Oranges, she says.

Alex? I ask.

Gushers.

Is that girl Alex or boy Alex?

I was imagining boy, but I think it’s the same.

How about Alice? Is that too similar to Alex?

No, it’s totally different. Caesar dressing. Caesar salad.

How about Joe?

Definitely meatballs.

Yeah, for sure.

Abby is a food person, someone who eats slowly and deliberately, sometimes cooking calculated and elaborate dishes and other times going through girl-dinner-simple phases. Last month, the Brooklyn-based North Carolinian launched a 72-card deck called Food Stories, a passion project slowly brought to life over the past few years. They feature Abby’s illustrations and have questions and prompts like:

What food would you gladly eat off of someone else’s body?

or

What food represents your childhood? Do you still eat it today?

or

Describe a time when food and spirituality intertwined for you.

I’m no grand foodie. In the right conditions, the kitchen is a reprieve. Yet, it often balloons into a place of fragrant stress, where I stand belly button to the counter, my arms stretching across too many pots and pans of bubbling and steaming ingredients, willing it to taste good. Things are easier when I’m feeding myself, but the pressure mounts when the food I’m making is filling more than one mouth. In those moments, I’d often much rather be the person clearing the dishes into a hot, sudsy sink at the end of the meal.

However, in the past year, I’ve spent some simmering moments picking through the Food Stories card deck, leafing through yummy theoreticals and self-reflections — the first time in Prima Brooklyn, curled around wine glasses and candlesticks, and the last time in East London’s Rochelle Canteen, smiling across white tablecloths and portions of sweetheart cabbage. In these moments, my concept of food, self, and how they interlace has shifted.

Abby grew up surrounded by food. Her dad owned a BBQ restaurant in North Carolina for 44 years, a place where she spent evenings making art in the office when she didn’t have a babysitter, and eventual summers helping with catering events.

“There was live bluegrass music every single night, so there was always someone picking banjo, and it was usually a mix of older dudes who frequented the bar and novice musicians that would often get the crowd singing along on any given night,” she tells me. In the moments when she couldn’t find her dad, it was often because he was sitting at a table talking to a stranger or a friend.

This is where she learned how to treat people, in “this third place where all types of people come together and have this universal experience of eating and being in this space that isn’t your home and getting served by someone.”

The idea for Food Stories first came to Abby in a snowstorm in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. It was a low point in her life, darkened by uncertainty and listlessness. She was snowed in, bored, and alone, and began making doodles on her iPad, illustrations that would later mark her cards. A couple of years later, she found herself back in her hometown in a similar period, “feeling very lost and confused. I knew that I wanted to work in food and with food, but maybe not in the service industry again,” she said.

Inspired to host a pop-up dinner in the area, she envisioned seasonal and locally-sourced ingredients, a community chef, and a table littered with hand-made cards that asked food-related questions. In the end, the dinner never happened, but the creation of the cards did.

Abby and I were both still growing up in the early days of Instagram when clean-eating influencers ruled and misinformation on dieting and nutrition took on a new and potent form. For many young women, this translated into a hyperfixation on eating healthy food in ways that ultimately did more to harm us. For Abby, her 20s felt like a time of food-related control.

“Then in my mid-20s, I started travelling solo,” she tells me. “I remember in Oaxaca having this day by myself, going to the market and buying all of these types of tamales and fruit and just sitting in the sun and eating all of it. I was like, “Why does this make me want to cry in a happy way?””

“I thought about all the times in my life where I have loved food — eating food and playing with food and learning about food — and pretty much all of my happiest memories in my life are around food.”

Control gave way to joy, and her mid-20s grew into a phase of reclamation as Abby reoriented toward becoming a food person and redefining what that meant for her. Now, she tells me about her weirdest girl dinners, her renewed view on “junk food”, the sauce she puts on everything (miso, tahini, syrup, etc.), and the fact that right now her go-to is a simple quesadilla: flour tortillas with just cheese.

At the heart of Food Stories, Abby maintains a thread of community, connection, and food justice, committing to partner with food justice organizations and give back to the community in a way that ensures dedication toward food sovereignty and accessibility. Most recently, she hosted an event that raised funds for One Love Community Fridge, a group that champions food distribution and education in New York City.

“I really hope that Food Stories can be this safe playing ground for people to find connection,” she says. “Not only with new people, but also with people that you’ve known forever, like your family, because we get in these ruts with people. It’s easy to assume that you’ve heard all their stories. I hope that this deck gives people permission to hear new stories.”

Over red berries, orange wines, and broken bread, I’ve learned that Abby wants funfetti cake served at her funeral because she believes that cake is one of the best ways to bring people together, that instant coffee and ramen remind her of young love when she was travelling through Romania and living on $5 a day, and that, as a kid, she kept a baby carrot in the back of her mom’s messy Chevy Suburban, examining it over the years as it calcified into a small, dark brown nub.

I’ve also learned some things about myself, for example, how I am perhaps actually a food person after all, just in my own stress-tested and layered way.

Between head bobs and track blends, Chen confirms that the 92-BPM R&B and hip-hop vibe was a good choice for the day — first to me in the booth and then into the microphone for the listeners, her voice going hushed and gooey. She pops over to the Discord chat to check replies, typing out messages about Oscars wins, Big Tobacco conspiracies, and even the accident that took the life of her late partner, all between soul-affirming D'Angelo and Toni Braxton tracks. Bouncing to the output of her craft and doting generously on the Discord chat, she’s at ease, an effortless multitasker.

“Everyone has their own lives,” she says of the chat room, “and the more time you spend there, the more you start caring about everyone's life because, in the end, that's what it is — a place to make friends and music. It’s like the radio is just an excuse.”

NTS Radio launched as an independent online radio station in 2011, the brainchild of music blogger, DJ, and pirate radio enthusiast Femi Adeyemi. Housed in a former jazz record shop in Dalston, the station has amassed a mammoth following of 360,000 daily listeners — an audience base of algorithm cynics, subculture enthusiasts, and all-around alternative music nerds.

The station strives to act as a music discovery platform, opposing the automated lull of algorithmic streaming platforms (with approximately 40% of its music unavailable on Spotify) and broadcasting a grand scope of genres from techno, dub, and jazz to the more obscure-leaning krautrock, new jack swing, and musique concrète.

In 2022, NTS made the switch from the clunky chat system Chatango to Discord, the instant messaging social platform originally used for mobile gamers. Three years later, the chat room is brimming with activity, home to over 61,000 users.

Through the chat room, NTS has moulded an oddly friendly corner of the internet where young, liberal, and often neurodiverse individuals discuss the intricacies of music, trade matters-of-the-heart tales, and plunge into deep, topical rabbit holes with one another. Here, people are connecting — both digitally and IRL. They are meeting for beers in local pubs, collaborating on creative projects with one another, and for some, even finding love.

Elena Ferrari and Paul van der Donk danced around each other in the chat for a while before they met up, connecting first through their mutual love of music between the 9 am NTS Breakfast Show and the 11 am Soup to Nuts show.

In September of last year, 28-year-old van der Donk sent 32-year-old Ferrari a private message after she asked about good parties happening in Amsterdam that weekend. While the two didn’t meet then, their private messaging continued. Two months later, when they were each going through separate breakups, they started a joint heartbreak playlist, laden with angsty, dramatic, and unapologetically emotional songs.

“During this time we messaged every day. Hours per day,” said van der Donk. “We were kind of dragging each other through.”

By November, they made a plan to hang out in real life, meeting at a cosy Dutch bar with craft beers and good music. 10 or 11 drinks in, they shared their first kiss. They’ve been dating ever since.

Like a new couple, they’re still settling into the grooves of one another. In the chat room, they’ve kept their relationship mostly secret, even though, according to von der Donk, “We talk to these people every day. We involve them in every part of our lives, but none of them know that we have a relationship. I think it's weird, but Elena finds it amusing.”

Sian O’Neill, on the other hand, has less of a filter when dishing the particulars of her love life. The lingerie designer and side-hustle DJ is a capacious presence in the chat, recounting dating tales with humorously intimate levels of detail, down to photos of her crushes, which she “dirty deletes” after a couple of minutes.

“My personal friends can be biased or tell me what I want to hear. But I know that these neurodiverse people and weirdos in this Discord will always give me the most honest feedback advice ever,” she says.

The Germany-based 33-year-old started listening to NTS Radio five years ago and joined the chat two years later. She tells me that she can tell the mood of the DJ based on the opening track of their show or even by the tone of their voice, having once joined together with other listeners to send flowers to radio host Flo Dill at the studio because “we thought that she wasn't feeling so great.”

The DJ-listener barrier crumbles beneath the weight of instantaneous chat room communication. Ferrari speaks fondly of the messages she would receive from Flo Dill when she was low on heartbreak. The DJ would send well wishes and check in on her to make sure she was okay.

“It felt really like a support group that I could find there,” she says.

According to radio specialist Grant Goddard, it takes two traits to make a good DJ: an intensely deep knowledge of music and an inherent talent for conversation.

With over 50 years of experience in music and talk radio, both in the UK and globally, Goddard has seen the industry cycle through its many evolutionary shifts.

“We haven't seen the death of broadcast radio, but we have seen the rise of online radio because generally, it's doing different things,” says Goddard.

Online radio is steadily gaining popularity, having surpassed AM/FM radio listening in the UK for the first time last year. The two mediums still grapple for listenership — a recent Q4’24 RAJAR report found that in the UK, 27% of adults listen to AM/FM radio while another 27% listen to online radio; however, that’s not accounting for independent radio stations like NTS that don’t fall under the RAJAR’s scope of survey.

NTS, with its three million monthly listeners, emulates a return to basics with its tastemaker DJs and live shoutouts. “It's bringing back some of the elements of traditional radio that made it so successful,” says Goddard.

Will Dickson, 32, is the head of marketing and communications at NTS and the Discord chat room administrator. As someone who’s been with NTS for close to 10 years, he conducted the switch from Chatango to Discord and recognises the pivotal connecting power of a chat room. With about 1,000 new Discord members joining each month, NTS’ chat room is on a steady upward climb, with most activity occurring during the Breakfast Shows.

“If we didn't have the chat, it's like almost, what's the point of broadcasting live?” Dickson says. “It really helps to add to that sense that you're experiencing content together with people in exactly the same way, and at the same time. It makes the broadcast an event. It's crucial.”

There’s a game of push and pull occurring between technology and the elementary human experience. A growing trend is taking shape as people shift away from social media, dating apps, and the algorithms that dictate what we listen to and watch. Instead, people are returning to old-school forms of human interactions like board game cafes and speed dating. While the Discord app is tech-forward, it’s also reminiscent of the chat rooms of the 90s and 2000s, like AOL, Yahoo, and MSN Messenger. Online radio stations like NTS scratch an analogue itch, where listeners can surrender control of the aux cord and be led by the experience a DJ creates.

“People are sick of algorithms. They want curation back,” Isaac Carter tells me. The 24-year-old spent the past five years working in commercial radio in New Zealand before changing course and returning to school to become a secondary school teacher. After seeing the industry from the inside, he lost faith in radio as a medium.

Carter is not the type to gravitate toward an online chat room, and it took him a while to participate, but once he did, he grew fond of the chat’s community feel, tuning in to The Breakfast Show as his nighttime wind-down.

“It's not infiltrated by weirdos, which is a very rare thing for an internet space,” he says. “It's almost bizarre. It feels otherworldly for the internet.”

Pondering over his draw to the chat room, he says, “Maybe it's just cause of everything going on in the world right now. It seems a bit closed off from it in a good way.”

“People turn to something for reassurance to try and combat the feeling of isolation,” says Goddard. “When there's war going on, whether that be a literal war or a trade war as we've got now, people tend to move towards that because it's a frightening time for people and they need more empathy than they would normally.”

The pandemic, although terrifying, brought listeners together in a new way, when, according to Chen, “live radio took on a new meaning in people's lives because of that moment of communion and shared experience.”

She adds, “I was living alone at the time. It felt like the NTS chat room and the shows were one of the rare moments where I had social interactions, even if they were digital. The fact that they were live felt like the closest thing to hanging out with real people.”

Five years later and the world spins on, new global conflicts arising, bristling, and causing safe spaces like the NTS Discord chat to feel especially remarkable. On any given morning in the NTS chat room, you’ll likely be greeted by familiar usernames from quick-typing regulars.

“good morning pals”

“Ahoy sailors”

“how the fuck are we”

“Morning all. What’s this then?”

These not-so-strangers might be in the same city as you — down the block or up the road. More likely, they’re further away, perhaps by nautical leagues, on the other side of one ocean or another.

Still, whether you’ll ever meet or not, for some time you’re all sharing a moment of wholesome togetherness, hearing the same breathy DJ’s inner monologue, shimmying to the same Swedish indie-pop tune, and smirking at the same devil-may-care messages and GIFS flooding the chat at breakneck speeds. In these moments, the room in chat room takes on a more solid emphasis, the music and messaging painting walls of sound and colour around you. In these moments, it’s hard to feel alone.

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A condensed version of this piece was published in the summer 2025 print edition of Artefact Magazine.