Project Acorn Bread by Whitney French

Project Acorn Bread

Whitney French

"Most of the people in this country don’t eat acorns you know. They have no tradition of eating
them, they don’t know how to prepare them...some of our neighbours wanted to cut down all
our big live oak trees and plant something useful. You wouldn’t believe the time I had changing
their minds.”

— Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Project Acorn Bread is a community arts initiative with a singular purpose of making wild acorn bread during the autumn season as a means to deepen solidarity between Black, Afro-Indigenous and Indigenous communities in Toronto. Led by writers Whitney French and Lue Boileau, this project is spiritually guided by the masterful writing of Octavia E. Butler — namely her 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. People from all ages will be invited to forage, store, mill flour to make acorn bread, a favourite meal by the novel’s protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina.

This project meets at the intersection of food justice, tradition keeping, community building and Black and Indigenous Futures. Parables of the Sower acknowledges the Indigenous tradition that was shared with Black communities in the Americas in the text and these solidarities survive today and will continue to survive in future.