ABOUT claudia
Dr. Claudia Serrato (P’urhépecha, Zacateca/Huasteca) is a Xicana culinary anthropologist, chef, educator, public scholar, and media host whose work centers on ancestral taste memory—the understanding that taste carries knowledge, culture, identity, and belonging across generations.
Based in Los Angeles, Dr. Serrato works at the intersection of Indigenous and Mesoamerican foodways, ancestral taste memory, womb ecology, edible memory, and cultural revitalization. Through scholarship, culinary practice, storytelling, and public engagement, she examines how food functions as a living archive of ancestral knowledge and how flavors, ingredients, recipes, and food traditions connect people to memory, community, and place.
Holding a Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Washington, Dr. Serrato has dedicated her career to documenting, teaching, and regenerating Indigenous and Mesoamerican food knowledge. Her work bridges academia and community practice, bringing together research, culinary arts, education, and cultural programming to illuminate the powerful relationships between food, memory, identity, and survival.
Raised in East Los Angeles on the foods, flavors, and teachings of her elders, Dr. Serrato learned early that food is never simply nourishment. Food teaches. Food remembers. Food carries stories. It transmits values, relationships, histories, and ways of understanding the world. This understanding became the foundation of her life’s work and continues to guide her research, teaching, and culinary practice today.
As an educator, Dr. Serrato teaches in the fields of Chicana/o/x Studies, Ethnic Studies, Indigenous foodways, and culinary anthropology. Her classrooms invite students to think critically about culture, race, colonialism, identity, and knowledge while recognizing food as an important site of memory, meaning, and cultural continuity. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Chicana/o/x Studies at Rio Hondo College and Lecturer in Chicana and Chicano Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
As a chef and cultural practitioner, Dr. Serrato works to regenerate Indigenous and Mesoamerican foodways through cooking classes, workshops, demonstrations, culinary experiences, public talks, and community gatherings. She has collaborated with Indigenous chefs, farmers, artists, educators, birth workers, and cultural practitioners throughout Turtle Island, helping communities reconnect with ancestral ingredients, traditional knowledge, and culturally grounded approaches to nourishment and wellbeing.
Her work also extends into womb ecology and Indigenous first foods, examining how relationships to food begin before birth and continue across generations. Through this lens, she explores how taste, memory, and cultural knowledge are carried through families and communities, shaping identity long before words are spoken.
Dr. Serrato is the host of Taste Memory, an original series produced in partnership with Indigenous House. Through conversation, storytelling, cultural teachings, culinary practice, and shared meals, the series examines the connections between food, memory, identity, culture, and ancestral knowledge. The project reflects her commitment to making Indigenous and Mesoamerican knowledge accessible to broader audiences while honoring the communities and traditions from which that knowledge emerges.
Over the past two decades, Dr. Serrato has shared her work through universities, museums, cultural institutions, community organizations, media platforms, and public humanities initiatives across the United States. Her scholarship, culinary expertise, and public engagement have been featured by The New York Times, New York Times Cooking, NPR’s Good Food, Telemundo, ABC News and Hulu, Tastemade, Eater, Atmos Magazine, and numerous podcasts, radio programs, and media platforms. She has also collaborated with and presented through institutions including the Smithsonian Institution, New York University, the Getty, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and La Plaza de Cultura y Artes.
At the heart of Dr. Serrato’s work is a belief that ancestral knowledge is not lost. It remains present in the foods we prepare, the seeds we steward, the flavors we remember, and the traditions we carry forward. Her work invites people to reconsider food not simply as sustenance, but as a source of knowledge, relationship, ceremony, and cultural continuity.
Through research, teaching, cooking, storytelling, and media, Dr. Serrato continues to activate, remember, and regenerate Indigenous and Mesoamerican taste memories for future generations.
