This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health care. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.

—NOTE: This episode includes discussion of family legacy, land loss, and grief. Take care of yourself while you listen.

Adrienne Michelle sits with Gabrielle Eitienne, who left a career in fashion and marketing in New York to come home to her family's land in North Carolina with a new purpose. She’s since learned so much – how to save seed, how to put up food, how to feed people like it matters, because it does. Gabrielle shares what the garden has given her that the grind never will.

Gabrielle is a cook, artist, and cultural preservationist whose work moves through oral history, film, cooking, and textile to trace the Black experience of land, seed, and table. She was featured in the Netflix series High on the Hog and in the Oxford American short film The Seeds We Keep. She is the co-founder of Tall Grass Food Box, a CSA built to sustain Black farmers across the Triangle region of North Carolina, and the creator of Revival Taste Collective and the AfroCarolina Revival Suppers.

Watch High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America (Netflix, 2021). The series that brought Gabrielle's preservation work to the world, tracing Black foodways from West Africa to the American South.

Watch The Seeds We Keep (Oxford American). The short documentary on Gabrielle's return to her family's land in Apex and the traditions she is keeping alive there.

Support Tall Grass Food Box, the CSA Gabrielle co-founded to sustain Black farmers across the North Carolina Triangle by putting their harvest directly into community hands.

Read "My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies" by Resmaa Menakem.

Find Gabrielle Instagram: @gabrielle_eitienne · Revival Taste Collective and the AfroCarolina Revival Suppers

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Adrienne Michelle, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, speaker, and the host of The Audacity to Heal. She is signed with Looking Glass Literary for her forthcoming memoir. She is a regularly featured expert in Essence, Cosmopolitan, and Betches, and the first lesbian therapist featured on Therapy for Black Girls. The podcast and the retreats are the on-ramp, and the memoir is where it all lands. Find her on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠ and at ⁠adriennemichelletherapy.com⁠.