Buying a meal from a Black-owned restaurant—or food truck or bar or pop-up—might feel tiny in the grand scheme of systemic injustice and racial discrimination. But it is something. (Hopefully it is among myriad somethings.) It’s also immediate. That one purchase directly impacts a local business, and the great thing is you can keep doing that one small thing over and over again.
After all, food has always been political. The pandemic has laid bare the ways in which some of the most vulnerable in our communities work in the food sector: the people working in close proximity in meat processing facilities; the millions of former hospitality workers, servers, bartenders, cooks; those who pluck fresh vegetables from the soil that will eventually nourish someone; the food banks facing unprecedented demand and hunger; small businesses scrambling for grants and partially forgivable government loans. As much as it’s more comfortable to believe otherwise, it erases all the complex layers of our food system.
And, yes, they can be such delicious layers. To that end, we created a spreadsheet of Black-owned food and drink businesses to consider supporting right now and in the future.
Here’s that list of Black-owned food businesses in the Dallas area. (It will also cover shopping, beauty, fitness, home and weddings, and arts and entertainment as we update throughout the week.)
If there are any missing from this list please email me; I update this regularly throughout the year.
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