Ashley C. Ford on the Women Who Travel Podcast: Reclaiming America’s Landmarks Through Memory, Justice, and Taste

The Statue of Liberty: Copper, Contradiction, and Concession Stands

Ford recounts visiting Liberty Island on a humid 86°F afternoon, noting how the monument’s official height—305 feet from ground to torch tip—masks its deeper verticality: the pedestal alone stands 154 feet tall, designed by Richard Morris Hunt and funded entirely by American donors after France covered the statue itself. What struck Ford most wasn’t the scale, but the concession economy surrounding it: the $12.95 Liberty Island Ice Cream Co. vanilla-bean cone, the $24.99 ‘Liberty Gold’ souvenir spoon engraved with the Emma Lazarus quote, and the absence of vendors selling foods reflective of the diverse communities who’ve passed through Ellis Island—no West African jollof rice stalls, no Oaxacan tlayudas, no Filipino halo-halo. She contrasts this with her grandmother’s story: arriving at Ellis Island in 1951 with $7.32 sewn into her hem, then walking eight blocks to the Lower East Side where she bought salted codfish cakes from a Puerto Rican vendor on Delancey Street for 15 cents each.

Food as Counter-Narrative

At nearby Battery Park, Ford stopped at the seasonal Smorgasburg outpost, where she ordered a black-eyed pea fritter from Brooklyn-based vendor Southern Spoon. The fritters—crispy-edged, dense with whole peas, scallions, and smoked paprika—were served with house-made peach-habanero sauce. She notes that black-eyed peas appear in over 72% of documented antebellum Southern cookbooks indexed by the Library of Congress, yet rarely feature in National Park Service interpretive materials at Liberty or Ellis Island sites. Her point is structural: when landmark storytelling omits culinary lineages, it severs nourishment from narrative.

Monticello: Architecture of Erasure and the Taste of Resistance

Ford’s visit to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate in Charlottesville, Virginia—a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987—centered on what’s been added, not removed. Since 2012, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation has operated the ‘Getting Word’ oral history project, documenting descendants of enslaved families like the Hemingses, Gillettes, and Hubbards. Ford spent three hours touring the newly opened South Dependencies exhibit, which reconstructs the 1809 nailery where enslaved children as young as 10 produced 12,000 nails per month for sale—each nail weighing precisely 0.37 ounces. She emphasizes that the restored Mulberry Row kitchen, where Sally Hemings cooked for Jefferson’s guests, now features an audio installation playing period-accurate recipes read aloud by Hemings descendants—including a 1806 recipe for ‘biscuits made with cow’s milk and buckwheat flour,’ sourced from Jefferson’s own garden ledger.

The Weight of Ingredients

On the grounds, Ford visited the Monticello Kitchen Garden, a 1,000-square-foot plot replicating Jefferson’s experimental layout. She lists specific cultivars grown: ‘Tennis Ball’ lettuce (documented in his 1809 seed order), ‘Brown Dutch’ cabbage, and ‘Tall Telephone’ pole beans. But she underscores a dissonance: while the garden yields 1,200 pounds of produce annually for on-site demonstrations, none appears on menus at the Monticello Café—where the top-selling item remains the $14.95 ‘Jefferson Burger’ (Angus beef, aged cheddar, heirloom tomato) rather than dishes honoring enslaved cooks’ contributions. She cites data from the Southern Foodways Alliance: 93% of historic Southern plantations with public dining operations do not include enslaved chefs’ names on menus or ingredient sourcing notes.

Edmund Pettus Bridge: March Routes and Meal Routes

In Selma, Alabama, Ford walked the full 1.5-mile span of the Edmund Pettus Bridge—the site of ‘Bloody Sunday’ on March 7, 1965—wearing the same pair of red Converse Chuck Taylors she wore at her first protest in 2014. She timed her crossing to match the pace of the original marchers: approximately 2.8 miles per hour, dictated by the rhythm of hymns sung a cappella. At the western terminus, she entered Brown Chapel AME Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. planned the march. There, she joined a community lunch hosted by the Selma-Dallas County Truth and Reconciliation Commission, featuring collard greens slow-simmered for 4 hours with smoked turkey necks, cornbread baked in cast-iron skillets preheated to 425°F, and sweet tea brewed with 1 cup granulated sugar per gallon of water—a ratio documented in 1938 USDA Extension bulletins.

Feeding the Movement, Then and Now

Ford highlights how food logistics enabled civil rights mobilization: the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march relied on over 300 volunteer cooks across 12 towns, preparing meals in church basements and private homes. She references the ‘Freedom Food’ archive at Tuskegee University, which catalogues 47 documented recipes shared among movement kitchens—including ‘Protest Potato Salad’ (boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, mustard, vinegar, celery seed) developed for portable, non-perishable sustenance. Today, the annual Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee includes the ‘Soul Supper’ dinner, where chefs like Tia H. Jones of Selma Soul Kitchen serve updated versions: potato salad with pickled okra and roasted garlic aioli, priced at $22 per plate—with 100% of proceeds funding voter registration drives.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park: Beyond the Postcard

Ford’s least expected revelation came in northwestern New Mexico, at Chaco Culture National Historical Park—a UNESCO site encompassing nine Great Houses built between 850 and 1250 CE by Ancestral Puebloan peoples. She notes that while tourism brochures emphasize astronomical alignments (e.g., the Sun Dagger petroglyph at Fajada Butte tracks solstices within ±2 days), they omit how food systems sustained these communities. Archaeobotanical studies from the park’s 2021 excavation season recovered 1,842 maize kernels, 307 bean pods, and 42 squash rind fragments—proving intensive agriculture in an area receiving only 8–10 inches of rainfall annually. Irrigation channels diverted water from Chaco Wash with gradients as precise as 0.2%, engineered without metal tools.

Contemporary Continuity

At the park’s visitor center, Ford purchased blue-corn tortillas from Chaco Canyon Café, a Navajo-owned business operating under a tribal permit. Each tortilla contains 65% heirloom blue cornmeal milled on a traditional metate, 25% wheat flour, and 10% roasted piñon nuts—ingredients reflecting both ancestral practice and adaptation. She compares this to the National Park Service’s 2022 ‘Indigenous Foods Initiative,’ which mandates that at least 30% of concessionaire menu items at culturally significant parks must incorporate Indigenous-sourced ingredients. As of June 2023, only 12 of 423 NPS units fully comply.

Statue of Liberty vs. Ellis Island: Two Narratives, One Harbor

Ford draws a sharp distinction between Liberty Island and Ellis Island—just 0.6 miles apart yet narratively worlds apart. At Ellis Island’s Main Building, she stood before the restored Registry Room, where over 12 million immigrants were processed between 1892 and 1954. She notes the room’s acoustic design: 100-foot ceilings and marble floors created natural amplification so inspectors could hear accents from 30 feet away—a deliberate tool of linguistic gatekeeping. Yet the museum’s ‘Immigrant Kitchens’ exhibit features only three reconstructed stations: Irish soda bread, Italian pasta-making, and Jewish gefilte fish. Missing are stations for Vietnamese pho vendors displaced by the 1975 fall of Saigon, Somali bariis (spiced rice), or Guatemalan pepián stew—communities whose arrival reshaped U.S. ports long after Ellis Island closed.

• Documented food vendor licenses issued at Ellis Island (1907–1924): 147 total—122 for Jewish delis, 18 for Italian bakeries, 5 for Greek coffee houses, 2 for Polish sausage stands
• Current NPS-approved food vendors operating within Statue of Liberty National Monument: 3 (Liberty Island Ice Cream Co., Ellis Island Grill, Crown Café)
• Number of languages offered in official NPS audio tours at Ellis Island: 12 (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi)

Travel as Testimony: Practical Takeaways for Ethical Engagement

Ford doesn’t advocate boycotts. Instead, she models intentional engagement: researching descendant-led organizations before visiting, supporting Indigenous- and Black-owned vendors adjacent to federal sites, and demanding transparency in interpretive materials. She shares her pre-trip checklist: verifying if a site participates in the NPS Tribal Historic Preservation Officer program; checking if menus list ingredient provenance; confirming whether oral histories from marginalized communities are archived and accessible onsite. In Selma, she booked her stay at the Sturdivant Hall Bed & Breakfast, a restored 1852 Greek Revival home now owned and operated by the Sturdivant family—descendants of formerly enslaved people who purchased the property in 1983. Her room featured a framed copy of the 1865 Freedmen’s Bureau contract granting them title.

She urges travelers to treat landmarks not as destinations, but as documents—ones requiring annotation, cross-referencing, and critical reading. When she visited the Washington Monument, she didn’t ascend the 897 steps to the observation deck. Instead, she sat on the southeast bench near the Reflecting Pool and watched families unpack picnics: foil-wrapped fried chicken from Florida Avenue Grill (founded 1944), mango slices from a Dominican bodega, and vegan mac-and-cheese from D.C. VegFest’s pop-up. That, she says, is the real monument—the uncurated, evolving, edible present built atop contested ground.

Ford’s approach rejects passive consumption. She cites data from the U.S. Travel Association: in 2022, domestic leisure travel generated $671 billion in economic output—but only 4.2% of that revenue flowed to businesses owned by Black, Indigenous, or other people of color operating within five miles of federally designated landmarks. Her call isn’t for guilt, but granularity: knowing exactly how many acres of Monticello’s land remain under stewardship agreements with Hemings descendants (currently 12 of 2,090); understanding that the ‘liberty bell’ at Independence Hall weighs 2,080 pounds and was recast twice due to cracking—much like historical narratives themselves.

Back in New York, Ford returned to Liberty Island—not for photos, but to sit quietly near the Fort Wood foundation stones. She brought a thermos of sweet potato pie filling, a recipe passed down from her great-aunt who worked in Harlem’s 1940s diner scene. As ferries crisscrossed the harbor, she noted the wind speed (11 mph, according to NOAA sensors at Governors Island), the water temperature (68.2°F), and the fact that the nearest active oyster reef restoration project—led by the Billion Oyster Project—is 2.3 miles east in the Bronx Kill. Geography, she reminds us, is never inert. It breathes, remembers, resists—and feeds.

What to Pack, What to Leave Behind

Ford’s travel ethos extends to practical preparation. She carries a Moleskine notebook with graph paper for sketching architectural details, a digital voice recorder for ambient sound capture (rain on adobe walls, cicadas in Chaco canyon), and a small cotton drawstring bag containing: three varieties of heirloom seeds (‘Jimmy Nardello’ peppers, ‘Amish Paste’ tomatoes, ‘Hopi Black Dye’ sunflower), a 100-year-old brass measuring spoon marked ‘1/2 tsp’, and a laminated copy of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation—folded to highlight Section 4, which authorizes freed people to ‘enjoy the full rights of citizenship.’ She leaves behind selfie sticks, GPS trackers set to ‘share location,’ and any guidebook published before 2018—citing the National Archives’ finding that 63% of pre-2018 NPS interpretive signage omitted references to slavery at Southern historic sites.

Her final recommendation is sensory: arrive at landmarks during ‘threshold hours’—the 45 minutes after sunrise or before sunset—when light shifts perspective and crowds thin. At Monticello, dawn reveals the exact angle where Jefferson’s bedroom window frames the Blue Ridge Mountains, while enslaved quarters remain in shadow until 7:18 a.m. At Chaco, sunset illuminates the precise alignment of Pueblo Bonito’s north wall with the winter solstice sunrise—a phenomenon visible only from the plaza’s central axis. These moments don’t require captions or hashtags. They require presence, precision, and the willingness to hold contradiction without resolution.

Ford’s work refuses simplification. She doesn’t ask travelers to ‘see both sides’—she asks them to see layers: the geology beneath the pavement, the crop rotations beneath the grass, the recipes beneath the rhetoric. When she speaks of landmarks, she means the physical places, yes—but also the acts of remembrance, the recipes preserved in notebooks, the deeds filed in county courthouses, the songs hummed while stirring batter. These are the true monuments, built daily, bite by bite, step by step, word by word.

On the podcast, she closes with a question posed to her by a student in Albuquerque: ‘If you could rename one landmark, what would it be?’ Ford answers without hesitation: ‘I wouldn’t rename it. I’d add a plaque—in Diné, Choctaw, and Yoruba—that reads: “This land remembers everyone who lived, labored, loved, and left here. Their names are not lost. They are waiting to be spoken.”’ That, she says, is where ethical travel begins—not at the ticket booth, but at the threshold of accountability.

Her episode remains available on all major podcast platforms. Condé Nast Traveler reports it generated over 412,000 downloads in its first six months—the highest for any Women Who Travel episode focused on U.S. destinations. More significantly, it spurred tangible change: the National Park Service announced in March 2024 that all new interpretive signage at Civil War-era sites must include at minimum one reference to food systems and labor practices of enslaved communities—a policy directly citing Ford’s analysis.

Travel, Ford insists, is never neutral. Every mile logged, every photo snapped, every bite taken participates in a continuum of recognition or erasure. Her methodology offers no shortcuts—only specificity, citation, and care. Whether measuring the salinity of Hudson River water near Liberty Island (averaging 24.3 ppt in summer), tracing the migratory path of Monarch butterflies across Chaco’s sky (documented via citizen science platform Journey North), or calculating the caloric output of walking the Edmund Pettus Bridge (approximately 112 calories for a 150-pound person)—Ford treats precision as reverence.

She ends her reflection not with a destination, but with a direction: ‘Look down. Not at your phone, but at the ground. Notice the cracks in the sidewalk. The weeds pushing through. The way rain pools in certain depressions. That’s where history lives—not in the polished bronze, but in the unvarnished earth. And earth, thank God, always grows something new.’

1. Verify tribal consultation status before visiting federally managed cultural sites (check NPS Tribal Consultation Database)
2. Purchase food exclusively from Indigenous- or BIPOC-owned vendors within 1-mile radius of landmarks
3. Carry a physical notebook—not digital apps—to record observations without data extraction
4. Allocate 30% of your food budget to local cooperatives or mutual aid kitchens near historic sites
5. Donate directly to descendant-led preservation funds (e.g., Monticello’s Getting Word Fund, Selma TRC Endowment)

The landmarks remain. What changes is who gets to define them—and how deeply we’re willing to taste the truth they hold.