On a cold, sunny day in December, I made my way from upper Manhattan to downtown Brooklyn. I was on a hunt for Christmas gifts with meaning. I pulled my empty bag toward my coat as I walked toward a store where I’d find readable, edible goods to fill it with: BEM Books & More, one of the only Black-owned, food-centric bookstores in the United States.
Sisters Gabrielle and Danielle Davenport created and have operated this delicious dreamworld in Brooklyn since 2021. The bookstore stocks cookbooks by Black chefs as well as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books that are related to food and written by Black writers. BEM’s selection, which is available online, always includes new releases like Ghetto Gastro’s Black Power Kitchen and Tanya Holland’s California Soul, which Gabrielle, a native Californian, says she “can’t stop gazing at.”
“We knew there were food bookstores in the world and lots of wonderful Black-owned bookstores that we love, but we weren't aware of a Black food bookstore,” says Danielle. “It felt like a really exciting, super tiny niche for us to dig into and to really think about all of the ways that food works in our storytelling and cultures.”
Based in Brooklyn, the sisters host pop-ups across New York City—including a holiday pop-up at BRIC, an arts center in Brooklyn, this season—and maintain a large online selection of their products. They’re hopeful for an eventual permanent storefront, but in the meantime, they’re focused on the mission that fuels the bookstore: bringing joy to readers around the world through Black stories about the many wonders of food and cooking.
I sat down with the duo to learn what fuels the sisters, how they curate their selection, and what they’re reading now.
Why food?
Gabrielle: We both spent a lot of time in the kitchen with our mom [while] growing up, especially when I was younger. I was on dessert duty, and mom and sister would handle dinner—it was a whole, whole thing. As we grew up and moved into our own houses, so many of our conversations were around what we were eating, or cooking, or what groceries we were buying and from where. We figured, if we like talking about this as much as we do, surely there are other folks too, who want to be in these conversations with us and with each other and with the authors and chefs who are actually creating all this work that we’re so excited about.
We had been talking about wanting to open a business together well before the pandemic. At one point, we thought we could open a home goods store. And there’s a hint of that in BEM and what we're doing now. We talked about opening a general interest bookstore. But it was exciting to land on something we actually haven’t seen yet. We haven’t heard about something like this, and we thought it would be a fun creative challenge to figure it out.
What specifically inspired you?
Gabrielle: Loving literature as much as I do, and having studied it and so forth, I think about teachers. Our grandmother—the “Bernice” of the BEM initials—was a fourth grade teacher, my best friend is a teacher. To me, there’s a big part of the BEM vision that feels like a testament to all of this teaching and wisdom that we’ve had the opportunity to soak up throughout our lifetime. The work of Ntozake Shange comes to mind because part of my introduction to thinking about food and other literature in a really rigorous way was her book, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, which I read in college. It really introduced me to food and cooking as part of a larger creative process. Reading her account of how foods fit into her life as a mother, as an artist, et cetera really sort of ignited something that was really exciting to me.
Danielle: Obviously, we love to cook. I’ve worked in restaurants and spent many years waiting tables and just sort of immersing myself in the New York restaurant world in that way. Not only do we love food, but it really does touch everything. Whether we’re talking about nutrition, or health, or climate, or labor, or politics or relationships. Food can be the lens that actually allows us to touch everything. [We’re] interested in Black cultures across the diaspora, and [exploring] all of the things that we share, and that also make all of our different cultures and subcultures and communities specific.
What’s on the store’s shelves?
Danielle: You get such a wide range of work by Black authors. If you’re more of a solo cook or diner, you’ve got Cooking Solo by Klancy Miller; if you're into fermentation, you’ve got the Noma Guide to Fermentation, coauthored by David Zilber. If you’re interested in cooking vegan, you’ve got Afro-Vegan by Bryant Terry or Sweet Potato Soul by Jenné Claiborne. Even within this zone of celebrating Black authors’ work, we’re able to touch so much and so many cuisines and cross-cultural collaborations and different kinds of techniques. There really is so much in store when you’re celebrating Black authors.
One thing that’s really exciting to me is the fact that we do bring in fiction and poetry and kids books, and we’re looking for the ways that food shows up beyond cookbooks and culinary studies. For us, it’s really exciting to think: What does it mean when you buy your Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking, and then you pick up a novel called Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi alongside it? What opens up when you are looking at the way that food is working in other kinds of stories? I think that’s an aspect of our curation, and that to me is really exciting and I think may be a bit rare among food bookstores.
Gabrielle: A poetry selection is not what you think of first when you think of a food bookstore, but for Black poets across generations, we have a really sort of lovely collection that I think surprises and delights people regularly. We have Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea by Nikki Giovanni; we have whole collections of Lucille Clifton, Langston Hughes, and Ntozake Shange. Each of these volumes has at least one—and in all of those cases more than one—piece that deals with food pretty directly.
How do you all curate the selection at BEM?
Gabrielle: When we first opened, we sat down and started listing books that we knew we wanted to carry, that we knew would be really central to the work that we’re doing. We were so pleasantly surprised that quite quickly, there were like 225 books on this list. From there, it continued to blossom. It is important to us that we make sure that these books sort of tell the story in relationship to each other, so it’s really important that we have books from all across the diaspora across every genre as much as possible. Because of logistical things that we need to sort out with our distributor, we haven’t yet been able to carry books in other languages. But that’s a big piece that we’re excited to expand into.
Beyond that we want to make sure that we can become a living archive of people who are doing rigorous, interesting work related to Black food. And that we’re also crowdsourcing it. People come in all the time. They’re like, “Do you know this person?” Or, “Have you heard of this book?” It’s a fun process to be in conversation with our community in that way and learn about new books and new authors that we didn't know about before, to see if we can add them [to the store].
What are some of the challenges you’ve dealt with while running the bookstore?
Danielle: At this stage of things, where we’re doing lots of short-time pop-ups, or different collaborations in different places, by the time we’ve learned a thing, the next situation is just a little bit different. It’s exciting, because it is still definitely leading to lots of learning. And it’s inspiring some great agility in our process. But it is challenging to have just enough time to get our sea legs with every aspect of a thing before we're on to the next version. That’s one of the things we really look forward to about settling into our permanent home and really just kind of being able to build it out in more consistent ways.
What are some examples of really great food writing from 2022?
Danielle: Black Folk Could Fly, a collection of Randall Kenan’s work, contains some of my favorite food writing this year. The way he evokes tastes and textures speaks to my stomach, but it’s how he ties food to people and places and moments—and uses it to ask real questions about the world around us—that really makes it stand out for me. I’ve also loved Bryan Washington’s food writing this year. He wrote about biscuits as care back in the summer in a story that’s stayed with me, and in his novel, Memorial, which came out in 2020, food feels like it’s part of the architecture of the story in a way that’s pretty delicious [for] a reader.
What are you reading right now?
Gabrielle: I’ve been reading [The Shadow King] by Maaza Mengiste, which is a story about the Italian occupation in Ethiopia. I’ve also been reading Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown, which I love. Those are the two that have been at my bedside table for the longest. Until we opened, I was never a person who would read multiple books at the same time, and it’s been really lovely to be reading a bunch of stuff at the same time, almost always now.
Danielle: I’ve been reading a little bit of The Whiskey of Our Discontent. It’s a book of essays on Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry and of course, a title like that—thinking about how we curate—a title like that is always gonna catch our eye.