I grew up in a Nairobi estate where Sunday lunch was never just food. It was a referendum. My Luo grandmother laid out fish stew and ugali the size of a small planet. My Kikuyu mother countered with mounds of githeri and irio. My half-Goan father slipped in coconut-laced prawn curry when no one was looking. The table was loud, chaotic, and unmistakably Kenyan: a negotiation of identity served on mismatched china.

That scene plays out in a million variations across the world, because food has stopped being just fuel. It is now the fastest, clearest way we announce who we are, who we refuse to be, and crucially who we can afford to become.

Identity on a Plate

In diaspora WhatsApp groups, a Nigerian in Toronto will post a photo of perfect jollof and caption it “We are still here.” A Syrian refugee in Berlin opens a restaurant serving free kahk to other Arabs on Eid, quietly stitching community back together with sugar and ghee. Even the avocado toast stereotype isn’t about the toast. It’s class cosplay: the performance of having arrived somewhere leisurely and green.

We tattoo our belonging onto our tongues. When young Indians in America started ordering “extra spicy” at restaurants their parents never dared enter, they weren’t just chasing heat hey were reclaiming an identity their immigrant parents had sanded down to fit.

The Price Tag of Memory

But identity has an exchange rate now.

In 2023, the global price of cocoa hit a 46-year high. Ghanaian farmers whose ancestors invented the crop’s modern cultivation couldn’t afford chocolate bars. Meanwhile, luxury brands released $300 “single-origin” tablets wrapped like museum pieces. The same week, olive oil theft became so rampant in Spain that farmers chained trees to the ground.

Food has become the crudest ledger of inequality. You can map gentrification by the arrival of $18 cold-pressed juice. You can map colonial hangover by the fact that Kenya exports tons of avocados while local markets sell the bruised “rejects” at ten times less. We eat someone else’s heritage while they watch from the economic sidelines.

The New Social Currency

Scroll through any feed and you’ll see it: someone’s perfectly lit ramen bowl has more emotional resonance than their wedding photos. Food content is the internet’s love language. A 22-year-old in Jakarta with 3 million followers doesn’t need a resume; she has a recipe for martabak that stops doom-scrolling in its tracks.

Restaurants have figured this out. The hottest tables in London, New York, and Dubai aren’t always the ones with Michelin stars they’re the ones engineered for virality: neon signs, pastel crockery, angles that photograph like a fever dream. Taste is negotiable. Shareability is not.

Lifestyle as Rebellion

And yet some of the most interesting food stories right now are acts of refusal.

Young Koreans are bringing lunch boxes (dosirak) to fancy restaurants because they’re tired of overpriced fusion and want their mothers’ anchovy stock instead. In Mexico City, chefs are closing trendy spots to reopen fondas serving the exact food their grandmothers made, charging a third of the price. Climate-conscious Gen Z is romanticizing “broke student meals” of the 90s—beans, rice, an act of resistance against both inflation and extractive agriculture.

The Table Is Political

Every choice we make at the stove or the supermarket is a vote.

When a Palestinian family in Chicago keeps cooking maqluba upside-down, they are refusing erasure. When a Dalit chef in Mumbai puts beef on his menu for the first time in his lineage, he is rewriting caste one plate at a time. When a broke artist in Lisbon decides to grow tomatoes on her balcony instead of buying the imported ones flown in from Morocco, she is quietly opting out of someone else’s carbon footprint.

We used to say “you are what you eat.”
Now it’s clearer: you are what you choose to eat, what you can afford to eat, and what you refuse to eat in a world on fire.

The plate has always been a mirror.
Today, it’s also a megaphone, a ballot box, and if we share it right a bridge.

So next Sunday, when my grandmother’s fish stew meets my mother’s githeri on the same table, I won’t just taste lunch.
I’ll taste the entire argument of who we are, who we’ve been, and who we still dare to become.

What does your plate say about you?
Mine is still negotiating.