Today in our lobby, we ended up in one of those conversations that starts silly and ends up telling the truth.
We were talking about cornbread — specifically, what it “goes with.”
For some of the white folks in the room, cornbread belongs next to chili or a pot of beans.
For the Black folks in the room, cornbread belongs next to everything: steak, pork chops, greens, fried chicken, Sunday dinner, and Tuesday night leftovers.
Somewhere in the laughter, I said, “Cornbread is to Black folks what biscuits are to white folks.”
And everybody nodded.
Because it was true.
But that moment was about more than bread.
What we were really naming was this: food carries memory. It carries survival. It carries culture. It carries who had to stretch meals, who cooked for big families, who learned from their grandmother, and who learned from a box on the counter.
In many Black families, cornbread isn’t a side — it’s a staple. It’s part of how people made a way out of very little. It’s tied to kitchens where women fed a lot of mouths, where nothing went to waste, and where food meant care, dignity, and love even when times were hard.
For many white families, biscuits hold a similar place. They’re comfort. They’re Sunday mornings. They’re “this is how we’ve always done it.”
So when we joke about what cornbread goes with, we’re actually talking about where we come from. We’re talking about who taught us to cook. We’re talking about what felt like home.
And that’s the beautiful thing about spaces like Woman’s Co-op:
We don’t have to pretend those differences don’t exist. We get to laugh about them, learn from them, and let them sit side by side — just like cornbread and biscuits on the same table.
Because the goal isn’t for everyone to eat the same thing.
The goal is for everyone to feel like they belong at the table.