For Ariel Reyes Antuan, food has always carried meaning beyond the plate.
He remembers the meals his grandmother used to make when he was a child growing up in Cuba — flavours and scents that stayed with him long after he left home.
It wasn’t until years later that he began to understand just how deeply those memories were rooted. They were imprints guiding him back to himself, a quiet thread connecting him to his home, his ancestors, and their knowledge.
That thread eventually led him and his wife, Jess Barton, to found lyé Creative, a grassroots movement focused on restoring food as a relationship — not a commodity.
His life’s work is to explore what the world would be like if food were more than just a product on a grocery shelf or a price tag on a menu. What if food were an opportunity to practice reverence? A bond that ties us to the land, to our ancestors, and to each other.
“Our focus is to awaken that ancestral memory and how to bring food from one’s lineage to these lands,” says Ariel. “It’s about learning and then applying these teachings from the people who came before us.”
Inclusion through culturally relevant crops
Central to lyé’s mission is uplifting the familial knowledge of communities that are often left out of dominant food narratives. For example, “in Canada, there is a newfound focus on the Indigenous people of these lands, and there are also many people from all over the world now living in Canada with different ancestral and Indigenous knowledge that we can learn from,” Ariel explains.
According to the 2024 Vital Signs survey, only 43% of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) feel that they have equal opportunities and are treated as equals.
In response to this inequity and the broad sense of division experienced by these communities, lyé launched a project called Culturally Relevant Crops. They consulted diverse cultural groups to identify which crops community members wanted to see growing on local farms in Victoria.
In one of lyé’s recent reports, community members shared powerful memories that reconnect them to their cultural roots. One participant recalled gathering lemongrass with their grandmother in Mexico to make tea. Another participant described how seasonal eating deepens their bond with the land.
The project helps BIPOC communities reconnect to the foods their predecessors grew and ate, making space for healing, sovereignty, and belonging. The Culturally Relevant Crops initiative has been supported through the Victoria Foundation’s Collaboration Grant Stream with a grant of $30,000.
Victoria’s 2024 Vital Signs survey also showed that 66% of respondents think there should be more opportunities to support cross-cultural education and awareness.
Just over a third believe it’s important to focus on providing opportunities that promote social, cultural, and racial equality. These are concerns that lyé strives to address.
Community programming that transforms the paradigm
In Ariel’s view, Western society’s dependence on money as the primary currency has fractured our relationship with the land. He believes that our long-term survival depends on redefining that relationship, and seeing the earth not as a commodity, but as a living part of a wider ecosystem.
“Our modern lifestyle doesn’t fit with restoration, and that is how and why alternatives are colliding with the current way that we are living. We are awakening but we are also learning how to dance in two different worlds,” he adds.
As lyé responds to this shifting paradigm, it offers immersive community-based programming that brings people back into a relationship with food and land. Their workshops include cooking traditional ancestral foods, seed saving, gardening and urban farm tours, ecological land stewardship, and teachings in ethnocultural nutrition.
lyé is more than a collective. It’s a call to remember. An enterprise that invites people back to the table to eat, to listen, to share stories, pass down wisdom, and rekindle the sacred relationship between food, culture, and community.
To learn more about lyé Creative, visit iyeherstories.com.