Tagan Engel
Producer/contributorTagan Engel is a guest co-host of Seasoned. She brings more than 25 years of experience in food systems and justice work. After a decade as a chef, baker and caterer in NYC, Boston, and through travels to Brazil, Nigeria, and Israel/Palestine, she returned to New Haven, her hometown, to merge her passions for food and social justice. She became deeply involved in community organizing on local food justice efforts, partnering with community members, businesses, organizations, and the city to create solutions to school food, equitable access to nourishing food, culturally connected cooking education, community and school gardens, food workers rights, sustainable supply chains, and supports for BIPOC food entrepreneurs. She led efforts to pass the first community driven city food policy plan, establish the Food System Policy Director position for the City of New Haven, and founded the Kitchen at CitySeed.
Tagan currently hosts The Table Underground podcast/website where she records inspiring stories of food and creative social justice, and consults on related work. She is a Resident Fellow at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment and the Yale Center for Environmental Justice where she advises on community driven liberation practices, regenerative agriculture and food systems, and racial, economic and social equity. Tagan is a founding Board Member of Soul Fire Farm and a Mentor and Advisory Board Member with CitySeed Incubates. She was a co-creator of the 2020 New Haven Cultural Equity Plan and a 2018 Graustein Memorial Fund Inspiring Equity Story Fellow. Tagan is a wife and mother of two teenagers in a family that she loves with abandon. She is an Ashkenazi Jew, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors - whose legacy of story and liberation she carries on - and an Iyanifa in the Yoruba orisa tradition.
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This week on Seasoned, Juna Gjata and Dr. Eddie Phillips, authors of 'Food, We Need to Talk,' join us to unpack ideas about diet culture, weight loss and what it means to be healthy.
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This week on Seasoned, Samantha Seneviratne talks about butter’s role in baking, chocolate chip cookies and her love for enriched doughs. Plus, Tagan Engel shares latke-making tips for Hanukkah and explores the ways Jewish practices connect to farming.
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This week on Seasoned: tips for pulling off Thanksgiving dinner and the efforts to grow and save the seeds of Buffalo Creek squash in a garden at Yale Farm.
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In this episode of Seasoned, we talk with Stacey Mei Yan Fong about her cookbook, the immigration story that inspired it, and the joy that pie brings.
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Yewande Komolafe talks about her cookbook and her deep connection to Nigerian food and cooking, in this hour of Seasoned. Plus, we hear from the team, including teens, working on an urban farm, garden, and market in Bridgeport.
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We get to know Top Chef Junior star, Rahanna Bisseret Martinez. Her first cookbook is Flavor + Us. And a New Britain family turns their lawn into a pick-what-you-need garden for the community.
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This week on Seasoned, we talk with the co-founder of Semilla in Hartford. It's a coffee shop and a neighborhood living room. And we learn about the profound hospitality of the Eritrean coffee ceremony.
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This hour on Seasoned, we talk about the best ice cream shops in the state with people obsessed with local ice cream. Plus, meet the owner of Sweet Claude's and learn about the cows that produce the milk for UConn Dairy Bar.
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Richard Myers and Shawn Joseph are on a mission to change the image of farming. This hour on Seasoned, get to know the entrepreneurs behind Park City Harvest. Plus, learn about the grapes growing at Connecticut vineyards.
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This week on Seasoned, we talk with two culinary trailblazers about Indigenous and Puerto Rican food and cooking.