About Sacred Table

Sacred Table began in California with an open door and a table. Kerline would leave work at a Mission District nonprofit, shop for ingredients nearby, take BART back to the East Bay and cook. Four or five nights a week, people came. There was no charge, no guest list and no obligation. Some arrived as strangers and left as people who would return.

After a layoff, what had been a way of gathering became a livelihood. The table grew into curated dining experiences, pop-ups and catering. Years later in Johannesburg, Sacred Table found another form through Lang De Moun Mon (LDMM), where food lived alongside performance, visual art and a creative team experimenting with what a restaurant could be.

Today, Sacred Table carries that history into food, performance, land, travel, film, photography, writing and gathering. The forms have changed and will keep changing.

Food is still where we begin. The table is wherever we make it.

The “table” now carries a much larger meaning. It can be in Oakland, Johannesburg, Lesotho, on a trail, around a fire, or inside a film.

What We Embody:
The way we do one thing,
is the way we do all things.

Spirituality

We understand making, feeding and gathering as sacred practices. Spirit lives in the ingredients, the land, our bodies, our ancestors, our imaginations and what becomes possible when we come together.

Food Integrity

We honor food from source to table. We work as closely as possible to the land, season and people who grow, harvest and prepare what feeds us, choosing ingredients with care and wasting as little as we can.

Economic Security/Abundance

We practice from the belief that there is enough. Food, knowledge, creativity, pleasure and resources can circulate. We build experiences that invite people to encounter abundance as something shared and made tangible.

Collaboration/Partnership

Sacred Table is inherently collective. Artists, cooks, growers, guides, communities and collaborators shape what we make. Different knowledge enters the room, and the work becomes something none of us could have made alone.

Service/Altruism

Sacred Table began by opening a door and feeding whoever arrived. That spirit remains. Feeding people is an act of care, and hospitality is one way we practice responsibility to one another.

Learning/Wisdom

Everyone arrives carrying knowledge. We create spaces where people can teach, question, exchange, experiment and leave carrying something they did not arrive with.

Communion

We make tables wherever we are. A table can form around food, on a trail, in a gallery, across land, through a story or inside a performance. What matters is what becomes possible when we gather.

Creativity

Imagination is a practice. We reach collectively into the imagination space and give form to what we find there through food, art, land, movement, story and gathering.

Vision: We live in the Future-Present™

We believe the future is an imagination space we can access now. We reach into it collectively, gather what we find there, and breathe life into those ideas in the present. Sacred Table is a practice of making those possibilities tangible through food, art, land, story, movement and gathering. We create as though the worlds we imagine are already within reach, because they are.