On a humid Thursday evening in early August, Lutheran pastor Emily Scott welcomed 22 attendees to the first meeting of her new church in the room of a local bookstore. Scott led the congregation in a short song and introduced herself by mentioning her preferred pronouns: she, her, hers.

The pioneer congregants followed suit. Specifying pronouns is an unusual thing to see at church, but learning the basic nuances of each individual’s gender identity set the progressive tone for Scott’s nascent LGBTQ-focused church in Baltimore.

“There’s an awareness within the mainstream Protestant world that many churches have been places of exclusion, and that’s something we really need to break out of,” says Scott, a 37-year-old graduate of Yale Divinity School. “I wanted to first make my identity as a queer woman very clear.”

She explains that inclusion, informality, and community were top priorities for her church’s dynamic, and she wants its development to be a community effort. She even delayed choosing a name until she and a more established congregation can collaborate to do so. For now, she calls it “Imagine a Church Baltimore.”

This is not her first foray into church establishment. She is a church planter, according to her website, meaning she creates new spiritual communities from scratch. For the past decade, Scott worked as the primary pastor at St. Lydia’s Dinner Church in Brooklyn, New York, the first church she founded.

Like Imagine a Church Baltimore, St. Lydia’s was dedicated to social justice and paid specific attention to the needs of LGBTQ Christians that she said typically go unaddressed within mainstream ministries. Scott said she loved working at St. Lydia’s but, as it grew into a more stable institution and a national news story (covered by The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal), she wanted to bring her expertise and enthusiasm to a new community, and she quickly settled on Baltimore.

“Before I moved, I’d been really drawn to Baltimore for a number of years,” says Scott. “Baltimore is filled with people who are invested in the city. I’m really moved by all the community-based activism and grassroots movements.”

Scott’s first service integrated classic elements of church—a sermon, a biblical recitation, and a few more songs—with practices that are seldom found inside typical places of worship, including the discussion of pronouns and queer identities. Imagine a Church Baltimore also has no brick-and-mortar space, so in lieu an official location, Scott borrowed a room from Red Canoe in Lauraville.

This past March, Scott left New York and purposely settled near Lauraville, a neighborhood she said has a notably large LGBTQ community. In order to spread the word about her church, Scott set up shop at Baltimore Pride in June with a photo booth where people could pose against a halo under the words “The Divine Shines in You.” She also regularly runs a booth at the Hamilton-Lauraville farmers’ market on Tuesday evenings, and is active on Imagine a Church Baltimore’s Facebook page, which currently has 136 followers.

“Part of my job is to listen to the community and build something in response to what I hear, so I’m trying to engage with the people here in any way that I can,” says Scott, who credits a large portion of her decision to move here to Bishop Bill Gohl of the Delaware-Maryland Synod. “He is incredibly affirming of LGBTQ folks. It’s rare to find this level of support for a church like mine.”

Scott said Gohl has also encouraged her to use her church for social justice as well as religious refuge for marginalized people, and she said several potential congregants have suggested social justice work within church services as well. Following the first meeting, Scott asked the attendees what sort of church they are imagining: “a place of acceptance,” “a place to welcome new faces and celebrate new friends,” “a place that sounds like shared laughter,” and “music—not only hymns” were some ideas.

The second meeting, tentatively set for September, will focus on names in both a symbolic, identity-focused sense as well as a tangible discussion of what to call the church going forward. However, Scott stresses that Imagine a Church Baltimore is not just a stand-in title or a concise phrase for its congregants to hashtag on social media. It’s a call to action for Baltimoreans who have felt rejected or ostracized by organized Christianity before.

“I’m dreaming about a place that feels free and reflects the broad diversity of Baltimore,” says Scott. “I want to create a place that doesn’t feel defined by respectability but instead by the big, wild, messy way that God made us. Ultimately, it’s the people that come to this ministry who are going to create what it becomes.”

Renee Brooks Catacalos knows a thing or two about local food. She served as the deputy director of Future Harvest-Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture, published and wrote for Edible Chesapeake magazine from 2006 to 2009, and has eaten almost exclusively locally for over a decade.

Her first book, The Chesapeake Table: Your Guide to Eating Local, will be released in October and outlines why she’s been hooked on the local food movement from the start, which foods you can only find in the Chesapeake region, and how you can benefit from the fruits—literally and figuratively—of local farmers’ labors.

You’ve been working with local food for years now. Where did you start?
My interest in local food started as a consumer, actually. I’d lived abroad in my twenties in places where eating local is pretty common, but when I moved back to DC in 2001, farmers markets and “eat local” campaigns were really starting to take off. I was a little skeptical at first, but I found that shopping and eating locally was a lot of fun. It was so interesting to find out where the food comes from and talk to the suppliers about how they grow and care for it all, and it all tasted incredible, like noticeably more flavorful than food from a lot of grocery stores.

In addition to taste, what are some other benefits of eating locally?
There are so many! The health and environmental benefits are some of the most important for me, because when you buy locally grown food, especially meat, you’re choosing not to support industrial farms that use a lot of toxic chemicals. There are even socioeconomic benefits. Right now, eating locally is a little more expensive, but in order to allow a broader range of people access to healthier, seasonal, well-raised food, we have to buy it so that it’s economically viable for the farmers to continue making it and eventually lower the prices.

Giving up the convenience of going to the nearest supermarket and eating largely locally grown food can seem daunting.
Yeah, lots of people are definitely daunted by it beforehand, mostly because they feel like they don’t have the time, the know-how, or the money to do it. But it’s really like any other food-specific commitment, like being a vegetarian, or a vegan, or kosher, or gluten-free, except this one doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Even if you just get to the farmers’ market once a month to buy a box of peaches or if you know the grocery store stocks local honey, that’s a great place to start.

What does The Chesapeake Table bring to the conversation about local food?
One of my biggest frustrations with other books on local food is that so many of them take a really broad, national viewpoint, and that’s hard to translate into a real game plan for consumers. That’s why I wanted to take this regional focus and be much more specific about the Chesapeake region, because there is so much the Chesapeake offers us in terms of local food. My book also comes from a consumer perspective, which is sort of rare. I don’t work directly in the industry anymore, and it’s hard to balance a job that is not related to food with trying to shop and cook and support the local food system, but it gave me a unique perspective.

This book isn’t everything you’ll ever need to know about local food, but I thought it could give people a good starting point with information about the local food system and the Chesapeake region, and hopefully it’ll prime them to keep learning on their own.

So why is the Chesapeake such a great place to eat locally?
I don’t think people appreciate how special the Chesapeake Bay actually is. Because it’s a mix of salt and fresh water, it creates such a fertile place where so many kinds of food can thrive. The seafood, of course, is the sweetest and the biggest because they put on fat during cold winters, and because this climate gets four distinct seasons, we get this extensive range of seasonal produce. Basically, we have anything except tropical foods. You can source almost a complete diet from this region.

What about Baltimore specifically?
Baltimore has a level of infrastructure to support the local food industry that a lot of other cities don’t have yet. In the past decade, the city has started to put money toward funding local farmers, and that’s legitimized that system in both a symbolic and a tangible way. Also, because of its size and diversity, both in the foods that are sold and the people that buy them, the Baltimore Farmers’ Market is one of the best I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot.

You’re from D.C., but do you have favorite places around Baltimore to eat local food?
Well, of course, I love Woodberry Kitchen and Gertrude’s, but farm-to-table doesn’t have to refer to that new American kind of food. Ananda in Howard County is an Indian resturant, and they have their own garden. There’s also a great website called Chesapeake Farm to Table that’s run by of Calvert’s Gift Farm in Sparks, and it lists a bunch of restaurants around Baltimore that source their food straight from that farm.

The term “farm-to-table” is everywhere now. How do you distinguish what’s legitimate?
The farm-to-table claims can get so ridiculous! I’ve seen peach gummy candy—obviously not farm-to-table since it’s entirely chemicals—labeled as “locally sourced.” A good way to know for sure is just to ask. If restaurants are serving local food, they should easily be able to tell you where the ingredients came from.

Unfortunately for Baltimoreans, most crab cakes are not made entirely with local blue crabs, so if you want something that you can know for sure is straight from the bay, buy crabs in the shell, in their whole, full glory. They taste so much fresher, and then you know exactly what you’re eating because you can see it.

Why is now the right time for this book?
Anniversaries are definitely times to reflect, and it had been about 10 years since I’d gotten into local eating when I came up with the idea for The Chesapeake Table. I started doing a lot of research and thinking a lot about what had changed in the decade, especially as I left the industry and began to look at things as a consumer.

I really am committed to the local food system, and I wanted to contribute something to it that would help it grow. I’m not reinventing the wheel. I’m just bringing light to how much work people are doing to bring local food to people’s dinner tables, and I’m trying to show people that even the tiniest things can make a big difference.

If you’re looking for the perfect getaway destination this summer, it might be closer than you think. On July 14 and 15 in Clifton Park, the Baltimore Washington One Carnival, otherwise known as the Baltimore Caribbean Carnival, will bring all the island essentials right to the streets of Charm City: color, costumes, and, perhaps most importantly, cuisine.

With over 25 food vendors to choose from—and thousands of attendees to beat to the front of the lines—finding the best dishes can be difficult. Luckily, we’ve got the inside scoop on the most authentic, can’t-miss fare you can find at this year’s festival.

Jerk chicken
Jerk chicken is one of the most iconic Caribbean dishes you’ll find on the islands or in the States. Originally a Jamaican style of cooking, “jerk” refers to the method of seasoning meat—in this case, chicken—with a dry-rub or a marinade made of allspice, often called pimento in Caribbean culture, and scotch bonnet peppers. (If you’re spice-averse, look out: scotch bonnet peppers, also called Caribbean red peppers, average about 500,000 Scoville heat units. In comparison, jalapeños usually rank at about 8,000.) Jerk chicken is often cooked in wood-burning ovens to give it that rich, smoky flavor that makes this dish an annual go-to at the Caribbean Carnival.

Curried goat
Another Indo-Caribbean favorite is curried goat. Although some people are hesitant to deviate from chicken and beef, goat is one of the popular meats in the world. Due to common religious customs in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean that prohibit the consumption of beef and pork, goat is a typical, delicious alternative. In fact, the protein is such a star on Caribbean dinner tables that a goat-based stew called goat water is the national dish of the island of Montserrat. At the carnival, check out curried goat—a thick, slow-cooked stew that is brightened with flavors from ginger, hot peppers, thyme, garlic, onions, and, of course, curry. What’s more, goat is a low-fat, high-protein meat that won’t weigh you down as you partake in the lively festivities all weekend long.

Fry fish
If there’s one culinary crossover between the Caribbean islands and Baltimore, it’s that seafood is king. Fry fish, or fried fish, is a Caribbean classic. Loughton Sargeant, the executive director of the D.C. Caribbean Carnival Committee, said that fry fish can be found in two forms at the carnival this year: Escovitch style, which involves dry-frying the fish and topping it with a mix of crisp vegetables, and what he calls “stew-style,” in which the fish is fried and then doused in a rich brown stew sauce that’s as hearty as it is traditional.

Oxtail
Originally, oxtail was exactly what it sounds like: the tail of an ox. As the dish has become more popular beyond the Caribbean, however, oxtail can now refer to the tail of any sort of cattle, but the minutia has had no consequence on its unctuous flavor. To the surprise of many oxtail newbies, cattle tails are very meaty and can weigh up to four pounds. In Caribbean cuisine, oxtail is traditionally prepared in a fatty soup or stew, or slow-cooked and served over rice. While you’re at the carnival, the over-rice style might be a bit easier to eat on-the-go, but both are equally delectable.

Pelau
Pelau is to Trinidad and Tobago what crab is to Baltimore: quintessential, widespread, and served with just about everything. Pelau is a rice dish commonly simmered with peas, carrots, hot peppers, meats, and an aromatic blend of seasonings, such as parsley, thyme, ketchup, sugar, and sometimes a touch of barbecue sauce. Pelau is a perfect plate for the Caribbean Carnival: mobile-friendly, packed with flavor, and often served in sharing-size portions.

Roti
Although not usually a full meal on its own, roti is a thin, unleavened flatbread that is everywhere throughout South Asia and the Caribbean islands, particularly Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Guyana, and Suriname. Perhaps roti’s most defining characteristic is its base made from a wheat flour called atta, which is often stone-ground and contains all the nutritious parts of the wheat grain that white flour often filters out. Roti is a perfect pairing with any meat, stew, or veggie dish. Elaine Simon, the president of the Caribbean American Carnival Association of Baltimore, said that several food vendors at this year’s carnival will sell roti as a side for larger entrées.

Pholourie
Pholourie, also spelled phulourie or phoulourie, is the perfect midday festival snack. Hugely popular in Trinidad and Tobago and also a widespread street food in Guyanese and Surinamese cuisines, pholourie consists of spiced, fried chickpea dough balls. Slightly crispy on the outside, warm and satisfying on the inside, these little dough balls are full of flavor. The dough is commonly seasoned with garlic, cumin, pepper, curry, and cilantro before they hop in the deep frier. At the Caribbean Carnival, you can try pholourie with sides such as mango or tamarind chutneys to balance the deep fried snack, or velvety yogurt sauces to taste one of the simplest Caribbean decadences.