Krystal Mack is a multidisciplinary artist who uses food and nature in her work.

Alicia: Hi, Krystal. Thank you so much for taking the time today. 

Krystal: Yeah, no problem. Thank you for having me. You can hear me well?

Alicia: Yeah.

Krystal: Ok, good.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?

Krystal: Yeah, I grew up here in Baltimore, Maryland. And more specifically, I grew up splitting my time between the Northwood neighborhood of Baltimore City and Loch Raven, and also in the suburbs in Essex, Maryland. 

And I would say that those two places heavily influenced what I ate growing up. My mom was also a teacher who was a single mom, but also in school getting her master’s. So it was kind of a lot of latchkey kid situations. So, a lot of processed food, for better or for worse. Lunchables were my best friend growing up. I loved Stouffer’s mac and cheese. 

When I was in Northwood area, Northwood, Loch Raven, I was spending time with my cousins and my grandmother. And that was a lot of home-cooked meals then. So chicken and dumplings, or fried okra, things of that nature. So I kind of got a mix of those two things. I feel it's a true Black Great Migration story kind of situation going on with my palate, especially from the Mid-Atlantic region. Soul food from the south, but then also Stouffer's.

Alicia: The Stouffer's mac and cheese is good.

Krystal: It is good! It is.

My mother, though, she really tried to pass that off as hers for a little bit. I remember at one point she was dating some guys. And I remember every time she was like, ‘We're gonna make dinner!’ And they would always think that that was her mac and cheese. Like, ‘Why are you lying to these men?’ [Laughter.] 

But yeah, no. Very delicious.

Alicia: Very delicious. 

So much of what you do is specific to Baltimore. And I read an interview you did in 2019, where you talked about using interdisciplinary art as a way of understanding the city and the changes it's gone through. Now that so much of your work is online and accessible to people outside of your city, outside of that framework that you have, how—Have you changed your approach at all? How are you maintaining the very specific Baltimore nature of your work while you're now working for so many, a much broader and bigger audience geographically?

And I wanted to ask this, because I really love regional specificity. I think that we lose so much of it in the national media. And I think that we get to the truth when we are hyper-specific about locations. And being specific doesn't mean being esoteric. 

But anyhow, how do you maintain that in your work?

Krystal: I feel like maintaining that is kind of an act of maintaining my identity in a way. So for me, it just feels like it's something that I actively do every day. I get up. I have coffee. I have breakfast. And then I actively engage with my neighborhood, just to kind of have a sense of understanding of who I am and where I come from. 

And it is harder. I would say it's actually harder now, more so because of the changes that are happening in Baltimore. Well, fortunately, unfortunately, I've always had to kind of create and share my work online, because there really isn't a space for me that I feel fully fits my work. I mean, I'm not in a restaurant anymore. I don't own a bakery anymore. I don't do any of those things. Like you said, it is very interdisciplinary. 

And for me, I feel like my work is more of a lived practice. I know that sounds cheesy and hippie-dippie. But for me, it's never like, ‘Ok, the angle is to get this item on the shelf, or the angle is to be in this magazine, or have this established space.’ For me, the angle is to better understand, to better understand who I am in this moment, where I am in this world. And the tools that I use every day, how are they—specifically food—are they influenced by my surroundings, influenced by what's going on, influenced by my emotions? 

All of that, for me, especially as I mentioned in the need for visual, I’m a neurodivergent person. I feel like I view the world in a way that is not commonly explored. I guess one of my traits is being a little bit more vulnerable than the average person would be. And I feel like while that to some can be seen as a weakness, to me it's seen as a strength. 

And being able to have these open conversations about what's happening in Baltimore, and how that is very much intertwined with the fate of what's happening in cities like Baltimore, like St. Louis, in Detroit and the like. These once very industrial cities that are heavily populated by Black people, oftentimes Black people who came there because of the Great Migration. What does that—the foodways of those areas look like? And how do they connect with how we identify in a national sense as Black Americans? 

So that's always been something that's fascinating to me. And having been put into this position where I guess through my connections or relationship to women in food in the, white women in food specifically in the food industry, being able to have these conversations in a way that, I don't know, kind of hold folks accountable. [Laughs.] These are not just things that are happening off in cities that you have no connection to. They're happening in Brooklyn, too. It’s just people are refusing to acknowledge the role that they play. 

So for me, it feels now that I have great power, but with this attention, with great power comes great responsibility. With this attention. I feel like it's my responsibility as a Black person that's not in a major market to have these conversations for myself, for my city, and for other people whose lives in—I guess as a place intersects with those things, if that makes sense.

Alicia: That makes sense. [Laughter.] 

You bring that hyper specificity to ingredients as well. You use local ingredients. I've gone through so many of your recipes in your Patreon. I'm like, ‘Wow, I love this use of things that are not going to be available everywhere.’ I don't think that that kind of specificity is alienating. And I do think that sometimes we have these conversations that kind of assume that that is alienating to people. 

But you really just bring that into the fore of your work, that you are in a specific place, and you use specific ingredients. And so I wanted to know about how you ended up using food as a medium and how the locality of those foods has become important to you.

Krystal: Yeah.

I think for me, it actually all started years ago when I had this frozen dessert business called KarmaPop, which was frozen popsicles based on Mid-Atlantic seasonality. So I was using okra in desserts, and frozen desserts like an okra granita kind of, with coconut milk and mucus from the okra kind of giving it that creamier texture. 

Just really trying to show the ways that food in this region doesn't have to be presented in one specific way, and if we tap into our imagination, the possibilities are endless. So working with urban farms here, working with Black-owned farms here. Using those ingredients in those unique ways, it kind of shows the imagination and the range, but also we're not tied to this specific image. If I were to say okra to someone, they would, as I mentioned before, instantly go to fried okra or oh, some type of soul-food-style dish.

But to me, it feels we know that it's so much more than that. It's not just this, reduced to this one thing. I feel oftentimes how Black foodways are reduced in this country. It's very much like, ‘Oh, fried chicken, soul food. Period. That's it.’ There's no complexity there, when the reality of it is so complex. 

That was the thing that drew me to food, the ability to use that as a storytelling medium. And I was loving doing that with something that was very, I guess, childlike and somewhat pedestrian, like a popsicle. It shows that you can use very regular everyday ingredients, but kind of have your own fun, unique twist on it. And the story, the end product itself, can tell the story of how you arrived there. 

So I guess that's how it came to be for me. Just kind of finding a way to show the diversity and range of Black food items, or foods that are popular in Black food culture, and then wanting to expand on that by telling the story.