"Justice would taste like the best pie ever": These activists bake a good fight into every slice

Gather for Good co-founder Steph Chen’s earliest pie memories involve scraping the rich remnants of banana cream pie filling off her father’s plate once he’d had his fill. It was his favorite dessert order whenever the family went out to eat, “so I think banana cream will always be very special to me,” Chen said.

She has that in common with author and filmmaker Beth Howard, who once regaled a TEDx audience with the story of her parents’ half-century love affair beginning with a romantic supper of tuna casserole, Jell-O salad and a homemade banana cream pie. “I am living proof of pie’s seductive powers,” she tells her listeners.

Rose McGee’s years-long relationship with buttery crusts and heavenly aromas began with an impulse one day one Sunday morning to make a sweet potato pie and a blackberry cobbler. This was shortly after she got married, McGee told me, and it was an unusual inclination.

“Cooking wasn't my forte,” she explained. “But I tell people, I think it was the pie that started calling me. I really do believe that. I never would have called it, that’s for sure—but it was calling me. And it called me that Sunday morning, from my bed, and said, ‘Get up. Call your grandmother. Ask her how to make it.’ So that’s what I did.”

A pie can be one thing to one person, and another to someone else, McGee noted. To some, pie means flirtatious cherries, cinnamon-kissed apples or pleasantly puckering lemon awakening the taste buds.

Pies contain multitudes. They can be pizzas or hand pastries; breakfast, lunch, dinner or dessert, graced by flavor profiles that are lively, lush or even a little lusty. For some, a pie’s identity lies in the crust: flaky and tender, pressed lovingly into the pan with fingertips or rolled smooth with butter, oil or lard. But beyond their form, pies are also vessels—for stories and memories, for personal histories that mingle with a shared cultural understanding. That’s what makes them such powerful messengers of healing and unification.

The name of McGee’s organization, Sweet Potato Comfort Pie, needs no explanation.

Neither does Pies for Justice, the Juneteenth event Chen has coordinated with Gather for Good co-founder Sherry Mandell, owner of Tehachapi Grain Project, since 2020.

Between Thursday, June 19, and Sunday, June 22, participating chefs and restaurants throughout Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego are presenting unique pies to be sold or raffled whole or by the slice.

The 2025 baker lineup includes neighborhood favorites, widely acclaimed pastry artisans and celebrity chefs, whose efforts will contribute to the more than $66,000 Pies for Justice has raised for charitable organizations dedicated to caring for the local BIPOC community. This year's event benefits Peace4Kids and ACLU SoCal.

“We always say food people are the best people,” Chen said. “They're small business restaurant owners, farmers, chefs. They were the first ones feeding people when the LA fires hit. They have to worry about keeping the lights on, but they're also constantly donating, constantly giving to these moments in time.”

“I think for us, especially those who are making things and feeding people, there's already a natural calling to want to nourish and to bring people together,” she continued. “And so I think pastry lends itself really nicely to any sort of activism work.”

What does justice taste like? 

What does justice taste like? A range of flavors, according to the varied offerings of Pies of Justice, and each extraordinary. Baking with Ish offers a Ube Tiramisu Icebox Pie as a raffle prize. DTown Pizzeria’s Chef Ryan Ososky has designed a strawberry “Margherita” pizza with burrata, balsamic and basil for sale. There are versions of time-honored classics like key lime and strawberry rhubarb crumble, and a swoon-worthy peaches and cream combo.

Pastry chefs Daphane DeLone of Connie and Ted's and Cathy Asapahu of Ayara Thai are contributing versions of key lime pie, but with differing approaches. DeLone's hews more closely to the classic, which she says is a sort of Rhode Island staple; although the restaurant is located in West Hollywood, their focus is New England-style seafood.

Asapahu, meanwhile, offers miniature makrut lime meringue tarts as an homage to Thai cuisine, which uses the tree's leaves in its seasonings. Her mother also has a large tree growing in her garden, adding a personal note to her recipe's twist.

"Key lime pie is such an American thing," she said. "But, you know, I'm always looking for ways to tie in our heritage and our flavor profiles. So that's like a great liaison between the two cultures." Which, come to think it, is what the American ideal is supposed to be about.

“To me, I think justice would taste very clean and beautiful if we can all just kind of take a moment and just remember why we all exist here together," Chen said.

Howard echoes that sentiment in her website title: The World Needs More Pie. The author of "World Piece: A Pie Baker's Global Quest for Peace, Love, and Understanding" has begun screening her recently completed documentary, “PIEOWA: A Piece of America,” around Iowa, where she lives part-time when she isn’t in Los Angeles.

“The entire thing is about people doing pies for social good,” she said, adding, “It's the kind of stories that help restore your faith in humanity. A lot of people are doing it for fundraisers. Some people just give the pie away to make people feel better, which is also amazing. And pie does make people feel better.”

When it comes to mobilizing neighbors on a massive scale, nothing gets it done quite like pie.

Why is that?

Maybe that’s a silly question. Who doesn’t like pie in some form?

The thing is, there isn’t a succinct answer that entirely covers pie’s allure. Like a good laminated pastry, this delight has spiritual and psychological layers.

"When you think of pie, or homemade pies, it kind of hits a maternal nerve," DeLone reflected. "It's something that your mom or your grandma or any maternal figure in your life probably used to make, or something that people naturally just think that they would make. And so the thought of it provides a certain level of comfort."

Pies are metaphors for so many things, Howard told me on Tuesday.  They represent solace, love, peace and building community.

“Pie is really flexible. You can put anything in a crust,” she said. “And here's my main thing on pie, and a message that I'm actually kind of trying to slide into my film: Pie is an immigrant! It's not American. . . It’s just gone to Egypt and Greece, and then to Europe, and then to England. That's where apple pie came from. And then it made its way to the United States. To me, that is the ultimate metaphor right now that people need to hear.”

If that message is tough for some people to absorb, consider the pie mythologizing that’s been baked into our national story.

“Pie is the American synonym of prosperity and its varying contents the calendar of the changing seasons,” declares the New York Times in an article that ran on May 3, 1902, titled, appropriately enough, “PIE.” Just that, bellowed in capital letters evoking images of very self-assured men sporting handlebar mustaches.

“Pie is the food of the heroic,” it continues. “No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished.”

Cherry pie slice (Svetlana Monyakova / Getty Images)

More than 110 years later, the horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School brought the community of Newtown, Connecticut, to its knees. Twenty children between the ages of six and seven years old as well as six adults were murdered, shocking the country into a collective state of helplessness.

Howard, who used piemaking to heal after the sudden loss of her husband Marcus in 2009, brought together more than 60 volunteers to make 240 pies baked in several home kitchens in New Jersey. They loaded the pies into an RV and drove them to Newtown to offer its families their version of home-baked solace.

As it unfurled, Howard realized that she and the volunteers not only brought pies but created a place for people to gather.

“It was just a beautiful thing to see,” Howard told her TEDx audience. “It wasn't a magic pill, but this little bit of pie was just a momentary distraction, at least, from the pain, and people were still able to smile through their tears.”

 “It takes time to make a pie,” she told me in our recent conversation. “And I think that's part of the beauty of it, that makes it so special: You have to slow down.”

Chen agrees. “This goes across the board, from chefs to even the home bakers,  anyone who is willing to kind of put their phones down right and really just stop the cycle of a lot of terrible things happening,” she said. “Being able to channel their energy into something, to using their hands and to create something — for me, that's the kind of relief baking has always given me.”  

To McGee, whose “baketivism” began in 2015 in response to the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, after police fatally shot 18-year-old Michael Brown, “Pies and the stories of pie are uplifting in a time when we really need uplifting,” she said.

To stop for a moment and sit with a pie, McGee said, "allows people a chance to reflect on something that is soft.”

The stories pies tell

And that reflection is at its most potent when pies are accompanied by storytelling. Sweet Potato Comfort Pie recently sponsored its fifth annual Sweet Potato Pie Showcase, part of its yearly event to celebrate the Juneteenth Jubilee. It is open to all pies and all people because it’s not a contest or a pageant, but a communal celebration of stories.

We're living in such a crushing and cruel environment right now, McGee observed. The showcase counters that with the kindest stories from bakers, like a woman who grew up in rural Minnesota and learned how to make a strawberry rhubarb pie from her grandmother.  But she suddenly decided she wanted to shift it and make it her own. Thus, her family’s sliver of bliss is her peach rhubarb pie.

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If justice had a flavor, McGee believes it would taste like the best pie ever. To demonstrate what she means, she shared another story. Years ago her son wanted her to taste a type of chocolate on a slice of her renowned dessert. Sweet potatoes and chocolate do not come to mind when one thinks of matches made in flavor heaven. Understandably, McGee refused.

But her son was adamant. “’ I don't think you're being very fair.’ I remember him saying that. ‘I don't think you're being very fair in not trying it. Your pie is good. The chocolate is good.’”

And as McGee continued to refuse him, her son shoved a bite of the combo into her mouth. It turns out that he was right. She started making chocolate sweet potato pie, and it is now one of her family’s favorite desserts.

“When I think about justice, I think that [we should] give it an opportunity to be,” she said. “We cannot hold our own values against everything, thinking our way is the only way.” At this point, McGee wasn’t talking about chocolate sweet potato pie anymore.

What was on her mind were the murders of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, and her husband Mark, as well as the shootings of State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. On Sunday law enforcement captured 57-year-old Trump supporter Vance Boelter in a rural area southwest of Minneapolis.

Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., condemned the shootings as "a politically motivated assassination" targeting Democrats.

“If we're all claiming to be balanced, intelligent and compassionate folks, then we should be open to listening to what others have to say,” she said, circling the crust to return to her original tale about her son’s insistence. “I think that's what can happen when we really begin to work with each other and listen to each other. It becomes a better world, a better place.  It's not the same that it would have been if it were just one way of thinking.”

By coincidence, Howard happened to screen “PIEOWA” at a church in Henning, Minnesota (Population: 860) on Friday, June 13. She recalls a lady in the audience who spoke up during the question-and-answer portion and proudly announced that she had two pies cooling at home that very moment.

The woman went to her house, retrieved them, and served them to the crowd.

“So that's the spirit of pie right there,” Howard concluded. “It’s sharing.”

For more information about the Los Angeles area restaurants and chefs participating in Pies for Justice, click here.