Food is the ticket. Food is something universal. It is something primitive. It is magic if you want to believe in that. Once you bring food into a room, it allows people to drop their masks or bring their guard down, even if it is just for that half hour or hour that we are going to dine together.
BIPOC Foodways Alliance is dedicated to breaking down barriers between cultural communities, and also breaking down barriers among other differences, including sex, age, and gender orientation. We use food as a tool.
Immigrant Kitchen is one of our programs, and it provides a platform for women who are home cooks from around the world to tell their stories through the lens of food. We added Immigrant Kitchen around the time that the administration was going out of its way to demonize immigrant communities. I had this thought bubble that we needed some kind of counter narrative to the rhetoric we hear every day.
I think people are really trying hard in this moment to create community. Community has been lost for a variety of reasons in this country. Food has a magical power to it.
I spent most of my adult life in some aspect of the food industry. I was either a chef or writing about food. After a couple of decades of this, I noticed that the large majority of people at the top were guys, and often they were white. I love restaurants, but I think the people who have the most important stories to tell about food are women, often home cooks.
Those people carry the cultural legacy. They carry the cooking, the histories, and the stories. When we bring those women in to share that knowledge with an engaged audience, something really incredible happens. Everybody leaves feeling more empowered.
BIPOC Foodways Alliance is dedicated to breaking down barriers between cultural communities, and also breaking down barriers among other differences, including sex, age, and gender orientation. We use food as a tool.
Immigrant Kitchen is one of our programs, and it provides a platform for women who are home cooks from around the world to tell their stories through the lens of food. We added Immigrant Kitchen around the time that the administration was going out of its way to demonize immigrant communities. I had this thought bubble that we needed some kind of counter narrative to the rhetoric we hear every day.
I think people are really trying hard in this moment to create community. Community has been lost for a variety of reasons in this country. Food has a magical power to it.
I spent most of my adult life in some aspect of the food industry. I was either a chef or writing about food. After a couple of decades of this, I noticed that the large majority of people at the top were guys, and often they were white. I love restaurants, but I think the people who have the most important stories to tell about food are women, often home cooks.
Those people carry the cultural legacy. They carry the cooking, the histories, and the stories. When we bring those women in to share that knowledge with an engaged audience, something really incredible happens. Everybody leaves feeling more empowered.