One Bite at a Time: Margo Gabriel on Food, Haiti, and Global Storytelling
By Kimberly M. Parris
The richness of Haiti’s story is often told from a lens of sorrow and struggle.
Award-winning journalist Margo Gabriel seeks to be a part of shifting that narrative, both for Haiti, as well as for global cuisines and cultures — one bite and one word at a time.
Based in Lisbon, Portugal for the past six years, Gabriel, relocating from her hometown of Boston, has always been interested in how words are used to weave stories that describe the beauty of life and culture.
“[Growing up] I was always fascinated by poets that bend language in a way that captivated me,” she shared with me during our virtual interview that felt more like two old friends of different Caribbean cultures, one generation removed, catching up over dinner.
A first-generation Black Haitian American, Gabriel’s first food memory was being in her kitchen with her mother and her sister, learning how to cook various Haitian dishes. We chatted at length over our shared love of dishes such as legim, a one-pot stew that slowly cooks vegetables like cabbage, carrots, and eggplant, and infuses them with Haiti’s version of fresh seasoning known as épis, peppers, cloves and meat or seafood.
It was here that she expressed how sharing these types of meals that required love and patience shaped her storytelling lens.
“I just was always drawn to that,” she noted, speaking about the camaraderie and storytelling that tends to come with different generations of the same family coming together at the kitchen table. It was these moments cemented in Gabriel’s DNA that, as she grew older, helped to shape the lens through which she told her own stories.
Language was always an important part of her perspective, as someone who grew up speaking both English and Kreyòl. Gabriel realized early on that being bilingual was more than just communicating in a different language – it was a unique way to showcase the food and the culture she grew up with.
That said, with this realization came a different set of challenges: how does one describe an experience of, say, Sunday dinner, in a Haitian household, to someone who is unfamiliar with the language and the food?
It was with this that Gabriel realized that her gifts with language might be able to bridge a gap.
Between learning how to cook from her mother, and growing up with storied chefs on public television such as Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, Gabriel began to realize that she was meant to use food to tell the stories of her culture. In fact, on her arrival at the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts, one of the first things that she set out to do was to figure out ‘how to become a food writer.’
Some people fall in love with the food. Margo Gabriel fell in love with the story behind the food.
It was this desire to share the unique perspective that she’d gained over the years, through her childhood, that led Gabriel to study journalism. As someone who is bilingual, she often looked at the world around her through a bilingual lens — and she sought to let that lens be translated through both writing and cooking.
For years, she worked in the corporate world as an accountant while pitching food and culture stories on a freelance basis to independent journalism outlets. This was the beginning of her career as a freelance food journalist, writing for outlets such as Cuisine Noir, Edible Boston, and Fodor’s Travel, to name a few.
And then…there was Lisbon.
Bringing the food and culture of Haiti across oceans reflected its own sense of poetry, but it was a near perfect scenario for Gabriel, who migrated to the capital of Portugal in 2020. It was there that she began to recreate some of the dishes of her family’s homeland – a process that didn’t always prove easy.
Sourcing ingredients to make rice dishes, fresh seasoning, and sos pwa, a Haitian pureed bean sauce served with rice, for example, often required a decent amount of grocery exploration. With Lisbon being a port city, seafood was plentiful, and so Gabriel began focusing on both that, as well as seasonal ingredients, when reimagining the food she grew up with.
Going back to how storytelling shaped her world view from childhood to now, Gabriel wanted to find ways to create a new sense of community, while introducing people in her new home to the culture of the home she always knew. It was this that prompted her to begin hosting pop up dinners in Lisbon, where guests could experience her storytelling through food.
She notes as we talk that she soon realized something that she innately knew all along: that we are more connected and similar, than we are different.
Gabriel’s freelance writing and her dinners provided her with the means to create an avenue that was important to her: to be able to highlight both cuisines and perspectives often dismayed from traditional journalism narratives.
As I talked with her, there was one profound thing that stood out to me — there is joy everywhere to be found, even (and in spite of) resistance.
When you hear of Haiti’s history — their fight for independence, both the physical and financial struggles that ensued following their 1804 revolution to reclaim their land, you don’t always get to hear about the beauty. The joy.
Listening to Gabriel reflect on the dinners where she shares her culinary perspective, you get a small glimpse of just how much flavorful joy there is, regardless of the struggle.
It is a keen reminder that perspectives are shaped by the people who value their experiences being shared in a meaningful way, and that our collective voices can reshape just about any narrative.
It was beautiful to witness.
Currently, Gabriel’s unique perspective lives in her Substack, Creative Current. The interview series highlights global conversations with Black women, as well as other notable creatives and people of color. The interviews centering food, culture, and the stories that shape both, were an idea that she had after realizing there were so many incredible stories she could share beyond the culinary world.
As we wrap up, she notes that “people want to know where the real stories are”. She likes to feel that her own inherent curiosity surrounding those stories is a contributing factor in helping other food and culture creatives share their own lived experiences, a note that I tend to agree with.
Gabriel’s award-winning work can be found in a number of places: in Cuisine Noir, where she is a contributing writer, in multiple publications listed on her portfolio, or in her cookbook, The Expat Kitchen.
Comments