Episide 1: Harvest Dinner 2024: Social Media Video
Harvest Dinner is an annual Yale tradition. It’s a really good opportunity for students to come together before the November recess to just kind of relax and enjoy some great food. My name is Julia Wang, and I graduated from Yale College this past May with the class of 2024 in the fall of my senior year, I decided to take a class in ethnicity, race and migration, called indigenous food sovereignty, taught by Professor Hobart. For our final project, we had to do something creative with indigeneity and food. I decided to re imagine a Thanksgiving Harvest Dinner in the dining halls of Yale that would represent and celebrate the indigenous food waves of the people on whose land Yale occupies. You. Julia’s paper came across my desk, and I shared it out with my team, because it was incredible. He tried to figure out some ways that we could implement some of her ideas on our harvest menu this year, but to translate it on the scale and for our student body and in our dining halls. It’s just a challenge. She had a recipe for salmon, so sourcing took a look at it.. They figured out what salmon we could source, what blueberries we could source, and then we introduced it on the menu. And it’s really this huge group effort to bring a single dish like salmon with blueberry glaze onto our harvest dinner menu. I wanted Yalies to think about the place that they are living, the people who first called it home and to invite them into a more thoughtful and deeper engagement with thanksgiving, and I’m very excited to see what we do next.
Episode 2: Holiday Dinner 2024: Social Media Video
(0:01) The holiday dinner that we do in the colleges is for the upper level students. The first year (0:07) students go to the Schwarzman Center. I oversee residential dining.
We really wanted to focus on (0:13) how different people celebrate the holidays, you know. Just looking at the desserts like with (0:16) coquito, which I’m very excited about. A lot of those like warm fall spice flavors that you get (0:22) from eggnog, the spiced apple cake, which normally you would have an apple honey cake (0:28) around Hanukkah time.
Finding those connections around food is very important. It’s not just (0:34) the food that you’re eating, but it’s also the interactions and the connection you have (0:37) with other people. This is probably the most talked about event when alums come back.
(0:44) First year dinner. (0:49) Menu design is probably done three months ahead of time. This is a team effort.
(0:56) We’ll have a procession which has seven pieces. We’ll also have a yule log made by the Yale Bakery. (1:04) A sweet potato pie, which I usually make with my mom every year with my grandmother’s recipe.
(1:09) Had American traditions on one side, but we’d also have lots of Chinese influences as well with (1:15) like roasted duck. We’d have whole fish, noodles, and the like. My grandmother taught me how to make (1:23) pierogies.
They were really good pierogies, but she was not very kind on her critique of (1:27) my pierogies the first year.
Episide 3: Breaking Bread 2025: Social Media Video
Cutdown MTM MLK 2025
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We wanted to really celebrate and pay tribute to Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King through the cities that he travelled, and we thought about culinary traditions that were brought forth by black American chefs.
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Lamar and our team collaborated on a menu that was inspired through some of these locations.
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You know, everybody eats.
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So we just shot a stick towards the type of things that he would have eaten, be it from fried green tomatoes representing a dish from Lamar’s family to that of, you know, the travels to New York and Edna B Lewis more to into Washington, DC; James Hemmings.
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We got inspiration from Chef Marcus Marcus Samuelsson and his restaurant in in Overtown, concentrating and illuminating the works of these chefs.
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And Chef James Benson reached out to me.
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We talked about some of the dishes and kind of workshopped the menu a little bit together.
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And I think students will be very surprised to learn that so much goes into the planning of the menus in the dining hall.
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I think that students will really enjoy this meal, and I hope that it will allow folks to have those conversations and those dialogues across the table that we used to have when I was here as an undergrad.
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I’m really thankful to everyone who had a hand in this because it truly takes the whole team to make these things happen.
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That’s exactly like I remember.