The Table Underground
is an audio and visual platform
to uplift inspiring stories
of Issues and people who are often marginalized
with a focus on food, Race, Radical Love,
& creative social justice.

podcast | writing | recipes | consulting

TAGAN ENGEL
Producer | Host

Tagan is the founder of The Table Underground radio show, podcast and website. She has over 30 years experience working in food + land justice as well as racial and economic justice as a chef, grower, coalition builder, policy maker, food business owner and mentor, consultant, and community builder. The main threads through her life and work are a passionate love of all things food and land related and a deep connection with people and their stories as a source for justice and transformational change. The Table Underground is a place to make visible and uplift this love of food and land, community, story, anti-racism and healing justice work. Tagan is a wife and mother of two in a family that she loves with abandon. She is an Ashkenazi Jew, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and also an initiate in Ifa in the Yoruba Orisa tradition of which her husband is also a Babalawo (traditional priest). She is from New Haven, CT and has lived in NYC & Boston and traveled and cooked on many continents around the world.

In addition to her involvement in local grassroots community building and cultural equity work, Tagan currently leads practice based work through the Regenerative Agriculture and Just Food Systems Lab at the Yale School of the Environment and serves as a Resident Fellow with the Yale Center for Business and the Environment where she advises on regenerative food systems, racial equity & liberation work in practice, social entrepreneurship, and community directed work. She is a founding Board Member of Soul Fire Farm, and deeply supports their work of uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system. Tagan was a member of the Co-Creation team that developed the 2022 Cultural Equity Plan for the City of New Haven, and was a 2018 Inspiring Equity Fellow with the Graustein Memorial Fund. She also worked as the Community Food Systems Coordinator at CitySeed for nearly a decade responding to community needs for undoing food apartheid, improving school food, local procurement, urban farming, cooking education, and much more. Tagan also led organizing work on the New Haven Food Policy Council where she supported multiple community directed food justice initatives including the creation and passage of the first New Haven Food Action Plan and establishment of the Food System Policy Director position for the City of New Haven. Tagan served on the advisory team to establish the ConnCAT Culinary Arts Academy and as a mentor for social entrepreneurs with Collab, CitySeed, and the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale. She is also an advisor for Linke Fligl, a queer Jewish farm and cultural organizing project.

To contact Tagan about consulting work email: tagan . engel @ gmail.com

The Table Underground Podcast and Radio Show
aires on the first Monday of the month from 6-7pm on WPKN 89.5fm in Bridgeport, CT and is available on all podcasting platforms. It formerly aired on WNHH community radio 103.5 fm in New Haven, CT, USA.
The podcast launched in late 2016, aired bi-weekly until 2020, and now produced monthly. Tagan also worked as a producer on WNPR, CT Public Radio’s show SEASONED, a number of her stories are posted on the podcast page of this site, but air on that show’s own podcast stream. The theme song for The Table Underground episodes is Still Shining by The Passion HiFi - We are so grateful for this open-source music! Gratitude to The Arts Council of Greater New Haven for their non-profit fiscal sponsorship!