Updates
Serving Pride: LGBTQ+ Changemakers Fighting Hunger
June 26, 2025
Happy Pride from our We Don’t Waste family to yours!
This month, we’re celebrating the LGBTQ+ activists who are not only fighting for equality, but for food justice, too. Across the country, queer leaders are growing gardens, feeding communities, and challenging the systems that leave too many without access to nutritious, culturally relevant food.
Queer Food Activism Is Food Justice
Food justice is queer justice. For decades, LGBTQ+ folks, especially within the trans and BIPOC communities, have experienced disproportionate rates of poverty and food insecurity. They’ve also been at the frontlines of change, building mutual aid networks, reclaiming land, and creating spaces where nourishment and dignity go hand-in-hand.
LGBTQ+ Food Activists to Know
Here are just a few LGBTQ+ food activists and organizations we’re proud to spotlight:
Vanessa Parish (she/her) – Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Queer Food Foundation
Vanessa Parish co-founded the Queer Food Foundation in 2020 as a mutual aid fund to support food service workers who were being laid off at the start of the pandemic. Today, the group also conducts research and hosts events and educational panels.
John Birdsall (he/him) – Award-winning food and culture writer
John Birdsall is a James Beard Award–winning queer food writer and former chef known for exploring the intersections of food, identity, and culture. Birdsall wrote The Man Who Ate Too Much, a biography of James Beard, and What Is Queer Food?, a deep dive into how queer communities have shaped food culture. Check out his piece, America, Your Food Is So Gay.
Alex Ketchum (she/her) – Co-founder, Queer Food Conference Alex Ketchum is a professor at McGill University’s Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies and a co-founder of the Queer Food Conference. Ketchum is also the author of “Ingredients for Revolution: A History of American Feminist Restaurants, Cafes, and Coffeehouses,” which is the first history of more than 230 feminist and lesbian-feminist restaurants and coffeehouses in the U.S. from 1972 to the present.
Liz Alpern (she/her) – Founder, Queer Soup Night Liz Alpern is a chef, cookbook author, and founder of Queer Soup Night, a community-driven event launched in Brooklyn in 2017. What began with Alpern making soup has grown into a national movement with 13 chapters, where LGBTQ+ chefs serve soup to raise funds for local nonprofits. For Alpern, queer food is all about shared identity and community connection through food.
Why LGBTQ+ Food Justice Matters
At We Don’t Waste, we believe that nourishing communities has impacts farther-reaching than the food you can see on a plate. It means standing with those fighting for equity, representation, and the dignity of having access to food, all year round. LGBTQ+ food activists remind us that a just food system must be inclusive, intersectional, and rooted in love.
This Pride Month, let’s honor their legacy not only with words but with action. Volunteer. Donate. Share their stories. Advocate for policies that fight hunger and support queer communities. Let’s celebrate our diversity while remembering the age-old adage that nothing brings people together better than a shared meal.
HAPPY PRIDE!
