Queerborough Speaker Series: Serving it Hot - Queer Stories from the Kitchen with Vijay Saravanamuthu

Event Description

Join community organizer and culinary storyteller Vijay Saravanamuthu for an evening of shared cooking, conversation, and connection. In this intimate workshop, participants will come together to prepare and enjoy a meal, exploring how food becomes a living archive of memory, migration, and desire.

As we chop, simmer, and serve, we’ll reflect on queer relationships to food, land, and kinship—asking how taste, scent, and ritual can carry our stories across generations. Together, we’ll reimagine the kitchen as a creative, communal space where nourishment is both political and personal, where recipes become acts of care, and where queerness finds its flavour.

No prior cooking experience is needed—just curiosity, appetite, and openness to sharing stories around the table. Halal, Vegan and Meat options available.  

Facilitator Bio

Vijay Saravanamuthu (he/him/his) is a multi-talented community organizer with a passion for holistic wellness and the sensory art of food. A queer Tamil man living in Scarborough, he has been deeply engaged in equity-seeking work with racialized communities for over 20 years. Vijay works in community health in Toronto’s non-profit sector, focusing on capacity building, social determinants of health, and dismantling systemic barriers to equity.

Currently pursuing undergraduate studies in English and Health Policy at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Vijay brings creative, interdisciplinary approaches to exploring how place, space, and queerness intersect in everyday life. His work often bridges art, storytelling, and care—reimagining wellness not only through health systems but through food, memory, and shared experience.

Vijay’s current explorations center on culinary archiving as a form of queer world-making: recovering ancestral recipes, experimenting with Tamil and diasporic ingredients, and using communal cooking as a way to build belonging and preserve intergenerational knowledge. He sees the kitchen as a living archive—where history, identity, and pleasure meet.

An artist and aspiring health researcher, Vijay thrives in the sunshine, loves tending to his plants, and believes that nourishment—in all its forms—is an act of resistance and love.