Tagan Engel

Tagan Engel is deeply passionate about her work to create equitable cross-sector food systems and to foster racial, economic, and environmental justice, and has spent 25 years doing so. 

She is a chef, entrepreneur, food justice activist, community organizer, artist, educator and journalist. Based in her hometown of New Haven, CT she focuses on uprooting systemic oppression to build transformational system change for people and the natural world. She has expertise in community-driven policy and planning work, sustainable food and supply chains, regenerative agriculture, supporting BIPOC food entrepreneurs, building inclusive organizations, and using story and grassroots organizing for social change. 

She led efforts to pass the first community driven food policy plan for the City of New Haven (which led to establishing a Food System Policy Director position for the City) and founded the Kitchen at CitySeed. 

Tagan currently hosts The Table Underground podcast/website where she records inspiring stories of food and creative social justice and consults on related work. She also produces stories with Seasoned on CT Public Radio. 

She is a Resident Fellow at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment and Experiential Learning Advisor with the Yale Center for Environmental Justice where she advises on community driven liberation practices, regenerative agriculture, and food systems, and racial, economic and social equity. Tagan is a founding Board Member of Soul Fire Farm and a Mentor and Advisory Board Member with CitySeed Incubates. She was a co-creator of the 2020 New Haven Cultural Equity Plan and a 2018 Graustein Memorial Fund Inspiring Equity Story Fellow. 

Tagan is a wife and mother of two teenagers in a family that she loves with abandon. She is an Ashkenazi Jew, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, whose legacy of story and liberation she carries on, and an Iyanifa in the Yoruba orisa tradition.