Black Women Built Food Culture. ‘Black Women in Food’ Is Making Sure They Get Credit, Capital and Community to Match

The food industry has a long history of borrowing from Black culture, often without crediting the Black women behind it. Nina Oduro and Maame Boakye have spent the better part of a decade building something designed to change that.

Dine Diaspora, the D.C.-based culinary platform they co-founded in 2014, started with an idea that was simple enough: curated dinner gatherings where chefs told the stories of their heritage through their menus. But as it grew and the two co-founders began meeting more chefs, the same issue kept surfacing no matter how many chefs they brought to the table.

Those showing up to their signature dinners were overwhelmingly men, which spoke to how much of the industry’s female talent had been overlooked. Finding female chefs took significant effort, and it raised a bigger question. Why? “We didn’t want to be part of the problem,” Boakye said. So they did what made sense and went back to their network, asking people to help them find the women who were out there building careers across the industry and not getting nearly enough attention for it. What came back showed them that the women were there all along, cooking, farming, writing, running restaurants, doing the work, while the industry continued to shine its light elsewhere.

That realization became Black Women in Food, which started as an awards campaign and has since grown into a three-day summit taking over Washington, D.C. this weekend. The gathering brings together chefs, farmers, food journalists, restaurateurs, food justice advocates and entrepreneurs. By design, it brings every corner of the food world into one room.

“The Black women’s food issues around equity and inclusion mimics the rest of other industries in America,” Oduro said. “The food industry is a microcosm of other areas.” Black women continue to shape how this country eats, from setting trends to building the culinary traditions others later borrow from. The funding and the recognition have not kept pace with any of that.

This year’s summit theme, “Ascend Together in Purpose in the Face of Change,” reflects where they are right now. “Economic disparities are rampant right now,” said Oduro. “We’re facing challenges in businesses, especially restaurants. Many are closing.” Racial and economic inequities that were already present are now sitting underneath a broader economic climate that’s making everything harder. And yet, Oduro and Boakye keep bringing people together anyway. Boakye described the gathering as a deliberate act of collective rising, “harnessing the strength of our community to redefine what’s possible and chart a future of our own design.”

Oduro has seen it firsthand. One woman left her corporate job and started pivoting into people and culture work within the food industry, eventually finding her way to Members Circle, Black Women in Food’s private platform where members can connect, share resources and access opportunities together. Oduro connected her to another member and what started as one exploratory phone call turned into the woman landing her first client in her new business. In her note back to Oduro, the woman described Members Circle as “a community that lets their guard down, a community that you can go to when you’re in moments of transition and a community that will celebrate you and not gatekeep.”

The summit is engineered to produce more of those moments at a much bigger scale. The food industry has long kept its different players separated from each other, chefs talking only to chefs, farmers rarely in conversation with the people cooking their produce, and policy advocates working in a lane that can feel entirely removed from what happens inside a restaurant kitchen. That separation has real consequences, especially for Black women who already face barriers to visibility and access. When a food media person and a restaurateur who can’t afford a PR budget end up in the same room, conversations happen that the industry’s normal structure would never allow.

 “Solutions are driven when diverse mindsets come together,” Oduro said. “The access points to opportunities can be right in front of you.”

Behind the scenes, there is also a research partnership with Cornell University focused on closing the data gap on Black women across food, beverage and hospitality. Most industry data doesn’t disaggregate by race, let alone by gender, and without numbers the case for funding is harder to make and the scale of the problem stays invisible to the people who have resources to address it. “We know that numbers and evidence drives funding and drives opportunity,” Oduro said. The Cornell partnership is meant to put numbers behind what Black women in food have always known, so the conversation can happen at a national level with something concrete to point to.

Both founders bring years of international development experience into this work, and it shows up in how they think about inclusion, whose knowledge gets credited and who gets to shape the systems that govern what we grow, cook and eat. Boakye had a message for the Black woman who has been sitting on a food-related idea and hasn’t done anything about it yet, “Now is the time to be bold to do it.” 

This weekend, the summit will be run entirely by volunteers, roughly 30 people who have given eight months of their time to see it happen. When Black women in food decide something needs to exist, they find a way to build it themselves.

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