There is a question that has quietly accompanied much of my journey through food, although I have only recently found the language to articulate it.
Who decides who or what belongs at the table?
It is a question that extends well beyond restaurants, recipes or recognition. It reaches into the ways we understand ourselves, the stories we choose to preserve, and the confidence with which we present our food to the world. For societies shaped by colonialism, migration and adaptation, the question carries a particularly heavy and complex weight. We inherit cuisines that are at once deeply local and profoundly global, yet we often learn to value them through someone else’s eyes.
For much of our post-colonial history, Caribbean food has occupied an uncertain place within the international culinary imagination. We have celebrated our rum, our sugar, our flying fish and our breadfruit, while quietly accepting that the benchmarks for excellence lay elsewhere. European cheeses represented craftsmanship. French kitchens defined technique. Italian traditions became the measure of authenticity. Even when we honoured our own culinary heritage, there lingered an unspoken assumption that recognition would always arrive from outside, and that legitimacy required endorsement from institutions beyond our shores.
Perhaps that is one of colonialism’s more enduring legacies. It teaches us not only what to consume, but whose opinions matter. It encourages us to become students of other food cultures while remaining hesitant scholars of our own. Consequently, I have come to distrust – if not detest - the descriptor “elevated”!
It is for this reason that I often find myself thinking about Carmeta Fraser - one of the quiet architects of Barbados’ food memory. Long before we began speaking about food sovereignty, culinary heritage or sustainable food systems, she was living and advocating those ideas. Carmeta wore Barbados the way some people wear perfume! Dark-skinned, generously built, dressed almost invariably in flowing floral prints that seemed to bloom as brightly as the gardens that surrounded our homes and playgrounds. Her lipstick was never timid; it announced itself before she did. Her smile was generous and constant and her voice possessed that unmistakable cadence that belonged to a generation of Barbadian women who never felt the need to soften themselves to become acceptable. If we are honest, many of us saw her almost as a caricature. She was the woman who said things that made us roll our eyes. "You are what you eat." "Food comes first." They sounded like relics from another generation that seemed hopelessly disconnected from a world becoming faster, shinier and more modern. We laughed because we thought the future belonged elsewhere. But we now know the world has only just caught up with her.
I doubt Carmeta Fraser would ever have described herself as an advocate for food sovereignty. The language did not yet exist in the way it does today. Yet she embodied its central premise with remarkable clarity: that people have the right to define their own food culture, to value their own ingredients and to tell their own culinary stories without measuring them against imported standards of worth.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me. It is, I have come to realise, the deeper purpose of Cane & Kitchen.
When I began writing these essays, I imagined I was documenting food. What I gradually discovered was that I was documenting belonging. The food simply became the medium through which larger questions revealed themselves. Why do some cuisines command immediate respect while others are treated as curiosities? Why do we instinctively celebrate imported traditions while apologising for our own? Why do we so often speak about Caribbean food through the language of limitation rather than possibility? But also, how do we account for the “imported” ingredients and processes and accommodate them in what is distinctively us. After all there is an undeniable paradox of Caribbean food as hybrid that pits authenticity against purity and endogeneity.
Those questions have never really been about food. They have always been about confidence.
It was against this backdrop that two invitations arrived within days of each other.
The first welcomed me into Les Dames d'Escoffier International, a global community of women dedicated to supporting women in food, beverage and hospitality through mentorship, scholarship, leadership and professional development. The second invited me to serve as a judge at the World Cheese Awards, joining colleagues from around the world in evaluating one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring expressions of craftsmanship.
I accepted both invitations with gratitude. But I also accepted them with a growing awareness that they represented something larger than personal recognition.
What struck me most about Les Dames d'Escoffier was not its prestige. It was its philosophy. Here was an international organisation built upon the deceptively simple proposition that women flourish when they invest in one another. Knowledge is shared rather than guarded. Success is multiplied rather than hoarded. Leadership is understood not as status, but as stewardship.
As I read more about the organisation, I found myself thinking less about joining something new than about recognising something familiar because I had seen this philosophy before.
I had seen it in Barbadian kitchens where recipes were handed down without expectation of reward. I had seen it in women who quietly mentored younger cooks, caterers and entrepreneurs long before the language of mentorship became fashionable. I had seen it in women like Carmeta Fraser, who understood that preserving knowledge was itself an act of generosity.
In many respects, Les Dames d'Escoffier gave an international structure to values that Caribbean women have practised for generations.
The invitation to judge at the World Cheese Awards revealed a different, though equally important, truth.
For years I, like many artisans working in small island states, unconsciously imagined these spaces as belonging to someone else. They were places where European traditions naturally held court and where our role was primarily to observe, learn and perhaps, if fortunate, participate from the margins.
I no longer believe that.
Not because technical standards no longer matter - they matter profoundly - but because I have come to understand that excellence is enriched by diversity of experience rather than diminished by it. Every cheese tells a story of geography, climate, culture and history. A judge does not simply evaluate texture and flavour; a judge learns to appreciate how place expresses itself through craft.
That lesson, ironically, was not first taught to me in Europe. It was taught to me in Barbados.
It was taught by women who understood that food is always an expression of culture before it becomes a commodity.
Perhaps that has been the greatest surprise of all. It was not that these international communities existed. It was discovering that they had room for us all along.
The barriers were not always erected by them. Many had been built by our own assumptions, inherited through the long now virtually genetic shadow of slavery and colonialism - that excellence had a particular accent, a particular geography or a particular history. We had become so accustomed to seeking validation that we oftentimes forgot the value of our own contribution.
As a woman working in food, this realisation has carried particular significance. There have been moments when I wondered whether my experience was sufficiently international, whether a small island could meaningfully contribute to conversations shaped over centuries, whether our stories would ever be regarded as anything more than interesting footnotes to larger culinary narratives.
What I have discovered instead is that authentic communities do not ask us to leave our identity at the door. They ask us to bring it with us.
That, perhaps, is the confidence that Carmeta Fraser quietly modelled throughout her life. She never sought permission to value Barbadian food. She simply did. She never waited for international approval before treating our culinary traditions as worthy of respect. She understood that dignity begins with the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.
There is a temptation, when recognition comes, to view it as an arrival. I disagree. It is an invitation to contribute, bring visibility, be heard and to listen and to learn.
To return home carrying not only new knowledge, but renewed confidence in the richness of our own culinary inheritance.
Les Dames d'Escoffier reminds me that communities are strongest when women intentionally create space for one another. The World Cheese Awards reminds me that excellence is a lifelong discipline of curiosity, humility and learning. Carmeta Fraser reminds me that none of these ideas are entirely new. We have been practising them, in our own ways, around Barbadian tables for generations.
Perhaps the real work before us is not convincing the world that Caribbean food belongs within the global conversation. Rather it is about convincing ourselves.
Because food sovereignty is not only the right to grow our own food. It is the confidence to believe that our stories, our techniques, our traditions and our voices deserve to stand alongside any in the world without first asking permission.
And perhaps that is what I have been trying to understand all along.
We were never waiting for an invitation. We belonged at the table from the very beginning.