We were lucky to catch up with Hadassah Patterson recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Hadassah thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

The way I’ve endeavored to live is without wasting energy and opportunities.

Having parents who were older than my peers taught me the value of life. Our lifespans are so short in the stream of time. I understood especially early that I would lose my father first, most likely. And I developed a pragmatic approach to everyday life, listening and understanding who he was to better understand myself.

That’s where I first cut my teeth as a journalist, peppering him with questions about our history and his life experiences. I learned some amazing things about the world – far beyond my years – and he was a great storyteller.

That said, I don’t waste my life on any projects just to spin my wheels. There are times when I work jobs to take care of myself, certainly. And I have consulted on other’s projects for nearly a decade. But, I endeavor to see for what reason people cross paths with me, in a collaborative sense.

The most current meaningful project is my film, Origins: The Culinary Heritage of the Southeast Woodlands, which is fiscally sponsored by Southern Documentary Fund.

I rebranded my chef business, Well Leaf LLC, to center food and multimedia production. And right now, we are filming on various locations, celebrating the origins of our regional foodways – and by extension – Southeastern and American food.

Really, global foodways owe a debt to Indigenous agriculture. It is said that 60-80% of the world’s produce originated with Indigenous farmers. We’re talking with a number of knowledgable sources and taking a practical approach to empowering more accessibility to Indigenous and People of Color food sovereignty.

That’s the point: creating more accessibility. Even in 2023, redlined areas still have measurable differences in longevity to more prosperous communities. I learned this in training for Community Health Work, and it’s a tough pill to swallow that we really haven’t made as much progress as we could have in community health and wellbeing.

We’re going to change that in some critical ways.

Hadassah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a Durham, NC Native – both as someone born here going back several generations – as well as having Indigenous ties to this land. We are especially originated from Eastern North Carolina, but I have found kinship from across the state. So this is my ancestral home in several directions. Our families hailed from across the Carolinas and Virginia primarily. I have actually found Indigenous roots in my DNA from across the entire Western Hemisphere. It’s just more concentrated here in the Southeast U.S. I look forward to advances in geneaological research.

Of course we have tri-racial ancestry across the southeast, with African and European admixtures and several others. As I’ve uncovered more, it has changed my understanding of myself and clarified my identity. I love to see this in young people too. The way their eyes light up as they learn just how connected to the land they are is healing to everyone. I like to say I’m an Indigenous woman with a global mindset. Because we really are all connected.

This outlook has had a huge impact on how I approach interactions with others. I endeavor to find common ground and look to see what we can accomplish together. Nowhere is this more apparent than my food and multimedia work.

I have been actively cooking since the age of 5. Both parents cooked, and a number of our relatives and ancestors were hospitality folks, tailors and wellness professionals. My father worked a number of jobs, with my earliest memories including a global menagerie of animals and plants. He retired from his animal husbandry day job with a university zoology department. My mother was also extremely versatile, though more technically inclined, working in the botany lab of the same building as my father, and later in fiber optics and manufacturing.

They reared us with a strong work ethic and worked in convention-level and community foodservice as well. I cut my teeth running between my father expediting huge pallets of food for tens of thousands to my mother working concession stands. After a front counter cashier job as a teen, I spent worked in bookkeping, customer service and banking operations prior to receiving my culinary and hospitality management degrees.

We certainly learned not to waste time and resources. Every cook, chef or hospitality job I took grew my craft in a different way. So I’ve exchanged a tremendous amount regarding Southern and global food in my experiences. And there is always more! We never stop learning in the technical and creative industries!

I still do private chef and events work – especially with educational or traditional themes. I consult with other hospitality and broad-spectrum businesses on a case basis, as I enjoy seeing people thrive doing what they love, and am good at strategic-level planning. I’m also great at creating multimedia content and introducing new concepts to staff or managers. Innovation is the future. We’d best get used to that, but we still must honor our shared humanity in doing so.

Ultimately, I’m really, really good at getting things done. In that vein, I’m getting cerification as a Community Health Worker for skills to create more capacity, equality, accessibility and address traumas encountered in foodways work. I see that we’re going to need a complex toolbag of social and emotional intelligence to get through this next epoch!

Acting was a sometime thing before, but these last two years I’ve deeply explored these other creative talents, and I absolutely love it. I don’t have any regrets, but I’m not sitting on my laurels about my performance craft either. I just finished a wonderful class at Moonlight Arts and Entertainment and have more growth planned in that direction.

I’ve been honored to work on some great commercial, theater and film projects that aligned, and have met some fabulously talented professionals in the process. I’m excited about opportunities in the way of Deaf/Hard of Hearing culture as well as Indigenous and People of Color characters with unique stories or perspectives. Ask me what works for me, because I’m agile.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

It would be wonderful if non-creatives understand that this is a calling with a life-purpose that the world can benefit from, and it is just as valid as theirs. Everyone’s dreams are valid. I’ve always worked and enjoyed it, but it has taken decades for some people in my closest circles to support my creative-centric work in an emotional way. The hardest days are when the way isn’t clear, and pressures are mounting. .

My being Deaf, there was an often-asserted narrative that I didn’t even “have to work that hard”. I could just ‘go on disability’ and not be so stressed, regardless of what I was purposed for in my life. I appreciated the love and concern, but it was misstated and mishandled for decades. And frankly, it was untrue.

Nevertheless, I cannot understate how toxic and infuriating it was. We have enough people in professional settings with mindsets to ignore or correct without it in our own circles. I have often changed the rooms I was in. Clearly, there are people with circumstances who benefit from federal, state and civic wellness initiatives, and that deserves our full understanding. A society is only as strong as how they care for their most vulnerable.

But if you want to be a part of a creative’s life, be a loving, supportive person. Just believe in them. Empower their unique greatness and find positive ways to support their work actively, not just passively. I only have space and time for can-do people with a positive mindset. Work with us. Communicate. Cheer us on.

This is also true of municipalities, funding and programming. There are marked differences in places which create supportive homes for creative business owners, especially those of color who come from underserved communities. Creative work is still work – entrepreneurship at its core. And the arts and humanities deserve investment.

So those places with mindsets that value diverse self-employed people will truly help us thrive, which will in turn help communities, cities, states and the country itself thrive. The skills to succeed in a creative business take on a different nuance and require a different type of genius, but they are still business activities which support lives, scale to employ others, and foster more vibrant, well-rounded communities and development.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Right now, I am hyper-focused on empowering broader community access to fresh, healthy food and woodlands Indigenous produce with the Indigenous foodways project, Origins: The Culinary Heritage of the Southeast Woodlands. Our mission with filming and sharing is all about food sovereignty. This also takes into account the systemic equalities necessary for people to experience home and land ownership and grow their own food.

Along those lines, it’s important from an origin perspective to look at the big picture, and we want to align with distribution channels and collaborative organizations which also see the big picture. We are all connected, and our actions and views create an impact for everyone, not just ourselves or personal idealogies.

We’re open to working with a number of entitites in tribal, municipal, state, federal and non-government organizations or educational realms who have shared missions to enrich wellness and create better equality in access and agency for our shared communities.

I am also very much booking holiday and educational events with Native American Heritage month coming up in November. I do not celebrate “Thanksgiving” but am available for harvest-centric observances and other special occasions, including private chef clients, anniversaries and birthdays, commercial contracts for foodservice, marketing or multimedia content work, and farm-to-table events. We have some fundraisers in the works for our project as well.

We’re also sponsor-friendly, but have criteria specs for what agricultural or non-food products we would align with for the show filming. People can contact us on our website contact page or message on social media.

Keep an eye out on social medias for the social series of fun, foodbased videos and content!
We’re talking with networks for the broadcast-specific show content.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wellleafchef.square.site/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/originsculinaryseus/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/originsculinaryseus

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hadassah-patterson-32b96b16/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcH1uAVxyU9_eUXjm1rabrQ
• Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm13819775/

Image Credits
Cowgirl hat and dress photos by Photographer Victoria Nuplez, Other photos courtesy of Chef Hadassah Patterson.