Meet Tiana Rainford
Where you’ll spot Tiana Rainford depends on her food cravings, which change from week to week — she might be in Chinatown for vegan dumplings or in Williamsburg for pizza. But she’ll always come home to East New York, where she grew up and where she now works at a community farm, growing organic produce and helping feed and educate her neighbors. Tiana welcomed us into her apartment to talk about food and family, the ancient art of phone calls with friends, and being a reformed tomboy.
on her morning routine
I get up at 6:00 am, and then I’ll call my friends around 7:00 am. Most days I call two of my best friends — we met in middle school and we became really close in high school. One lives down the block and the other moved to Maryland. We know if we’re gonna catch each other, it has to be in the morning. We probably sound ancient, calling each other on the phone, but I prefer phone conversations to texting. So I’ll call them and then get ready for the day.
I don’t eat breakfast. I want to get better at that. There’s that joke that New York doesn’t eat breakfast. I’ve heard different things — some people say you can intermittently fast, which makes breakfast obsolete, some people say to wait an hour or two after waking up to start eating. Most days I intermittently fast and don’t eat until 11:00 am. I’ll have tea. I’m an herbal tea person. I’ll make my own tea blends. Hibiscus, green tea, ginger. I love lemongrass, or my family would say, fever grass — that’s what I grew up calling lemongrass. It’s what a lot of people in Jamaica call it, and it wasn’t until I was older that I was like, “What is lemongrass and why does it look like fever grass?” And my mom was like, “It’s the same thing, that’s why.” Then I get to work really early, around 8:30 am or 9:00 am, because I drop my niece off at school first.
on growing up in East New York
I grew up with my mom and my sister, and sometimes other family too at different points — a cousin or my grandma would stay with us, which was always nice. My mom has 10 siblings, so I have a really big family on my mom's side. We're the only ones who live in Brooklyn, but most of the family is just a hop skip away in Queens, and I grew up going to their homes.
I like Brooklyn. It's my favorite thing. I really enjoyed growing up in East New York. The neighborhood gets a bad rap. There's more to the story that some people don't get to experience because they may be scared by what they’ve heard in the media and then never spend a lot of time here.
There's a lack of resources in the neighborhood, which is directly related to crime. So I think when we talk about crime in certain neighborhoods, we have to think about whether the neighborhood has been set up to succeed. And if it hasn't, then you can't really judge everyone who has been living there and going to school there. You don’t know how they’re working to make the neighborhood better. East New York is very community-oriented. Most people in the community know or are familiar with one another. If you don't know someone, your friend knows somebody who knows them. It’s very tight-knit. And the community is really invested in helping one another. Instead of having someone else come and help us, there’s a sense that we're gonna do it ourselves. That also comes from a distrust of outsiders. The community has tried asking people from outside, or asking politicians, to help and has seen that they’re not really getting the help they need. But I know I can ask a neighbor and they’ll help me.
““When I tell people I’m from East New York, they’re like, ‘Oh, you live there? I wouldn’t go there.’ But I love it. It’s more residential. When you live in New York City, people think you live in Times Square. it’s really nice to come back to East New York. It’s a community.””
on food and family
Growing up, I didn't like a lot of foods and my mom was always being creative about what she would feed me. She’s a trained chef from Jamaica, so she was really conscious of what we ate. She really emphasized the importance of eating at home, making our own meals, and eating fresh foods. Her father was a farmer too. So food has been really important to us forever.
Since I grew up in a Jamaican household, a lot of the food is meat-heavy. When I got to college, I had a little more autonomy over what I ate and took more responsibility for cooking my own meals. In my second year in college, I transferred to Brooklyn College from Baruch and I started to study nutrition, so I was learning more about food production and diet and health. I decided I wanted to transition to a plant-based diet. I got teased a lot by my family. I would have to make my own meals, separate from everybody else. But it opened my family up to plant-based foods. My mom is one of those chefs who just lights up if you give her a challenge. So it was nice to see how she would think like, Okay, I have to make something for Tiana. And I have to make sure it tastes good. And how can I make it relevant to other stuff that I'm making so everyone can eat it? And my sister is big on eating meat. Her daughter — my niece — is turning out to be really into vegetables. She likes them more than meat which is funny, because my sister likes meat more than vegetables. So now she has to figure out how to make vegetables for her daughter.
on deciding to study nutrition
Food runs so deep in my family. I always knew that I wanted to have some type of career or hobby dealing with food, but I didn't really know what that would be. I went to school thinking I’d do communications, or maybe science since I really like science. And my sister, who is twelve years older than me, is a nurse practitioner, so I learned a little bit about that. I toyed a lot with what I wanted to do. At the time, my mom was going through some health scares that were related to diet. And I thought that a lot of stuff that her doctors were telling her didn’t sound right. My mom eats food that is culturally relevant to her and her medical advisors didn’t understand that, and they made her afraid to eat the things she normally eats. Like, it may not be a norm for you to eat yam every morning or every day, but that has been a part of her diet and her culture for a long time. It didn't feel right for someone to tell her she couldn’t eat that anymore. I became really interested in how we can use food as medicine and how we can heal ourselves using the cultural foods that we have. More than half of the world's plant medicines are in Jamaica, so I wanted to learn more about how can we use food as medicinal because it's always been a part of my family’s practice. Growing up, it was always like, you drink this tea if you're sick.
““June through November is market season — that’s when East New York Farms has a farmers’ market. Things are growing, so I’m able to shop at the market or pick from some of the things that we have left over, which is always really great. I look forward to it. And sometimes I preserve things that we grow for the offseason. I have some frozen Scotch bonnets from the last market season that I’m still using.””
on the biology, psychology, and politics of nutrition
Going into Food and Nutrition Studies, I thought there would be more emphasis on science. I'm a science and math lover. I thought I was going to learn about all these compounds in food and that kind of thing. And there was a lot of science involved. But that’s not necessarily all of it. The approach to health in the nutrition field is a lot more about the psychology around people's relationship to food. You can't really go into biology without learning about psychology. They’re hand in hand, you need both of them in order to give a proper diagnosis for someone or a proper intervention. Because before I can even get to a point where I as a nutritionist can recommend things to you, I have to know more about you: how do you see food? How is your relationship with food? Is there a cultural significance? Is that important to you? For instance, sometimes people learn I’m plant-based, and they’ll say they want to do that too. But it's not as simple as getting up one day and just deciding to do it. You have to consider how it would affect your health, life, and even your personal connection to your cultural foods.
That was something that was surprising to me — nutrition was so people-forward. It was about learning about people and their relationships to food. But it’s also about how food intersects with politics, culture, and medicine. In my program, we took one course where we learned about different food cultures. But it was only a semester, and it was still from a Western point of view. Only a very small percentage of new nutritionists are Black and Brown people, and that lack of perspective shapes the way food and nutrition are talked about. It’s also about who has access to food and who doesn’t. That has to inform our interventions. And then in Western nutrition, the way we do interventions is often based on the Western diet. But America is a melting pot — so it's not just people who are following the Western diet. I do feel like a lot of food and nutrition work neglects people with a migrant background who may not be following the Western diet, even though they live in the West. We have to think about what people from different backgrounds need.
on finding her first job
After college, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to focus on within the nutrition field. I knew I wanted to work in my community but I didn't know what exactly I wanted to do and who I wanted to work with. I was working with Harvest Homes Farmers’ Market as a community chef — I’d give little cooking demos and some samples in a market and give nutritional education along with the cooking. But that was really part-time. I ended up going to what I thought was the first day of the farmers’ market, but it was actually just prep. It was not a farmers’ market. And one of the staff members at East New York Farms at the time stopped me and was like, “Oh, are you looking for a job?” I was like, “Yeah, maybe.” I left a week later with a job. It has really been great. I started off as a Farmers’ Market Manager and I’ve had several different roles over the years. In 2023 I became the Project Director.
““At the end of the day, trash is there, and no one’s picking it up. East New York Farms is connected to a daycare and we have youth that come to the farm, so we need to make sure that things are clean. But our staff shouldn’t have to be picking up things that could potentially be hazardous, and it takes away from the time we need to do our jobs.””
on working at a community farm
East New York Farms is an urban farming project. We’re working towards food equity through sustainable practices. We have our farmers’ market, we do food and supply distributions, and we have a youth internship program.
We distribute gardening supplies in the community — we do seed distribution, then we distribute soil, and then we distribute some compost as the season progresses. We also help find people power for gardening projects. East New York actually has the highest concentration of community gardens in the city. We have 57 community gardens.
And then in the growing season — summer through fall — we distribute food. We distribute food twice a week at two different sites. On Saturday, we distribute at Pink Houses Community Farm, which is at Pink Houses at NYCHA. And then we have our Wednesday distribution in collaboration with New Hope Church, which is just diagonal from our ENY Youth Farm. They're open to the community, and we don't ask for identifying information. And then the Saturday farmers’ market is open to the general public. The produce is pretty affordable — the most expensive thing is probably a squash which is probably $1 a pound. Fresh produce can be hard to come by in East New York. All the produce is organic and locally grown, and all the proceeds go back to us and to the other growers. We grow culturally relevant crops, like hot peppers, bitter melon, and Malabar spinach, and we grow garlic, kale, spinach, Swiss chard, and collard greens.
A lot of our regulars are really well-informed, but some people aren’t as educated — they might see the produce and think, this has holes in it, so we explain that we don’t use pesticides. That’s where there’s a need for education. People see things that aren’t perfect, and we have to explain that it's going to be imperfect because we are not using mass production methods.
on the toll trash takes
We’ve experienced a lot of trash dumping around our ENY Youth Farm, and I’ve experienced that a lot where I live too. It's not necessarily people from the neighborhood dumping their trash everywhere, it's people who drive to the neighborhood to dump things and then leave. People will dump trash in places that the Department of Sanitation hasn’t designated for trash, so they won’t pick it up.
What we learned at East New York Farms is that the more you register these things with 311, the more responsive the city starts to become. In the last couple of months, they've been a little bit more responsive because we've been bombarding 311 — but that takes away from our work too, because almost every morning, we have to spend time telling 311 that someone dumped something. So it's one more thing to do. Part of the problem is that there's a lack of public trash cans. This is a residential neighborhood — people live here and spend time outside. We should have public trash cans as any other neighborhood would.
on what she’s watching
I’ve been watching a lot of old Real Housewives of Atlanta lately since I finished a lot of the shows I was watching. I was watching Invincible on Amazon Prime. It’s a cartoon version of The Boys, but it’s more gory and intense. I watched Food Wars, which is an anime. And Mr. and Mrs. Smith — the new one — was so good. I loved the movie so watching the show was different, but I still enjoyed it.
on personal style
My mom was my example of personal style and wearing whatever makes you feel happy and confident. She always took us thrifting and to the flea market. And I have horror stories of being in Macy's for hours. She's my style inspiration, but she's really girly and I've always been more tomboyish, so we clash about that. I would say now I'm a reformed tomboy. I like comfy clothes — everything is about how comfortable it is or how useful it is. For work, I wear a lot of cargos. I'm really big on wearing things that you like and that make me feel good, and not necessarily what’s popular at the time.
I do a mix of thrifting, online shopping, and regular shopping. I’ll just go to different boutiques. I thrift all over, but I especially like closet sales and small, more local thrift spots. And SSENSE is my main online store. I made a pact with myself not to shop this year, so I haven’t been shopping much lately.
I don’t really look for particular brands. But when I was growing up, LeSportSac was really popular in the early 2000s, and my sister always wore one. And my mom was like, “You can't get one. It's not for you.” Because I was in elementary school. So she was like, “I'm not getting you expensive bags.” And so now, the other day, I was like, “Let me go to a LeSportSac and buy her bag.” So I bought one.
on her beauty routine
I’ll wash my face using different cleansers based on how dirty I think my face is. So either I'll use a moisturizing cleanser if I don't think my face is that dirty, or if I've been wearing makeup, or if I didn't wash my face the day before, I’ll use a deeper cleaner. I use the Snail Essence from COSRX all the time and I use SPF all the time. At night, I'll use shea butter.
I wash my hair once a week or every other week, and what I do depends on how my hair is feeling. If it's a little drier, I'll use a deep conditioner; if it’s moisturized, I’ll do a more basic routine. When it just needs to be refreshed, I’ll use a co-wash. When I was younger, I would do a lot more. My hair routine would take me a whole day, and my mom would be like, “This is ridiculous.” But now it's more like half the day.
I'm really big on relaxing. I've been going to the Korean spa in Flushing once a month.
tiana’s favorite spots in new york city
I've been to Hemp Lab a lot. I have a friend who works there and I just like the vibes there.
I like to eat out a lot. I like LuAnne’s Wild Ginger, halal spots for falafel with rice, Williamsburg Pizza — they have a really good vegan slice. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Chinatown lately because there’s great vegan food there. I like Buddha Bodai.
For thrifting, I like the Downtown Brooklyn Goodwill, L Train Vintage, Beacon's Closet.
I love to spend time in the parks in East New York. I like Linden Park — growing up, we called it Gersh Park. That was the main park in the neighborhood, and then they built Shirley Chisholm a couple years ago. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time there and in Breukelen Park, which I also spent a lot of time in during elementary school. And when I was in college, I spent a lot of time going to Highland Park, on the other side of the neighborhood.
interview and images by clémence polès, edited by meghan racklin