Luminescent green jelly eggs plucked from a candle stand. Encased within is a wisteria flower floating in the centre. It looks like an alien baby and slithers into my mouth like it belongs there. Oil slick jelly shots worming out of a hand directly down into open, eager mouths. Crushing cakes in palms as a dancefloor opening ritual; the warmth of hands melting cheap icing, tongues lapping it up. A half-eaten sweaty hot dog inside a sauna at the edge of a day party. Spicy, crunchy chaat overlooking a heaving warehouse. A hot cup of chai in the smoking area as my energy starts to lag. Communal fire-cooked meals laying the groundwork for the weekend ahead; enough food to sustain a multi-day outdoor dance. Two croissants pressed tenderly into my right and left hand on the way out of the club. I clutch them in my moist palms for they are anchors for the long road home. Fishing my humble banana out of my bag to hand over to security, who were barring me from bringing it onto the dancefloor. Security disposes of it, and I enter the club only to find I can't buy one inside either - an experience that is - and I use the term precisely - bananas! The lingering and persistent (but as of yet unrequited) desire for A Really Good Coffee the moment my feet hit the floor. 

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Moments where rave and food converge are few and far between. Despite their rarity, they've lodged in my body's memory as a small sensorial archive reminding me that I am not the only one to have been hit by hunger at 4am on the dancefloor, only to find that the only options for sustenance are liquid or powder. Of course, hunger on a dancefloor is often chemically suspended, but a body always comes down eventually, and there are many ways to be in the club. 

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A viral social media video did the rounds a while back which highlighted how people of colour expect food at a party while white people often don't. A telling thing about whose practices of care and hospitality shape our typical party environments. When nightlife loses its footing in community and care, it stops being designed around what a body needs to feel good and starts being designed around what a bar can sell. You can't fill that gap with an overpriced vodka soda (fight me). 

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The practices of culinary care that shape our dancefloors also shape our domestic spheres. I think of my own mother, who is a brilliant cook who doesn't particularly enjoy cooking, and who minimises the time she spends in the kitchen because for many women, it was a cage, a container, an obligation. She tells me about my grandmother, a working professional, who would return home from a full day's work and, without so much as removing her shoes, move directly to the kitchen to begin her second shift: feeding the family. Feminist food writer Monja Simon describes something similar in her own context: her mother rejecting fermentation, which is a part of her heritage and family practice, not out of disinterest but because she associated it with the exhausting care labour that had kept previous generations of women isolated in domestic space. The freedom and experimentation I found in food (or sometimes the lack of) through partying is a leap I could only have made because my mother first separated womanhood from this kind of obligation. When I danced back through the door she cracked open for me, it was through the playful arena of the rave, where things can be upended, inverted and distorted. But of course, none of these tensions around food are new.

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On the "pleasures, difficulties and ambivalences of cooking as a feminist" and the politics of feminist food writing, researcher Eleanor Careless draws on Dena Attar's introduction to Turning the Tables, a feminist cookbook published in 1987. In it, Attar makes the point that no cookbook is simply a collection of recipes. Almost all are, to some degree, propaganda for the ideology of a woman's place in the kitchen. Technology like microwaves and dishwashers changed how cooking was done, but not who did it. As more women entered the workforce, unpaid domestic labour wasn't reduced; it was compressed, or for wealthier women, outsourced. The relationship between feminism and food shifted accordingly and became less a question of liberation from the kitchen, more a sticky negotiation with it.

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This negotiation was rarely comfortable. Spare Rib, the longstanding British feminist publication, originally ran a food column called 'Munchy Business', pitched at women who didn't want to spend much time cooking. Careless notes how it eventually disappeared from the magazine entirely, outlived by a DIY column on home repairs and car mechanics, perhaps a symptom of the difficulty reconciling feminism with food. On the other hand, The Haringey Black Women's Newsletter ran recipes for West Indian ducana alongside articles on the oppression of Black women, suggesting that food could be a site of identity and solidarity as much as constraint. The discomfort perhaps was never with food itself, but with the terms on which feminism was willing to engage with it.

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Food has also been a tool in feminist protest. Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was a 19-year long protest camp established in 1981 outside a Royal Air Force base in Berkshire. One of the reasons women voted to make the camp women-only was that they were unwilling to be pushed into the traditional role of cooking and cleaning for the men. One protester described the presence of men at the camp: “they get drunk, they are violent and they won’t do the washing up.” Food was stored in prams for a quick getaway if the police arrived. Alongside developing more egalitarian cooking arrangements, Greenham Common women also danced. On New Year's Day 1983, 44 women propped ladders against the fence, climbed into the base, and danced on the missile silos. As one of their protest songs put it: 'we danced on the silos so they sent the police / who arrested us women for breach of the peace.' What the nuclear family had isolated and privatised, the camp collectivised.

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Around the same time, that impulse to take what had confined women and turn it into something shared was alive on the dancefloor. Women who had marched, camped and cooked at Greenham also made their way to spaces like those run by Sistermatic, a Black lesbian sound system that ran regular parties from 9pm to 9am at the South London Women's Centre in Brixton. They had a pioneering crèche and food offer in their parties, lifting practices confined to the domestic into the communal. At a time when women risked losing custody of their children simply for being queer, providing the crèche and the food were also acts of collective care.

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In other corners of women's nightlife, an unease with food transmuted into play. Chain Reaction, a lesbian S&M night, beginning in 1987, included cabaret, live sex, leather, chains, and yes, at least one instance where a group of dykes wrestled in spaghetti hoops. Here, food took on the form of spectacle, mess, and distortion of gendered norms. Chain Reaction was trans-inclusive, sex-positive, and by all accounts gloriously playful. It was also raided by feminists in balaclavas armed with crowbars and sticks, who smashed glasses and hit partygoers in protest at what they believed mimicked the very patriarchal violence they were escaping. Food play in club culture - like the fissures in feminist movements - is queer women’s history.

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That lineage of food play is still thriving. The queer cake sit at the Old Nun's Head, where performers gather to press and smear and ruin and laugh, is gleefully wasteful, a direct inversion of the domestic emphasis on preservation and service, but also, unmistakably, a gathering around food nonetheless. What was once the medium of confinement becomes, on a dancefloor, a backroom, a pub, the medium of their mess. Nightlife offers the permission to waste it, smear it, ruin it - something the kitchen didn’t. To take the substance of gendered labour and make it gloriously useless. To play with food in a party space is to desecrate a domestic duty.

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At my own collectively run party ~\\ lilith //~, we incorporate food. One summer party took the form of jelly wrestling. In another, a brilliant group called Holobiont cooked up a storm: a swamp-themed edible landscape, within which partygoers shovelled mud (crumbled Oreos) and trees (wilted asparagus) into their mouths, feeding each other, cake crushed between warm palms. The edible installation was literally in a domestic kitchen because we were throwing a house party, and that communal messy eating, inverted the domesticity that once marked the space. 

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But food in party spaces doesn't only emerge through play, but also care. At Riposte, the music stops thirty minutes early so that the party crew can press croissants into people's hands as a soft landing, a gentle return to the world after a long night. A nourishing transition from the party space to the road home. At a friend's party fundraiser, there was no guest list, only a shopping list: friends arrived carrying tins and dry goods, collecting almost 90 kilos of food for a local food bank by the end of the night. And once, at a squat rave on a sea tower only accessible at low tide, the organisers cooked a full feast before the music even started. Because if you're going to throw a rave in a building half-reclaimed by the sea, why not feast while you're at it. I loved the ambition of it all: carrying speaker stacks and red bell peppers across the melting ocean floor, hustling to escape the incoming tide, for nothing more, nothing less than a dance. 

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Nightlife writing has a selective memory. Often we remember the music, the lights, the moments of collective transcendence, while overlooking the infrastructure of care that made those moments possible. Care work is unglamorous, and unglamorous work goes unrecorded. But it was always there. It is always here. In my forays into food, frivolity and nightlife, and eventually into writing Club Commons, my first book about queer nightlife, I found a whole tradition of women and queer people already there, feeding people in the dark. Food and dance kept surfacing even in the stories that had ostensibly nothing to do with clubs. The club has always been a place for people to play, and to author their own stories. Those stories, it turns out, are full of people feeding each other.

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Put it in my mouth, please.

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Anjali‬‭ Prashar-Savoie‬‭ is‬‭ a‬‭ writer,‬‭ DJ‬‭ and‬‭ party‬‭ organiser‬‭.‬‬‭ She released her first book Club Commons: Moving Bodies to Grow Movements in Queer Nightlife and Beyond in 2026 with Velocity Press.‬ You can read more of her writing at dreamscroll.substack.com