La Piña is a newsletter covering food history, culture, and politics.
From Emmy Award-winning documentarian and food historian Von Diaz, La Piña gets personal about food, exploring the people, ingredients, and systems that shape our cuisine.
The stories and images found here stem from Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking (Chronicle Books 2023), a culinary journey through the recipes, cooking techniques, and personal lives of tropical islanders across the planet.
Island communities have much to teach us, given shared experiences of isolation, colonization, and environmental vulnerability that demonstrate remarkable survival strategies and profound respect for the land.
But La Piña expands beyond these island landscapes. Global food systems impact all of us, creating complex dependencies between nations that have been upended by a global pandemic. Warming temperatures are causing droughts and fires in some places, torrential rains and floods in others, with storms growing increasingly violent. Wars, too, are like storms, and ongoing political crises in Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, and beyond shape our reality.
See food differently
When you subscribe to La Piña, you will be a part of a community of people curious about how food shapes society.
While the bulk of our content remains free, please consider a monthly subscription so our contributors can be paid fairly for their time and expertise. A subscription costs $7 a month/ $67 for the year. La Piña also contributes a percentage of all subscriber payments to climate change initiatives through Stripe, which donates 100% of its revenue to carbon removal projects, less third-party fees.
La Piña subscribers will have access to:
Articles about the culture, history, cuisine, and climate vulnerabilities of places such as American Samoa, Curaçao, Guam, Hawaii, Madagascar, Poland, Puerto Rico, Seychelles, Ukraine, Vanuatu, and corresponding diaspora communities.
Interviews with chefs, climate activists, farmers, scientists, and other thought leaders on food production, processing, distribution, and consumption.
Original photography; soulful portraits, iconic imagery, and breathtaking landscapes from Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking and other reporting.
Coming soon, updates on La Piña Productions, LLC., a burgeoning media venture specializing in audio, editorial, and documentary storytelling.
To learn more about Von’s work, visit her website at www.vondiaz.com. For updates on her stories, recipes, and travels, follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
Meet the Team
Von Diaz is an Emmy Award-winning documentarian, radio producer, and author. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Atlanta, GA, she has explored issues surrounding social justice, immigration, racism, food, culture, and identity. Von’s prolific decade-long career as a multimedia journalist spans book publishing, audio storytelling, and film. She is the author of two narrative cookbooks: Coconuts & Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South and Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking (Chronicle 2023). She has produced dozens of articles, radio broadcasts, and podcast episodes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Condé Nast Traveler, Food & Wine Magazine, The Splendid Table, and beyond. In addition, she has contributed recipes and essays to 10 anthologies and cookbooks, including Feed the Resistance (Chronicle Books, 2017), Women on Food (Abrams Book, October 2019), Machetes Under Our Beds: An International Anthology of Words and Writing by Daughters of Latin America (Amistad / HarperCollins 2022).
