Sheeplo, MS (WGNO) — For two years, Serigne Mbaye, a James Beard Award Nominated Chef from Senegal, has celebrated Juneteenth with a very special meal.
For Serigne, food is a nourishing language given to him by his ancestors. Food is often at the center of every Juneteenth celebration.
This year, Serigne is teaming up with other black chefs from New Orleans to host a meal on a farm in Sheeplo Mississippi at 3:00 called “Afro Freedom, Afro Feast. To purchase a ticket, click here.
“I really wanted to celebrate how our ancestors use to cook. You start a fire, you grab your pot and you make something happen. I think food is freedom in many ways. Food allows us to celebrate, share, tell the story. That is the power that food has,” says Serigne.
Serigne is teaming up with Ben Burkett, a vender at the Famer’s Market in New Orleans.
Ben Burkett is the state coordinator of the Mississippi Association of Cooperatives, an organization made up of black farmers, that is part of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives stretches from Texas to South Carolina and also abroad to some communities in West Africa.
Burkett’s goal is to encourage ownership of business, land and resources. His family has farmed a plot of land in Sheeplo Mississippi since 1889. This is the same plot of land that will be used for 2022’s Juneteenth Fine Dining Feast: Afro Freedom, Afro Feast.
The land adds uniqueness to the dinner because the dinner takes place on land that was once given to the recently emancipated and will celebrate freedom with culinary sophistication.
Ben Burkett notices a decline in African Americans working in the field of agriculture over the years. This may have started as a response after slavery.
“At one time, there were over nine hundred thousand African American farmers. It’s a little over 25 thousand African American farmers now, in the whole country,” says Ben Burkett.
There is hope for the future of food. There is a rising interest across the country in raising food from farm to table. Whether the setting is in the farmer’s field or in the chef’s kitchen, the legacy is part of the same cultivated story of freedom and Ben Burkett says there are plenty of jobs in agriculture that do not require an individual to be on the farm, but instead can include food production or restaurant experience.
The Juneteenth dinner celebrates hope for the future, but it also honors the past as Ben Burkett says, “we have come a long way. It’s a celebration of African American history, the struggle of food, slavery and the survival in this country. That is the only way I can look at it.”