The challenge: Queer food culture is vibrant, expansive, and community-driven, but mainstream food media has largely reduced it to shallow Pride-month gestures and fleeting representation. Meanwhile, queer and trans people facing food and housing insecurity were rarely part of the conversation at all.

The work: I co-founded and serve as Editorial Director of PLAY, a cookbook-magazine that offers a different vision of queer food culture. A vision that's playful, explorative, and built around mutual aid. Each issue features work from world-renowned chefs and writers like Andy Baraghani, Julia Turshen, Jon Kung, Preeti Mistry, and Telly Justice. I oversee editorial vision, assign and edit each piece, and creatively produce our fundraising dinners and events.

The result: PLAY was included in HarperCollins' Best Food Writing of 2025 anthology, and we have donated thousands of dollars to organizations addressing food and housing insecurity in queer and trans communities. What started as an underground zine has grown into a word-of-mouth phenomenon and thriving community of readers, chefs, and artists who believe food culture can be both beautiful and transformative.

You can read more about the project here.