Tagan Engel

Tagan 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.