Why Cakes Can Be a Powerful Form of Protest Favorite 

LONG BEFORE WOMEN finally — though incompletely — won the right to vote in the United States in 1920, they were finding ways to influence politics. In late 18th-century New England, colonial women would make muster cakes — spiced, doorstop-heavy confections flecked with candied fruit and soaked in alcohol — for soldiers being gathered (or “mustered”) to fight in the Revolutionary War. Later, women baked what became known as election cakes to potentially encourage voters to back causes that they cared about. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, suffragists included several such recipes in the cookbooks that they published — volumes that featured quotes from famous supporters alongside sometimes satirical recipes such as Pie for a Suffragist’s Doubting Husband, the crust of which was to be mixed with “tact and velvet gloves.” For the suffragists, cookbooks were “a tool largely to convince men that they had no plans of leaving the kitchen,” says KC Hysmith, 35, a North Carolina-based recipe developer and culinary historian. “The rhetoric used against them was: If women get the vote, they’re going to leave you to cook your own food.”

Today a new generation of protest bakers — making cakes in support of rights once again under threat — are interested less in appeasement than in subverting a symbol of domestic labor, in the style of second-wave feminist artists like Mary Kelly, who has used dirty diapers and laundry lint in her work. Among them are Hysmith, who pipes messages like “Flip the Senate” and “Abortion Saves Lives” atop simple vanilla sheet cakes and flower-adorned chocolate sponges, and the Texas-based Becca Rea-Tucker, 32, who uses her popular Instagram account, @thesweetfeminist, to campaign for reproductive health care. In Virginia, the baker Arley Bell, 34, posts pastel buttercream-slathered layer cakes inscribed with the names of police violence victims on her Instagram page (@arley.cakes), offering to send the sweets to followers who donate to GoFundMe campaigns for victims’ families. “It’s not just about a pretty cake,” she says. “The real beauty is in the action I’m trying to inspire.”

“Raising money through baking is an act of defiance against feminine stereotypes,” says Paola Velez, a 33-year-old Washington, D.C.-based pastry chef and the author of the new cookbook “Bodega Bakes.” She turned to culinary activism as a young line cook in New York City, where she sold honey-lemon cookies and miniature raspberry delight cupcakes to fund the purchase of feminine hygiene products for women in need. In 2020, she co-founded Bakers Against Racism, which has since raised over $2.5 million for civil rights organizations; in 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, she launched Protect Our Bodies to raise money to support abortion rights funds. Since 2017, the New York-based pastry chef Natasha Pickowicz, 39, has raised several hundred thousand dollars with her bake sales, at which pastry chefs from restaurants including Le Bernardin and Frenchette in New York and Los Angeles’s Sqirl sell offerings like chocolate marmalade cakes and honeycomb-cacao cookies in aid of reproductive rights. “Instead of losing yourself in this larger moment of existential angst,” she says, “bringing together even a small group of people for this kind of event can be very energizing.”

AS HYSMITH SAYS, “women have used food as a tool for resistance for generations.” She points to the activist Georgia Gilmore, who sold sweet potato pies and other dishes to help fund the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott, and to the many bake sales organized by feminist groups in the 1970s and ’80s to promote the Equal Rights Amendment. In 2020, Gilmore’s work inspired the Brooklyn-based baker Doris Hồ-Kane, now 43, to sell tins of her butter cookies in support of Black Lives Matter. The sweets raised about $20,000, and also gave Hồ-Kane the confidence to open Bạn Bè, New York City’s first Vietnamese American bakery, the following year. She sees its existence as a political statement, a means of celebrating and introducing customers to the flavors of her culture — like ube, pandan and cà phê — at a time when immigration remains a deeply divisive issue. “My parents were Vietnamese boat people, so they left their country with nothing except recipes that were handed down orally,” she says. “There’s a lot of power in continuing to share this legacy of displaced people.”

The pastry chef and artist Rose McAdoo, 34, likewise describes her baking as “an easy foothold” from which to engage people on potentially controversial topics, including mass incarceration and the climate crisis. For the past four years, she has traveled to remote or otherwise inaccessible places — including the South Pole and Rikers Island — where, often in collaboration with people there, she develops conceptual desserts like rainbow-hued edible thermal maps sculpted from sugar and fondant, and biodiverse brioche doughnuts with fillings that highlight ingredients foraged from at-risk forests (such as salmonberry jam and pineapple weed pastry cream). This past June, while aboard a ship in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Norway, she built a model of a glacier from malted rye spice cake soaked in lingonberry compote, topping it with caramelized brown cheese buttercream, stroopwafel crumble and crisp feuilletine pearls, surrounding it with an ocean of blue spirulina lemon tarts and meringue icebergs. As McAdoo filmed, her fellow passengers devoured the cake on the ship’s top deck, its disappearance mirroring, in hyperspeed, the destruction of the enormous tidewater glacier behind them. Titled “Eating Away,” the project made clear both the costs of consumption — and our inability to resist it.

By Jenny Comita
New York Times
Oct. 9, 2024