Where Feminism Meets Food
It’s a simple mission, and that’s what makes it powerful: bring women together around good food. By putting local and national female food leaders in the spotlight, Pineapple Collaborative (formerly Pineapple DC) is fostering a community of food-loving women both online and IRL that celebrate eachothers’ success rather than compete.
We spoke with founder and CEO Ariel Pasternak and co-founder and COO Atara Bernstein about their vision for Pineapple and how it’s come to life in D.C.
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Can you tell me about the void you saw in D.C. that led to you start Pineapple?
AP: Pineapple began when I moved back to D.C. in 2015 to help open up Chaia in Georgetown. I was meeting all of these women in the food industry and recognized many of them didn’t know each other. On top of that, I personally was missing a community where I could explore my favorite issues in food. I saw a similar desire among my friends, and I saw amazing people like the Chaia founders, the Gordy’s Pickle Jar founders, and realized no one was personally recognizing them. I started with 30 women together in my living room, and two and a half years later we’ve hosted over 50 events and we’re now a community of over 10,000 women.
What drew you to the food industry?
AB: Food has been a really important part of my life since the moment I was old enough to hold a knife, basically. I grew up in the kitchen with my mom cooking large dinners every week for Shabbat. As I got older, I took an in interest in social justice and food justice, and realized that food is a really powerful political tool. I also have a background in art, and I wanted to bring those two worlds together. Over the past 2 years with Ariel, we have been thinking about how to reach more women and how to really explore a woman’s identity with food. What excites me the most about Pineapple is that women have such a strong expression of style around food, whether it’s their heritage, the way they interact with brands, their health; there’s so many aspects of a woman’s life that are surrounded by food.
How does the “good food” movement tie into Pineapple in DC?
AP: One of the reasons why I was inspired to start Pineapple, is because unlike other cities, the women who work in food here are not just in restaurants, consumer packaged goods, or bakeries; they’re working at the USDA, they’re working for amazing NGOs that have a local, national, or international focus, and we want that food passion and food awareness to come together.
AP/AB: There’s a depth to our passion for food that goes beyond the foodie world. It’s not just a food porn pic on Instagram. It’s also that we think deeply about where our food comes from, who grew it, how it’s grown, who produced it, who manufactured it, and the context around food in our cities. While many of us are blessed to have amazing access to food, we recognize that a lot of people in our city don’t, and we think about how we fix that, because we should all have access to delicious healthy food.
Food intersects so many issues. It’s not just buying something from the grocery store, and that complexity gives us room to think about our decisions critically and create programming around that. We would like to explore that intersectionality through topics like agriculture, biodiversity, immigration, labor, climate change, land use, access and gentrification — there are so many.
Tell me about the #PineFor philosophy.
AP: Something that we live by, and that is rooted in feminism is the idea that fangirling or actively admiring other women, women owned companies, women made products in the world of food or beyond, can create community and insight. Women are taught to compete rather than support or collaborate. Secondly, women in food are still not spotlighted enough. We need to change that paradigm, and our mutual love for food is a way we can do that. The ‘pine for’ philosophy is trying to cultivate the spirit of collaboration over competition.
AB: And It’s not just about food celebrities that we love so much and admire, it’s also about a woman who may be working at a law firm but loves food, and recognizing that her story is also important and special. It’s not really the community of women’s fault that there is this ingrained need to compete because the perception is that there’s not enough spaces for women at the top, but we believe that if you collaborate with a woman instead of compete, what you actually do is make more space at the top, and I think that’s radical and important.
Pineapple isn’t just an industry group, it’s for all women who love food; which to me is most women, and so we want to be this group that is an opportunity for women of all different backgrounds to connect around something that they love so much. We are inherently a intersectional feminist organization which means that we believe that women definitely don’t have as many advantages as men do, but women of color are in a much worse position. That’s something we live by, and the way that shows up for us is by highlighting women of color that we admire in our panels, in our content, in our programming, and through the people we seek advice from.
Top 3 D.C. restaurants?
AP: Little Serow, 2 Amys, Baked and Wired
Dream Pineapple event?
AP: Michelle Obama, obviously. I would die and go to heaven.
AB: Across all our cities, take a day to do a farm tour of the region to visit different farms that all produce something different.
D.C. chef or entrepreneur who should be on our radar?
AP: Farrah Skeiky of Dim Sum Media
AB: Lauren Nixon
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
