Scientific fun-fact: Food tastes better when you enjoy it with other people. The reverse is true too: Sharing food is a great way to get know people in a way that makes you care more about them.

With those profound truths in mind, Bernal Neighbor and editor Leslie Jonath has a crowdfunding campaign underway to publish  Feed Your People, a cookbook that will celebrate yummy food as a way to create stronger community.

(ROMANTIC DISCLOSURE STATEMENT: Neighbor Leslie is also my sweetie, and she’s asleep in bed upstairs as I write this now. Shhhhhh.)

Neighbor Leslie writes:

Feed Your People is a community-based cookbook with recipes for crowd-pleasing big batch cooking from warm-hearted cooks, chefs, community organizations, and grandmas for the foods we gather around — from backyard barbecues and soup suppers to hand-wrapped tamales, dumpling dinners, and seafood boils. Whether for a family reunion, a DIY wedding, holidays, memorials, non-profit fundraisers or a neighborhood block party, this book will inspire you and make cooking for your community a delicious, affordable, fun, memorable feast.

Despite the popularity of supper clubs, pop-up dinners, block parties, bake sales, and community dinners, there are very few books featuring recipes that scale for a crowd. Feed Your People will be co-authored with 18 Reasons, a beloved San Francisco based non-profit whose mission is to “empower our community with confidence and creativity to buy, cook, and eat good food every day” and published by Powerhouse Books.

If bringing great people together with great food sounds like your kind of thing, backing Neighbor Leslie’s campaign is just like pre-ordering a copy of the book — with the advance knowledge that the book will simply have with a loooooooooong delivery time.

Leslie explains what her book is all about in the video below, and you can contribute to Feed Your People here.