Sidetrack Cookbook Club - A Feather and a Fork

* *Note: $5 registration fee can be used as a credit toward a purchase in-store. The credit expires the night of book club.**

Join us for Cookbook Club! Attendees will RSVP as they would for one of our other book clubs, and a week or two prior to the meeting date, we'll send out a sign-up link where you can indicate the recipe you'll be making and bringing from the book. The sign-up will help ensure we have a variety of recipes to taste test! Make enough to share as we have some good eats and chats. The featured cookbook will be available for sale at Sidetrack.

We will provide paper products (plates, cups, silverware). Please bring any necessary serving dishes and serving utensils for your chosen recipe. You can bring a small cooler or warming device for your recipe if needed. Please note that electrical hook-ups are VERY limited at the store so you should not count on access to electricity for your items.

Sidetrack Bookshop is a mission-driven bookstore, which means (in part) that we are committed to providing a welcoming and inclusive space for people of all identities. In order to maintain our welcoming and inclusive space in the context of what we hope will be a lively and productive book club discussion, we have developed the following house rules.

By attending a book club meeting, you agree to the following:

1. Share the floor: Be sure to let everyone talk and express their thoughts on the book. If you feel like you're talking a lot, you probably are! Invite others to speak.
2. Be respectful: We'll no doubt have differing opinions. Seek to understand first, then to be understood. Check your privilege, and take special care with others who have lived experience differing from your own.
3. Comments or behavior that demean a specific person, identity, or culture will not be tolerated.

Book club hosts will keep these house rules in mind and will redirect you or the conversation as a whole if we feel they aren't being honored. We also reserve the right to ask an attendee to leave if we feel they're contributing to an unwelcome space.

From an acclaimed Indigenous chef comes an extraordinary cookbook that weaves powerful storytelling with 125 intertribal recipes to heal our bodies and restore our foodways—featuring a foreword by bestselling novelist and fellow Oaklandian Tommy Orange.
Chef Crystal Wahpepah has used her growing platform to tell the little-known history of Oakland's tight-knit Native American communities, which were relocated from reservations across the country to the San Francisco Bay area in the 1950s. Crystal's powerful message to reconnect to our foodways and transform generational trauma into strength as well as her healing dishes have been seen on Food Network’s Chopped and Beating Bobby Flay.
The rise of corporate agriculture around the world relies on singular and often genetically modified monocultures plus lots of chemicals and soil additives to produce massive crop yields. And while this approach may economically make sense on paper to feed multitudes at the lowest price point possible, it has harmed our physical health, emotional well-being, and the very creation that supports life. This truth applies not just to Indigenous people, who have been harmed by the federal commodified foods program, but to all of us who have come to rely on cheap and easy processed foods to feed our families. We no longer get the nutrients we need from our food and spend lots of money on supplementing our diets. We develop chronic diseases that can be avoided and even cured through eating habits.
Eat with the seasons, cure your disconnection with the land, and cook colorful, delicious food rooted in the oldest traditions including:
Three Sisters Veggie Bowls

• Sweet Blue Cornbread with Huckleberry Compote
• Indigenous Popcorn Balls with Edible Flowers
• Strawberry-Sumac Salad with Maple-Sage Vinaigrette
• Bison Roast with Chokeberry Rub
• Smoked Salmon Dip with Red Chilies and Chips
• Acorn Muffins, and much more

A Feather and a Fork includes 125 recipes developed in collaboration with ethnobotanist and food sovereignty advocate Linda Black Elk to explore the environmental, spiritual, physical, and social benefits of each dish as well as raise awareness of and support for indigenous food producers who are preserving heirloom foods and traditions.

Crystal Wahpepah, a registered member of the Kickapoo Nation of Oklahoma, has long been a warrior for food sovereignty. She is the creative tour de force behind the inventive, healthy, and delicious dishes served at her restaurant, Wahpepah's Kitchen, based in Oakland, California.
Co-writer Amy Paige Condon has collaborated on bestselling cookbooks with Todd Richards, the Back in the Day bakery and others.

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