- Published on
Carry-ing, Sept 30th, 2026
Can I enjoy watermelon in peace? Can fruit be fruit without the baggage? Can the fruit be where it lays? Can hope be offered in the celebration of food?
Fruits, and free samples are packed with meaning, memory and supports. I wonder in these moments of unabashed joy must we be transgressive or can we just exist without the need for subversion and retaliatory attacks? Must we carry the identity of subjugation, do we become subsumed in the layered meanings of symbolic cavities.
Tonight, Sept 30, 2026, we shared our joys, hopes, shame, family stories and excitement for the good of community over French bread, tuna fish, crudités, perilla leaf and sunshine. As I bring questions to bed, Carry-ing answers.
Can we enjoy food without flavor? Can food be shared without history? Can we gain support without doubt?
Carry-ing, gave food to thought and presence to memory, as color, culture, and conversation emerged around the shared long table. Within Carry’s modular design system lies the matter of community (conversation and consideration). Spread as thick or thin as you like, Carry (Chong Gu, @verycolorfulbeads) stretches out across the @projecteats educational garden on the Essex Market rooftop. Hosted in collaboration with @theclemente Zacárias and friends organize and support the Carry-ing sandwich making event.
Carry-ing says yes to these questions and implores us to eat what’s good, and bring enough to share!
Clemente and Project Eats Ask: What is one ingredient that has a meaningful story or history related to your family's foodways or personal memory?
I answer:
Tuna Fish (canned tuna salad) was a staple in my childhood. It was an easy meal that was often placed between Martin’s potato bread and wrapped in tin foil for the occasional school lunches. I can smell the sickening wet dog smell of eggs or tuna packed in tin foil after my morning investigations into my plastic lunch box: holding the dwindling warmth in my lap as toasted bread went cool on early mornings to school. Mornings with rattling diesel engines and yellow head lights clink in my memory, as backpacks and jeans rubbed on plastic leather seats; in the excitement and anxiety of school days and field trips I would pry my lunch box open to nibble on the comfort of seldom prepared lunches my mother made for me, as most days I bought.
For a time her version was the goated. Her paired down version was peppered, salted and dashed with paprika, lightening the pink chicken of the sea with a little more tint than full color, as it was mashed by the back of a spoon while mayo dolloped into the mixing bowl.
Then suddenly, my tastebuds arose with my grandma’s recipe, around the age of 6. Now, almost 30, I’m taken back to her kitchen, remembering the smell of celery, onions, and mayo wafting through the small kitchen in her house. Her hands at the time were more eager and hearty, as she shooed me away from her counter teasing “it’s MY secret recipe.” I can remember the almost rancid smell of tuna being covered by the care that she put in, turning shallow cans of pink “meat” into a meal that holds memory of summer afternoons at her glass table top. I can still feel the grooves of the scalloped metal legs along my intertwined feet. I think of the massive doily that stretched under the disk of green edged glass, green metal, and faux fruit in the milk glass bowl. Mirrored on the glimmering surface were matching milk glass bowls that housed Bush’s Baked Beans and cut hotdogs, cornflakes and milk, or sandwiches and stale pretzels that she would swear were fresh(we still tease her about that today) Her kitchen was perfumed with the lingering odor of onions, hardwood cleaner, her collection of ubiquitous plastic water bottles (corporate swag), and windex (her eraser for greasy battles against fingerprints and sugar craving ants). Grandma’s Silent Generation meals were the staples that kept me fed on weekends and after Friday’s after school.
I’m buried halfway in the photo’s frame, obscuring black orthopedic shoes for a body that needs adjustment but can’t quit. “What disaster is here before us,” I think as our lady of liberty hides her severed chains in artistic revisions and fabric gathers. I stomach the complexity when I cut fruit. I don’t smile, I don’t ask for more, I deny that it’s there; I pretend that its sweet flesh is rotten, I hope that it is as I bite further into the rind. At times I hope no one is watching when I take a bite. I wonder if I can eat it in peace, if I choke it down fast enough, maybe it will look like blood. I hold the prop and never savor the flesh fully in public, mindful of invisible eyes of perception. She holds a book that cannot be opened. Her slab to far to be read. Her symbolism a penny coated in a protective sheaths gleaming green and blue when lying in sunsets beyond the city streets.
Can we enjoy food without flavor? Can food be shared without history? Can we gain support without doubt?
Watermelon, a food of liberation, chained to the mental constructions of bigots eager to displace the joy of emancipation, are quartered and wrapped. Here, turgid flesh awakens to the jostling of street corners: away from formative Floridian sun, green rippled rinds once stacked in pick-up trucks, are united under a flag that claims one life for a “we” that denies and contorts the reality of its melanated sea. Within an unfurling of entangled of vines, a well traveled gourd crossed the Sahara and Kalahari deserts centuries ago: initially a water vessel it became a delicacy, now it’s an expected summer fruit that relieved summer heat and dehydration. Watermelon holds the complexion of blackness in dark starry/striped skin, sipped through a swirly straw yellow pulp turns red but always tastes distinctly Black when the phenotype matches.
