Reflections
We all have that dish, the one that carries memory, identity, or a moment in time. What’s been on your plate over the years?
Love, memory, joy…sometimes the most powerful ingredients are the ones you don’t measure out.
Savoring Our Stories
In April 2025, I had the joy of joining Rabbi Heather Miller and the Keeping It Sacred community for a special discussion titled Savoring Our Stories: How Jewish Identity Shapes Our Plates and Paths. Together, we explored how food can be both a mirror and a map revealing where we come from, how we’ve evolved, and what it means to belong.
Through stories of sushi, Southern comfort food, and reimagined Jewish classics, we reflected on how spiritual practice, memory, and identity show up at the table. Below, you’ll find highlights based on our conversation and reflection prompts to spark your own food memories.
What was your relationship to food growing up? How did sushi come into the picture?
I grew up in Mississippi on comforting, familiar food: fried chicken, meat-and-threes, biscuits. But even then, I was curious about flavors beyond what I knew. Babysitting gave me access to other people’s cookbooks, and I'd sit up late flipping through them, imagining the tastes I couldn’t try. In a way, I trained my palate through imagination.
Years later, I was running a restaurant and a client asked if I could cater a sushi party. I said yes even though I’d never made sushi before, and hadn’t even tasted it. So I did what I’d always done: I turned to books, studied photos, absorbed the methods, and followed my instincts. The party was a success. And something clicked. I kept making sushi, kept exploring and realized, this was the work I wanted to do.
What was it like walking onto the Morimoto’s Sushi Master set—not just as a nontraditional sushi chef, but as someone who moved between so many culinary and cultural spaces?
On camera, you’ll see me beaming, thrilled to meet Chef Morimoto and take part in this once-in-a-lifetime experience. But what the cameras didn’t catch was everything I was carrying.
I had recently closed my kosher deli after a health crisis and deep burnout during the pandemic. At that point, I wasn’t even sure if food was still part of my future. I was physically exhausted and emotionally raw. I kept asking myself: Do I still belong in this world?
Then came the question from the producers:
What does Marisa look like on a plate?
Here I was a Black woman from Mississippi in a sushi competition, a trained sushi chef who had kept kosher, a former kosher deli owner in the South…. It felt like too much for one plate. And I realized that for so long, I had compartmentalized pieces of myself into “more digestible pieces” over the years.
But this time, I chose to show up with all of it.
Did any moment during filming Morimoto’s Sushi Master catch you off guard or stir something unexpected in you?
Oh, absolutely. I knew at some point I’d have to use non-kosher ingredients, so I figured I’d just rip the band-aid off and pick shrimp myself. But the second I touched it, it felt like every camera in the studio zoomed in on me for a dramatic close-up. They didn’t… but it sure felt that way.
I’d told myself I was fine with it. But my hands hesitated. My heart did too. I was cooking shrimp. I was eating shrimp. And even though it tasted incredible (Sorry, Rabbi!), something in me stirred that I hadn’t expected. From that point on, I avoided pork and shellfish. But this show wasn’t about staying in a comfort zone, and eventually I didn’t have that option anymore.
Has your relationship to Jewish food evolved, especially as you’ve shifted toward plant-based creativity?
As someone who had the chutzpah to cater sushi before I’d ever even tasted it, I’ve never been shy about making Jewish food my own.
Just like with Japanese cuisine, where I find tradition not in strict mimicry, but in honoring the spirit and intention behind how food is prepared, Jewish food has never been just about recipes for me. It’s about values. It’s about how I show up in the kitchen and how I care for the people I’m feeding.
The value that drives everything I do is hachnasat orchim—welcoming guests, creating space, making others feel nourished and seen. That’s where my food lives now. And as I’ve moved into more plant-forward cooking, I see it as a way to welcome even more people to that table.
That’s what makes it Jewish for me.
