The Spring 2024 issue of Gravy centers food and movement, following dishes, rituals, and ingredients as they cross borders both geographic and symbolic.


Chef and author Adán Medrano asks: what are the possibilities for identity, memory, and community when we treat cooking as an art? Omme Salma Rahemtullah, a scholar and community organizer, highlights the foodways of people of Indian descent whose families lived a generation or more in Uganda. Writer Mercedes Kane tells how jesa, a Korean food ritual held to honor and remember a deceased family member, helped her grieve the loss of her father after she learned it from her husband’s family.


Poet Beth Ann Fennelly pens an “Epistle to My Lord Concerning My Son’s Future Spouses.” Columnist Gustavo Arellano writes of a Salvadoran-owned mercadito in Bowling Green, Kentucky, highlighting a successful business that caters to a diverse clientele. Minh-Y Tran maps her father’s journey from Vietnam to the American South.


Katie King takes readers to California, where invasive crawfish provide expat Southerners with a taste of home. Jarrett van Meter visits a blues club that serves fried fish in his hometown of Lexington. J. Drew Lanham shares an excerpt from his poetry collection, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, forthcoming from Hub City Press.