Podcast

Culinary Diplomacy with Better Plate

Posted by Kelsey on
This is a Special Correspondent Episode and part of Rebecca Picard’s #CulinaryDiplomacy series.

 

The Better Plate Community Columbus is a nonprofit founded to promote cross-cultural exchange through food-related community events. They are the first US-based satellite of Über den Tellerrand. They organize community events to encourage refugees, other immigrants, and the settled population to meet together over food. At these events, people from several different cultures cook, share, and discuss some of their favorite dishes. These events are donation-based to allow as many people to attend as possible.

They also coordinate refugee and other immigrant-led cooking classes. These cooking classes are led by excellent home cooks are who are passionate about food. They meet in home or community kitchens, work together to cook a meal, and then eat together. The Better Plate Community Columbus is committed to offering our classes at affordable prices and offer financial assistance.

 

MARGARET CHINN is co-founder of Better Plate Community Columbus and currently serves as Secretary of the Board. She likes trying new recipes and getting others involved in the fun. Professionally her background is in social work, teaching, and math.

 

 

AMANDA WARNER is a co-founder of Better Plate Community Columbus and is currently serving as president of the board. 

While cooking has been an ongoing passion for Amanda, recent travels sparked a deeper interest in how food can be used as a point of connection between individuals and communities. From 2014 – 2016, Amanda traveled with her husband and young son, working, playing, and eating their way through more than twenty countries on six continents. Amanda took cooking classes as she traveled, experiencing directly how food helped her connect with others and learn more about their cultures. Towards the end of the trip, she attended several events at Über den Tellerrand kochen, an organization in Berlin that organizes events designed to bring refugees and the settled population together over food. This inspired the idea to begin something similar when she returned to Ohio.

Professionally, Amanda is a consultant, instructional designer, and web developer who partners with international NGOs to design and develop interactive learning experiences (www.amanda-warner.com). She also volunteers at a local refugee resettlement agency.

KUUKUA DZIGBORDI YOMEKPE was born in Ghana and immigrated to the U.S. in 1996. She holds a BA and an MA in English from Ohio Dominican College and the University of Dayton respectively. She was a Bay Area transplant while she worked on her Masters in Theological Studies. She graduated with distinction and was awarded the Marcella Althaus-Reid award for Best Queer Essay in her graduating class. She is ABD in her MFA program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She brands herself the perpetual student.
Within the span of her life, she has inhabited multiple roles, most of which seem to have nothing in common except that the majority have something to do with education. Her adult working career began in Daycare and After-School programming and continued to Student Affairs/Residential Life work first at the University of Dayton, and later on, at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. While a graduate student at the Pacific School of Religion, she served as the Earl Lectures Coordinator for the annual Earl Lectures in Berkeley, CA. She’s worked several odd jobs at various times in between, but the most notable of them all was when she worked as a Quality Control Inspector and general warehouse worker at Red Envelope, inspecting, packing and fork-lifting people’s orders. None of her degrees mattered then; it was all about quality and making the numbers.
Kuukua characterizes herself as a memoirist, essayist, and writer of social commentary. She is the author of several essays and prose poems. Some of her essays have been anthologized in: African Women Writing Resistance (UW Press), Becoming Bi: Bisexual Voices from Around the World (BRC), and Inside Your Ear (Oakland Public Library Press). Her essay, “The Audacity to Remain Single: Single Black Women in the Black Church,” was anthologized in Queer Religion II (Praeger Publishers). She writes for Spoonwiz, The Feminist Wire, and Musings.
She has her hands in three projects currently: The Coal Pot, a Culinary Memoir celebrating her Ghanaian roots, Musings of an African Woman, her blog which features a collection of personal essays about immigration and assimilation, and a foodie magazine. Her scholarly and writing interests lie at the intersection of race and skin color, African culture, Black women’s bodies, expression of voice, and non-conformance and performativity.
Kuukua is a writer, dancer and culinary artist, proud to be an African woman and a politically queer woman of color.  She avidly feeds a voracious travel bug that occupies the hinterlands of her soul, so is often found wandering various parts of the world.  Currently, she has returned to the Empire and is weathering the so-called liberal New England serving as Residence Director at a small college. She is struggling with liberal people’s attitudes, the bemused stares and the inability to wear her hoodies.

BIDISHA NAG, founder, owner and instructor at Create Your Curry draws inspiration from her family and friends, and from her diverse and varied experiences.  Growing up, Bidisha traveled internationally for years, sailing with her marine engineer father, mother and sister to faraway lands. She grew up in a family that practiced radical hospitality and always had a place for family, friends, and even strangers. Bidisha’s personal journey as an immigrant woman in the United States to pursue doctoral studies culminated in a PhD in Cultural Geography.  The PhD dissertation also became an exploration of finding hope and voices in experiences of other female migrants from India. Bidisha was able to connect with the women’s experiences as she wove the stories and journeys of women “across the black waters” with deft understanding of the ambivalence of acculturation and assimilation.

 

Through her own journey of immigrating to a foreign land and making it her home, Bidisha has found her niche at the connection of cultures.  She enthusiastically embraced the new experiences, new sights, and of course, new food, while being firmly rooted to her own culture and traditions.  Friends and acquaintances, new and old, of varying ages, gender, races, and ethnicities were always welcome at her home to savor the warmth of the Nags’ generous hospitality and of course, nourishing healthy homemade food. 

 

True to the roots of her culture, Bidisha believes sharing food is a way to build relationships, and bridges across differences.  Food is not only to feed the body, but also to feed the soul as it has been identified repeatedly as the “single great unifier” across cultures.  Be it comfort food, or food for celebration, or to mark festivals and special occasions, Bidisha’s creations fuse eastern traditional cooking with western ingredients. The hallmark of Create Your Curry is to share the knowledge of Indian cooking and cooking methods.  Even if the knowledge is new, and methods are unfamiliar to some, Bidisha demystifies Indian cooking by blending her techniques with fresh, locally sourced ingredients to create meals that are healthy, tasty and provides nourishment for the body and soul. The purpose of Create Your Curry is to share knowledge, share traditions, share cultural aspects of Indian food as a means to break the barrier and the fear of the unknown.  True to its label of being a great unifier, Create Your Curry celebrates differences by bringing together people from diverse walks of life as a means to building relationships, building community, one meal at a time.

 

Special Correspondent Guest Host

REBECCA PICARD is an MA graduate in International Policy & Development from the Middlebury Institute for International Studies in Monterey, CA. She is committed to intercultural communication, bringing the female voice to male-dominated spaces, and international exploration.

Rebecca is also interested in all things food. Working in restaurants for 10 years steeped her in a passion for culinary diplomacy. She believes in food as a means for cross-cultural understanding, communication, and cooperation that can bridge divides and create peace. Viewing culinary diplomacy through the feminist lens, Rebecca sees women at the center of food movements and diplomacy, and their voices need to be heard. Connect with her on Linkedin.