Not many students at UC Santa Cruz spend their Friday mornings as line cooks. But in the kitchen of Cowell Coffee Shop (CCS), the smell of cilantro, the aroma of citrus fruit and the rhythmic sound of chopping greet you as you enter. On Feb. 27, students sliced and seasoned produce not as employees, but as attendees of “Food as Resistance: Within the Black Diaspora,” an event hosted by the Food Systems Working Group (FSWG).
In collaboration with CCS and UCSC Basic Needs, Food as Resistance is a multi-part workshop series that highlights how food can be used to combat oppression. Friday was the second part of this workshop, following the first installation of Food as Resistance on Jan. 30. Twenty students prepared breakfast to be served at CCS, and later took part in a discussion about urban farming, agroecology and the use of food as a tool for community and cultural preservation.
Attendees cut produce to prepare the breakfast, Feb. 27, 2026.
“All students are holders and producers of knowledge,” said Via Katz, a third-year environmental studies major. “Getting students to be both students and teachers to each other is really important. Those connections and that knowledge that we get to share with each other is the basis for any sort of other organizing that we want to see.”
FSWG members Katz and Axelle Roland, a second-year critical race and ethnic studies and plant sciences double major, helped organize these events.
“Our current food system would not be here without the labor and knowledge of Black folks,” Katz said. “[This event is] really important because highlighting the knowledge that Black people have always had and contributed to agriculture, is imperative to healing our food system.”
Afroecology, an expansion of agroecology, focuses on the Black experience and relationship to land. The practice values ancestral and communal knowledge of agriculture not only from Black Americans, but across the entire Black diaspora.
Katz, a co-chair of FSWG, previously interned at CCS. When she came up with the idea for the Food as Resistance workshops, Roland, another member of the CCS team, quickly joined forces to make the idea a reality. Inspired by the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program in Oakland during the ’60s, Katz and Roland structured the event to mirror the Black Panthers’ morning practice, by starting the event at 9 a.m.
“We really wanted to focus on seasonal ingredients, things that could be locally sourced,” Katz said. “A lot of the produce that was used came from the UCSC farm. Beyond that, we wanted something that folks could easily make in an hour, even if someone had never cooked before.”
Finished breakfast tacos and fruit salad are plated and ready to be enjoyed by attendees of the event, Feb. 27, 2026.
Katz divided attendees into two groups: one helping with food prep and cooking, the latter presenting about the history of using food to empower marginalized groups. After 30 minutes, the groups swapped places, then came together to eat and socialize.
The breakfast menu was as colorful as it was flavorful, consisting of potato breakfast tacos topped with a cilantro-date sauce, tofu scramble and pickled onions. Side options included a fruit salad made of kiwi, apple, pear and orange, as well as granola cereal.
Throughout the event, Katz and Roland handed out their own handmade zines that detailed the history of afroecology, the meaning of food as resistance and resources listing local organizations that help with food insecurity.
A group of student attendees take a break from cooking to discuss ways in which food can be a source of resistance, Feb. 27, 2026.
As attendees began sitting down to eat the breakfast they’d prepared, CCS opened for its regular hours at 10 a.m., welcoming the typical morning rush.
“I come to CCS pretty much every single day,” said second-year student Zuri California. “And [this event] was just reminding me to think of the people who are preparing this food for me every day. ”
Around 11:30 a.m., organizers brought attendees to the lawn outside the coffee shop for a larger group discussion about urban farming, agroecology and the history of oppression of Black Americans in agriculture.
“I forget that the present is history being made,” second year student psychology major Abigail Opeyemi said. “I feel like putting Black people on a platform in a way that allows us to share our experiences and also to be in community with one another, and to learn from another, and to teach each other, [is] very important. There’s a lot of [cultural] preservation that comes [from] just talking and having conversations and telling stories.”
Around noon, organizers Katz and Roland concluded the event. They both have hopes that students gained not just a zine and a free meal, but the knowledge that fighting oppression isn’t done only through protesting; it’s also done through intentional efforts to preserve culture and community.
“Written history is one thing, but taught history is another,” Opeyemi said. “I think that having history, not just written down in books, but having history in our hands and in our words, on our tongues, constantly is very important. And it is an act of resistance. As a Black person, as Black people, as a Black community, existence in its very self is resistance.”
