to these organizations," or things like that. There's usually this sense of like, are you doing enough? Are you being accountable to the different communities you're serving? and so forth. Which can be really really challenging, as these spaces were also trying to create this feminist space in the capitalist society which puts different kind of pressures in running a restaurant or a cafe or coffeehouse.
HZ: Some of these places were able to access particular funding sources because they use the word 'feminist'?
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, by marking it as feminist space, there is investment from different members of the community in this space. Since many of the people starting these spaces didn't have a lot of disposable capital, and they also didn't have access to traditional banking or loans oftentimes, is they would have different strategies to fundraise. One of the strategies could be hosting an event, so they would have women's dances, or some of the spaces were near local colleges or universities, and so the women's studies department might invite a famous poet or speaker, and then she would give a second talk at the restaurant for free and the restaurant could like have tickets or stuff like that, to draw people in. And then there was also something that we would today call crowdfunding, they didn't call it that at the time, but they would have people give donations or they would also have microloans and community-given money that if they weren't marking their space as a feminist business, I don't think people would have been as invested in giving to. Also you're looking at a group of people that are facing a lot of different forms of marginalization. So they're going to be less likely to have access to loans, especially for those founded before 1974 and prior to the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, they're not going to be able to get a line of credit in their own name. There's a lot of kind of economic challenges, so they're not starting with a lot of money up front.
HZ: Money matters also influenced who the space could be for.
ALEX KETCHUM: Which I won't get into too much because it might be a little dry, is tax code. So if it was a 501c3 and a non profit with club status, they could make it exclusive to a certain gender, so they could say it was a woman only space.
HZ: Which is how men-only golf clubs persist too.
ALEX KETCHUM: Whereas if it had a different kind of code and was a business, they had to be open to people of all genders, but might have like a woman only event or kind of like nights like that. Many of the spaces were women-centred spaces, so they really wanted a community space where women's music could play, which was often times coded as lesbian music. They just wanted a space that really centered on the needs of women.
But if we look at many of them, men were welcome if they were respectful. And this idea of nonbinary isn't really discussed in the same way, but, same thing, nonbinary folks would be welcome.
HZ: Some establishments were more restrictive or specific than others, whereby only women were allowed to be there, and then more questions popped up: which women were allowed to be there? Only cisgender women? Only lesbian women? Sometimes the place’s definition of 'women' was so strict, people couldn't even bring in their male babies.
ALEX KETCHUM: So there are a lot of debates about who these spaces were for, depending on the kind of community. And one of the things that was really exciting in my research was some of the coffeehouses actually put a tape recorder in the room to tape their meetings, so I could actually hear some of these debates. So there are debates about like, “How can we make this a space that's more accessible for Black women? How can we make it more accessible for different women of colour, for disabled people, for working class people?”
And there are debates around the role of trans women in the community; and I don't want people to think - because I think sometimes this is the narrative - that all spaces in the 1970s and 1980s that were feminist were trans exclusive. Because that's not the case. There were many that were trans inclusive, and were open to different gender expressions as well. But there were also some that were unfortunately, and very violently, very trans exclusive as well, and banned trans women from the communities. Which is an unfortunate and sad part of this history.
So this idea of woman is a really challenging one.
HZ: Sometimes, 'women's space' was used to mean lesbian separatist space. Hard to know, though, if you didn't know that.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, for sure. I think the word 'woman' also gave some shielding for potential violence or targeting, too. Like if you were an insider, you knew, and if you weren't an insider, you didn't know. I think that's always a challenge within queer communities, is this question of visibility and invisibility, right? Visibility means that other people can find you, they're a part of your community; but also it can put a target on your back. So I think some of them were navigating that. And also there were a lot of straight women and bi women and lesbian women working collaboratively. Many of them would use the word woman to describe the space, but they did different spellings like W O M Y N, that takes the man out of woman, or W I M M I N, or, you know, there's with womb in it, also, like, 'womban' and stuff: wart of this indicated to some communities, and you have to be really particular to what geographic space and time and sub community. But some of them are doing this to indicate lesbian space. Some of them wanted to use the word 'woman' because it also allowed flexibility for people who might be questioning or didn't necessarily fit under the lesbian label. And some of them also were just kind of like allowing for exploration. Some of these spaces were also political experiments, in a way, started by some folks who were just like, “we have a lot of excitement, a lot of energy coming out of the feminist movement, and we want to put our politics into action.” And so they thought this was one way of doing that.
HZ: It feels like they had more obligations than than most restaurants would to be run in like anti-capitalist ways, to have ethical food production at their heart; things like that.
ALEX KETCHUM: There's this diagram of a triangle in how I define feminist food. They were trying to make sure that the people working in the space were paid properly for their labour. They wanted to make sure that the farmers and the people creating the raw ingredients were properly paid. But they also knew that many of their customers were lower income. Women today, and especially then, are paid at a lower rate. It's a group of folks who oftentimes have less access to disposable income. So you're trying to make sure that people can afford to go in this space, but you want labour to be paid well, you want there to be good ingredients, right? That's a really difficult triangle to balance. And so, in trying to balance that, oftentimes the people running these spaces would just not pay themselves enough, and that would lead to burnout and infighting and a lack of sustainability.
Some of them tried to compensate for this by having maybe some dishes sliding scale, there's some things that at different rates or having like mitzvah walls where people can kind of pay it forward for other folks to have a meal or letting someone buy one cup of tea and sit there all day. So there are different kind of strategies so that the space could be accessible. But again that can kind of push up against that capitalist need to constantly, like, make money and grow, right? And that wasn't really what these spaces were trying to do, but they also still had to, like, keep their electricity on, pay their vendors, and so forth.
HZ: Did they have different names for the jobs involved, if they were trying not to replicate capitalist structures and hierarchies?
ALEX KETCHUM: Yes, in terms of like trying not to replicate some of the hierarchies within restaurants themselves, many of them challenged this idea of like waitresses or waiters, so they had people bus themselves. Especially a lot of the ones started in the earlier 1970s experimented with collective models, which sometimes led to kind of infighting and dissolution after 18 months. That was kind of the time period that I saw. It was like 18 months is really where like things hit the fan.
HZ: Bummer.
ALEX KETCHUM: But other collectives founded later and ones today have really thought through like, “okay, we're going to have an accountant, we're going to have a lawyer, we're going to have someone to kind of lead us through like group therapy or consultation and counselling so we can talk about our grievances so they don't bubble up and boil over.” But yes, there was this move away from like using language like waiters and waitresses. There was a focus on cooks rather than chefs also and actually celebrating the role of like learning how to cook in the role of the cook because there's a lot of gendered language around who is a chef. Most of these spaces weren't run like a French kitchen hierarchy with the chef and sous chef and sommelier -
HZ: - the brigade -
ALEX KETCHUM: - and all that, exactly. It wasn't really a brigade model that we were saying. So that was some of the like major change with the terminology. But these terms were also reflected in the design of the spaces themselves. So many would have open windows onto the kitchen so you would see the people doing the labour, you could interact with the folks, and so forth. And there was also a move away from tipping culture. So rather than having people tip, they would oftentimes have jars given to local causes, or groups such as women's softball teams, community organizations, shelters, and so forth.
HZ: It's kind of striking that a lot of those ideas are still talked about as if they're new now when they're like, oh this kitchen has got rid of tipping or is like all the cooking is visible to the customers.
ALEX KETCHUM: Definitely. Or trying to make sure that everyone can have a living wage that works within this space. These ideas aren't new, but they're oftentimes forgotten or erased or misremembered or misattributed. And the other thing is that it's not just feminist restaurants who have done these things: there's social justice restaurants, anarchist restaurants that have done these things. But I think it's a key part of this history that has been forgotten: women - and particularly feminists specifically - were doing a lot of this work in challenging restaurant structure.
HZ: With regard to anti elitism: they would avoid certain terms like ‘gourmet’.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, there's a really interesting discussion with the menus of these restaurants in terms of what they had on the menu and how they described it. Now there were some folks who were like, “It's gourmet food,” but it wasn't like gourmet food. They're using it more in the colloquial adjective way of saying like, "It’s nice to eat," rather than like true gourmet.
HZ: ‘Gourmet’ has had a bit of an etymological journey. For the past couple of hundred years, a food connoisseur; prior to that it was a French term for a wine-dealer or wine-taster - or the servant thereof, because gourmet probably derived from a word for a boy, a lad. Unrelatedly, the word and notion gourmet, throughout the 20th century and particulary from the 1970s onward, had a growing association with gay men: there was this idea of gay men and fine food being linked.
But that's not why some of these feminist establishments didn't use the word, nor is the little lad etymology, rather it was because of the exclusiveness conveyed by ‘gourmet’.
ALEX KETCHUM: Navigating that idea of cost and food is always tricky. I would say that most of them, because they wanted their items on their menu to be financially accessible for most of their customers, were having things like a lot of like soup or sandwiches, things that were more readily available, like there were places that were soup-focused because you could make a big pot of soup and the profit would be a bit higher while you could still have like a cheap dish for the day, and oftentimes were vegetarian foods.
There's the stereotypes of lesbians and lentils, or lesbians and the soup at the potluck type of thing. But also many of the customers were vegetarian already. Women at higher rates are vegetarian in the US context, especially in the 1970s and 80s. Also, they're saying that this is perhaps a countercultural space, because depending on where the restaurant was located, vegetarian restaurants may or may not be that accessible normally in the 1970s or 80s. I think it signalled like: this is a space that might reflect your values.
It did reflect a lot of the values, especially for spaces like Bloodroot, which were really tying the oppression of women to like the exploitation of the land in this eco feminist way, and were really focused on eating seasonally. But even when they first started - so they opened in 1977 and their first cookbook, The Political Palate, came out in 1980 - in that cookbook, there are fish recipes, because for many communities in the US in 1970s, fish was considered part of the vegetarian diet. So, that kind of understanding of what is vegetarian also transformed. And over time, the restaurant has become more and more vegan.
But it's not to say that every feminist restaurant was vegetarian. There's also this way of how eating hamburgers and meat was a way of kind of like pushing back on masculine stereotypes of meat-eating. There's this book by Carol J. Adams called The Sexual Politics of Meat that really explores some of the ways of meat and eating and gender.
HZ: The definition or the idea of feminist food varied from place to place: it could be in terms of the labour involved in the procurement of the ingredients and the making of the food; it could be in the ethos of the food itself, with seasonal ingredients or low environmental impact foods; it could be about the people cooking it or the venue serving it or the people eating it...
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, and also like what type of feminism and what cultural context and what time - and also how the food is labeled too, because one of the things with feminist food was sometimes it was what the items were called. So sometimes they'd be named after someone, for example, there are a few feminist restaurants that named their omelettes about women in their community that they wanted to celebrate. Brick Hut, which was a feminist restaurant in Berkeley, California that existed for 21 years: they had a Sister Marion omelet for the marathon-running nun; they had a Ruth Reid for an early 20th century lesbian poet and activist; the Seven Sisters for the Berkeley Feminist Constructing Collective; and the Mendocino omelette for the herb blend that the owners ordered from a woman-owned business.
HZ: Another bit of vocabulary that was used by quite a lot of these venues Alex is talking about is the term “chemical-free”.
ALEX KETCHUM: Usually ‘chemical-free’ meant alcohol and drug free, but not caffeine-free, and oftentimes not nicotine-free, so it depends on the space and the time. And also sometimes it's like, “This is the chemical-free table. There's a coffee house in Iowa City - and the signs still exist in the archive, actually - they're like, this is the marijuana smoking table. Like, this is for people who want to smoke pot. And it's like a small room, and you've got like the pot table, and the like tobacco table, and then the chemical free table. I mean, you could smell everything, right? You're in a tiny enclosed space.
HZ: Yeah, that’s a flaw of smoke.
ALEX KETCHUM: Some of these spaces also existed to be an alternative to the bar culture, to be spaces where the focus wasn't on alcohol. Some of the restaurants did serve alcohol. That created another economic challenge because for restaurants, usually alcohol is like a pretty good way to build profit within a restaurant, because of the profit margins on alcohol. Some of them were BYOB, but many of them didn't serve any alcohol because they wanted to be this alternative space, some of them wanted to be a space that was friendly for children to go. Chemical free gets interpreted in different ways, but you see in the 1980s, they're starting to be like more pushed back on like, "No, we can't have cigarettes," whereas before, that wasn't as big of a part of it. But there was nowhere I ever saw people pushing back on having coffee. So it wasn't like that for caffeine. So it wasn't straight edge in how we'd understand it today.
HZ: A lot of these characteristics of the spaces were practical, but some were matters of principle too.
ALEX KETCHUM: Some of the restaurants really, really explicitly wanted to push back on food negativity and diet culture, because they saw it as tied to the exploitation of women and keeping women down, and this kind of idea of like riots not diets. Bread and Roses was in the Cambridge area of Massachusetts, and in their original business proposal, they talk about pushing back on diet culture. They don't want to emphasize calories. They want it to be about nourishing people. Bloodroot also had a kind of similar principle.
HZ: Above the counter at Bloodroot was a sign that said, “Because all women are victims of Fat Oppression and out of respect for women of size, we would appreciate your refraining from agonizing aloud over the calorie count in our food.”
ALEX KETCHUM: And we can see the way that diet culture impacts people of all genders, but they were really focusing kind of on how it was explicitly impacting women within their spaces. Many of them wanted to push back on that. But there were some spaces that also said, "We also don't want women who are dieting to feel bad about themselves for dieting, so we'll just have a wide variety of items on our menu and people can make decisions." So the whole point was to make people feel welcome and included, while also encouraging people not to use harmful language that could make people feel excluded or targeted.
HZ: It's hard, isn't it? Because there's no escaping diet culture, it gets to everyone, everywhere.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, it infiltrates all of society. Yeah,
HZ: Were many of the places you studied still open?
ALEX KETCHUM: No, a lot of them closed within kind of the first 18 months. Some lasted longer like of four or five years, maybe the restaurant industry is really hard in general, so it's quite punishing and my restaurants close within a year no matter their politics. Bloodroot's the only one that still exists today that was founded in the 1970s, that's wild, right? Like, how many restaurants last that long? It's pretty rare.
HZ: True.
ALEX KETCHUM: So, yeah, they were the longest. Brick Hut was 21 years, which was quite significant as well.
HZ: The Brick Hut Cafe in Berkeley, California was a big enough business to have 35 employees, but after insurmountable financial overheads, it closed in 1997.
ALEX KETCHUM: But for some folks, too, this was an experiment during one part of their life, and then they moved on to different kinds of work after. There were a lot of folks who went into academia; some folks started catering businesses; some of them were journalists beforehand and then went back to journalism. So, a mix of different approaches.
HZ: Alex’s study of the feminist establishments concentrated on the period from 1972 to 1989, not because that’s the only time these kinds of places existed in the US, but it was their peak era. Well… so far.
ALEX KETCHUM: The reason I had stopped the initial kind of study in 1989 as the main emphasis was you see kind of a pushback on a lot of feminist ideals in the late 80s and early 1990s in this kind of idea of post feminism, this idea that, oh, feminism has succeeded. But there is also kind of like, some feelings of like, do we need to necessarily mark this space as explicitly feminist? While the project itself is looking at the places that explicitly call themselves as feminist, there were many restaurants who enacted kind of similar policies or formats as the feminist restaurants, but didn't use the word ‘feminist’, and that's not to say what they were doing wasn't important. Many of them used kind of social justice terms or anarchist terms or other kind of community terms.
HZ: What have you noticed with the evolution or not of terminology between restaurants like this fifty years ago versus the ones this century?
ALEX KETCHUM: The restaurants themselves have changed quite a bit. Part of it has to do with the changing economy that we live in and who's able to open these spaces. Many of the restaurants are also like cafe bookstores, so you have multiple streams of revenue, kind of like how Bloodroot is also a bookstore. They tend to be run by more of a diverse gender group. So they can be collectives with people of all genders involved. They're oftentimes marking themselves as queer spaces, and very trans inclusive spaces as well, like explicitly trans inclusive, and there also tends to be a lot more women of colour and people of colour involved in running them.
HZ: And obviously things are, different maybe now because rent is so punishing in a lot of places and all of that.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, in the 1970s, because of lower rents, it did open up a lot of possibilities for people to experiment, where some folks, that I talk about in the book, had never worked in a restaurant before starting one. They had no restaurant experience, and there's even one story of Susan B's in Chicago, where the night before they opened, the person was like, wait, this is supposed to be a soup restaurant, and I don't know how to make soup. Good luck trying to do that in the 2020s when you're trying to get all this like financing and you know, the lease is $20,000 a month. It's just such a different scale.
HZ: I was just wondering if there was anything that particularly surprised you when you were studying all of this.
ALEX KETCHUM: I think I was actually first surprised at how many restaurants I found. I had gotten kind of pushback early on during my masters from some folks who are like, “Are these even significant? What? It was like one or two places. Who cares?” And so part of that encouraged me - I'll say that in a kind way - encouraged me or inspired me to then try to take a quantitative approach of trying to create this directory, which is available publicly online at thefeministrestaurantproject.com, and encourage people to let me know spaces I was missing. And I still update it, so if any of you all find any spaces, please let me know. I'm happy to add more. But it really surprised me actually how many I found.
HZ: In a good way?
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, in a good way. The thing is that there's a lot of different ways to talk about the challenges around labour, around sexism, misogyny, racism, classism, and anytime that I'm doing my research, I'm always looking for something that inspires me. I always want to showcase and uplift the work that people did in trying to make the kinds of worlds that they wanted to see. It doesn't mean that they did it perfectly. The people I talk about in this book, they made a lot of mistakes and many of them learned and grew from them. Some of them didn't learn and grow from them, but other people did. And some of their strategies they tried didn't maybe work in the 70s, but work better today. And so that for me is what keeps me going in all of my work and my projects.
HZ: I think that was why I found it hopeful, because it was really cool that people were doing this, and that people do things because they think that's important and right, even if it is kind of ruining their own lives.
ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah. Yeah, I love that description of it. I'm laughing because it feels so real what you just said, yeah.
HZ: Alex Ketchum is an academic and the author of the book Ingredients for Revolution, a History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses - she continues to update the directory at thefeministrestaurantproject.com. And she’s co-editor of the new book An Illustrated Guide to Queer Food (with Recipes), representing the diversity of queer food from seed to potluck. It is out on 7 October 2025 and you can preorder from Arsenal Pulp Press and request your library gets it. There are also some virtual events happening around the book, I’ll link to them at theallusionist.org/ - and Alex is one of the organisers of the Queer Food Conference, the next one will take place May 2026, find out more at queerfoodconference.com.
The Allusionist’s continuing existence is possible thanks to those of you who do one or both of these two things: 1) recommend the show to other people, online, in person, in the group chat, it’s all so helpful; 2) being a paying member of the Allusioverse from just $2 per month via theallusionist.org/donate, and in return you get a bunch of bonus content, including livestreams with me reading from my large collection of vintage and modern reference books, inside scoops about the making of every episode, and at the moment weekly posts of - what’s fanfic that’s not by a fan? Speculative fiction? - about this season of Great British Bake Off, and I would not have expected to be using these as writing prompts but inspiration strikes in truly unexpected places.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
dele, noun: a proof-reader's sign (8) indicating matter to be deleted. Verb: delete or mark for deletion.
It sort of looks like a hook with a little loop on one end, or a musical quaver doing freeform dance. But it can sometimes also look like a lower-case cursive r running away. Or it can sometimes look like a loosely drawn lower case e. Take it from a former proofreader: when you’re marking up a manuscript, you use a lot of these, so over the course of the book the rendition of the dele gets sloppier and sloppier.
Try using ‘dele’ in an email today - or in the margin of a manuscript.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. The music is by the singer and composer Martin Austwick; you can find his own songs at palebirdmusic.com.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, so I can talk winningly and admiringly about your product or thing, get in touch with them at multitude.productions/ads.
And you can hear or read every episode, get more information about the episode topics and the people talking about them, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, find information about upcoming events, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
