WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:19.340 [ Music ] 00:00:19.340 --> 00:00:24.770 For those of you who've been lucky enough to travel abroad in the recent past, 00:00:24.770 --> 00:00:30.260 think about the first things you wanted to do and see. You probably had some museums and 00:00:30.260 --> 00:00:36.250 historical landmarks to check out, but I'll bet you also had eating food near the top of your to do list, 00:00:36.250 --> 00:00:41.570 and not just because you're hungry, but also because so much of actually experiencing 00:00:41.570 --> 00:00:47.800 the culture of a new place is trying the food. It's why we try pasta in Italy and why we try tacos 00:00:47.800 --> 00:00:53.940 and tamales in Mexico, and it's definitely why Anthony Bourdain tried warthog anus in Namibia, 00:00:53.940 --> 00:01:01.840 and not just for the TV ratings. So every destination has a dish or cuisine associated 00:01:01.840 --> 00:01:07.560 with it, and that's because food is so deeply tied to our culture and our identity. 00:01:07.560 --> 00:01:12.360 What we cook is an expression of who we are and where we come from and when we are 00:01:12.360 --> 00:01:18.440 traveling abroad, trying the food from that country is a great way to experience the culture firsthand. 00:01:18.440 --> 00:01:23.140 In the same respect, when you're moving to a new country, cooking and eating the food 00:01:23.140 --> 00:01:30.220 from your home is a great way to feel connected and nostalgic about that place and bring you back 00:01:30.220 --> 00:01:36.020 to your roots and your foundation. Sharing that food with other people can instantly connect you 00:01:36.020 --> 00:01:41.150 to people very much unlike yourself. Commensality is a stepping stone for building 00:01:41.150 --> 00:01:46.630 friendships and communities and strengthening ties between disparate groups. So today, 00:01:46.630 --> 00:01:51.100 there's also a growing trend among governments and middle power countries to 00:01:51.100 --> 00:01:56.210 create government-funded gastrodiplomacy programs, which basically serve as a tool 00:01:56.210 --> 00:02:01.970 to introduce the cuisine of a country to a foreign audience in order to gain awareness for 00:02:01.970 --> 00:02:08.970 the country itself. So as our world becomes increasingly globalized, cooking and sharing food 00:02:08.970 --> 00:02:16.800 have become powerful tools for preserving culture outside of its cultural and geographical context. 00:02:16.800 --> 00:02:22.230 So I'm here today to talk to you about the importance of maintaining this diversity 00:02:22.230 --> 00:02:28.600 in our culinary landscape and preserving and sharing cultural traditions through food. 00:02:28.600 --> 00:02:36.580 So to start, as Americans, our food culture is a little bit muddled. First of all, the food that's 00:02:36.580 --> 00:02:41.090 typically associated with the American diet isn't really good food. I'm thinking mostly of like 00:02:41.090 --> 00:02:45.780 ballpark Franks and fast food cheeseburgers, things that taste really good, 00:02:45.780 --> 00:02:51.820 but aren't getting any Michelin stars. Second of all, America is a country of immigrants, 00:02:51.820 --> 00:02:57.730 so our cuisine is constantly being influenced by food that's coming in from different countries 00:02:57.730 --> 00:03:03.440 and because of that, even though I'm a fifth-generation American, I never really strongly 00:03:03.440 --> 00:03:09.850 identified with a specific American food culture until fairly recently when I was geographically 00:03:09.850 --> 00:03:15.650 removed from it. And that happened in the summer of 2010 when I went to Uganda 00:03:15.650 --> 00:03:21.000 to live and work on a farm with a farmer named Bob and his family in order to learn more about 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:27.100 agriculture and food systems in developing countries. So while I was there, about four weeks 00:03:27.100 --> 00:03:31.840 into my trip, I got malaria which unfortunately is very common in Uganda, 00:03:31.840 --> 00:03:36.770 it's much like getting the flu here, and I knew this. I had been to malaria endemic countries 00:03:36.770 --> 00:03:41.500 before. I was well aware that with a quick diagnosis and proper drugs, it was 00:03:41.500 --> 00:03:47.510 totally treatable. But being a stereotypical American when I was sitting in that little rural hospital, and 00:03:47.510 --> 00:03:53.490 that doctor told me that I did in fact have malaria, I freaked out. I was really scared, and I think 00:03:53.490 --> 00:03:59.980 it was the first time in my adult life that I felt truly homesick. So in the following weeks, 00:03:59.980 --> 00:04:05.470 even though I couldn't actually eat anything, I was dreaming about American food. 00:04:05.470 --> 00:04:10.980 And whenever I got a chance, I would text my sister and ask her what she was eating, 00:04:10.980 --> 00:04:15.200 and what she eaten earlier that day, and what everyone else around her was eating, and 00:04:15.200 --> 00:04:21.510 I was dreaming about chocolate and coffee and bread, and I think that the food that 00:04:21.510 --> 00:04:29.060 I miss the most, and this won't come as a surprise to anyone was cheese. And ironically 00:04:29.060 --> 00:04:35.150 during that week when I was getting better, my entire extended family was vacationing 00:04:35.150 --> 00:04:42.370 in the state of Wisconsin, cheese capital of America. So this food homesickness was really 00:04:42.370 --> 00:04:46.650 weird to me. It was something that I had never experienced before, but it's actually 00:04:46.650 --> 00:04:51.350 really common among people who are moving into a new country and adjusting to a new culture. 00:04:51.350 --> 00:04:58.230 Reconciling that old and familiar food with the new unfamiliar food is part of a larger process 00:04:58.230 --> 00:05:04.040 called acculturation. And although this is different for everyone, cultural anthropologists have 00:05:04.040 --> 00:05:09.930 mapped into roughly four stages. So the first is the honeymoon stage, which is pretty self-explanatory. 00:05:09.930 --> 00:05:15.260 It's basically when everything is new and exciting, and you're like on an adventure in this new country. 00:05:15.260 --> 00:05:21.800 And then the next is the hostility or the conflict phase, at which point those differences in culture 00:05:21.800 --> 00:05:26.950 become grating and everyday life can become a little bit frustrating. And then you move up 00:05:26.950 --> 00:05:32.020 through the adjustment phase when you can objectively identify the differences in culture 00:05:32.020 --> 00:05:36.800 and kind of approach it with a more lighthearted sense of humor. And then finally there's 00:05:36.800 --> 00:05:41.260 the home stage at which point you're about as close to assimilation as you're going to get. 00:05:41.260 --> 00:05:48.070 Most people adapt either by cultural identity or relinquish their old cultural identity entirely and 00:05:48.070 --> 00:05:51.870 it should be noted that these stages are much more pronounced when you're moving into 00:05:51.870 --> 00:05:56.910 a culture that is starkly different from your original culture. And also when you have little to no contact 00:05:56.910 --> 00:06:01.350 with your home culture. So I found a lot of references to them in literature for 00:06:01.350 --> 00:06:07.050 peace corps volunteers, for example. So I was never in Uganda or anywhere else long enough 00:06:07.050 --> 00:06:12.170 to go through all four of these stages, but in a country like America, that has a large immigrant 00:06:12.170 --> 00:06:17.660 population, people are going through this new curve of cultural adjustment all the time. 00:06:17.660 --> 00:06:23.880 It's been well documented, and there's actually a lot of really interesting literature about the effect 00:06:23.880 --> 00:06:28.420 it can have on food purchasing and food consumption habits among immigrant communities. 00:06:28.420 --> 00:06:33.780 So one study of Korean immigrants in America found that when they first moved here, 00:06:33.780 --> 00:06:38.400 they were very adventuresome in their purchase of American food products, and then they kind of 00:06:38.400 --> 00:06:43.070 quickly moved into the hostility phase at which point they reverted back to purchasing more traditional 00:06:43.070 --> 00:06:48.620 Korean food products, and then made their way up to the home phase at which point they were 00:06:48.620 --> 00:06:52.310 purchasing those American food products with about the same frequency that they had been 00:06:52.310 --> 00:06:58.330 when they first moved here. There's also multiple studies showing that when non-western immigrants 00:06:58.330 --> 00:07:05.310 move into Western countries, like America, their rates of obesity and diabetes rise to about 00:07:05.310 --> 00:07:11.010 the same levels as those that are in their new adopted home. And this trend is associated directly 00:07:11.010 --> 00:07:17.480 with their increased consumption of Western foods. And finally a study of Mexican immigrants 00:07:17.480 --> 00:07:22.800 in America found that in just one generation the influence of the Mexican diet was almost 00:07:22.800 --> 00:07:29.780 entirely lost. So as these communities are moving into second and third and fourth generations, 00:07:29.780 --> 00:07:35.760 they're losing some of the traditional foods to make way for the American foods. And with that 00:07:35.760 --> 00:07:42.110 they're losing some of that sense of culture and identity. And this experience was actually illustrated 00:07:42.110 --> 00:07:47.780 beautifully in a recent New York Times article in which the author herself and the subject 00:07:47.780 --> 00:07:53.990 she interviews discuss desperately trying to hold on to those recipes and culinary traditions 00:07:53.990 --> 00:07:59.500 from their parents and their grandparents in order to maintain a connection to family and to 00:07:59.500 --> 00:08:04.800 their home country. She says, "Over generations, palates evolve and customs fade. The old 00:08:04.800 --> 00:08:11.490 ways of cooking are quietly forgotten." So in an effort to kind of curb that loss of cultural capital, 00:08:11.490 --> 00:08:16.720 as social scientists like to call it, me and two of my friends from graduate school, Ryan and Pete, 00:08:16.720 --> 00:08:22.360 started Global Kitchen which is a social enterprise that hosts immigrant-led cooking classes. 00:08:22.360 --> 00:08:27.860 And our classes are based in the New York City area. And all of the chefs that we work with 00:08:27.860 --> 00:08:33.110 teach the cuisine from their home country. So they'll be home cooks, and they'll sometimes 00:08:33.110 --> 00:08:39.130 be classically trained chefs, but they always teach traditional foods to our students 00:08:39.130 --> 00:08:44.700 that are common in their countries of origin. Some of these foods are well known to an American 00:08:44.700 --> 00:08:50.000 audience, such as Filipino adobo and Indian curry, and some you'd be hard-pressed 00:08:50.000 --> 00:08:55.300 to find in any restaurant even in New York City. A good example of that is Egyptian koshary 00:08:55.300 --> 00:09:00.800 which is actually incredibly popular in Egypt, but because it's so labor-intensive and 00:09:00.800 --> 00:09:05.620 there's so little demand for it in the United States, there's no real justification for serving it 00:09:05.620 --> 00:09:12.230 in restaurants here. So one of the things that we really like to emphasize in our classes is 00:09:12.230 --> 00:09:18.580 the cultural and historical traditions and context behind the food. So this can come from a chef 00:09:18.580 --> 00:09:23.440 instructor talking about cooking this particular dish with her parents and her grandparents when 00:09:23.440 --> 00:09:29.000 she was growing up, or it can mean talking about trade routes and a history of colonization and 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:33.160 how those influence the dishes in the ingredients in a particular country. 00:09:33.160 --> 00:09:38.490 A really good example of that would be the Spanish influence on Filipino cuisine, bringing in dishes 00:09:38.490 --> 00:09:43.890 like paella. And then finally we like to incorporate cultural elements into the classes themselves. 00:09:43.890 --> 00:09:50.860 So with our Ethiopian class, our chef instructors perform a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony. 00:09:50.860 --> 00:09:59.020 And this is a part of daily life in Ethiopia. It usually involves roasting beans over a fire or stove, 00:09:59.020 --> 00:10:03.730 and then grinding them by hand with a mortar and pestle or with a coffee grinder in our case, 00:10:03.730 --> 00:10:10.810 and then brewing the coffee in front of your guests and serving it to them, and in Ethiopia it's meant to 00:10:10.810 --> 00:10:15.180 signify friendship and hospitality towards the people that you're welcoming into your home. 00:10:15.180 --> 00:10:23.820 So what we really want to do with Global Kitchen besides the classes is create this platform 00:10:23.820 --> 00:10:30.460 for cultural exchange. And we also want to record these recipes in these culinary traditions that 00:10:30.460 --> 00:10:34.330 otherwise wouldn't be documented. And we're not the only ones with this idea. 00:10:34.330 --> 00:10:39.240 Some of you may have heard of "Eat With" which is a service that's rapidly expanding over the world, 00:10:39.240 --> 00:10:45.030 and it's basically a way to connect to hosts in a country that you're traveling to and then go to 00:10:45.030 --> 00:10:50.630 their home and they'll serve you a meal. There's also a really awesome restaurant in Pittsburgh 00:10:50.630 --> 00:10:56.780 called "Conflict Kitchen," and they only serve cuisines from countries with which the United States is 00:10:56.780 --> 00:11:04.220 in conflict. So this would be places like Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Cuba. And 00:11:04.220 --> 00:11:09.800 finally UNESCO has actually added specific cooking styles from countries like 00:11:09.800 --> 00:11:17.970 Japan, France, Turkey, and Mexico to it's intangible cultural heritage list. And these are all 00:11:17.970 --> 00:11:24.440 small examples of gastrodiplomacy, which I mentioned earlier. And defined broadly, simply means 00:11:24.440 --> 00:11:30.520 communicating your culture and your identity through food. But in the public diplomacy context, 00:11:30.520 --> 00:11:37.020 gastrodiplomacy is actually a tool that governments use to tap into people's emotional connection 00:11:37.020 --> 00:11:42.920 to food in order to gain influence and raise brand awareness about the country itself 00:11:42.920 --> 00:11:47.890 in an international setting. And it's also a fantastic way to encourage tourism to your country. 00:11:47.890 --> 00:11:55.540 So the first country to do this was Thailand. In 2002, it started the Global Thai program. And at the 00:11:55.540 --> 00:12:00.300 time, there are only five thousand Thai restaurants in the world, and their goal is simply to raise that 00:12:00.300 --> 00:12:06.000 number to eight thousand. And they did this by helping Thai restaurateurs in all over the world 00:12:06.000 --> 00:12:10.680 to gain access to funding and ingredients that they needed in order to build up their restaurants. 00:12:10.680 --> 00:12:15.500 So as you may have guessed, based solely on the number of Thai restaurants in Brooklyn alone, 00:12:15.500 --> 00:12:22.430 the program was incredibly successful. Today, there are upwards of 20,000 Thai restaurants 00:12:22.430 --> 00:12:26.440 in the world. Thai food has become one of the most well-known international cuisines and 00:12:26.440 --> 00:12:33.050 Thailand itself is a wildly popular tourist destination. And so other government saw this, and they 00:12:33.050 --> 00:12:39.440 followed suit. Korea started a gastrodiplomacy program in 2009. It was a 40 million dollar program 00:12:39.440 --> 00:12:44.410 and now just a few years later, Korean food is consistently ranked among the top American 00:12:44.410 --> 00:12:50.310 food trends. Taiwan started a program that helped throw gourmet food festivals on the island 00:12:50.310 --> 00:12:55.560 and also started a think tank, the sole purpose of which was to figure out new ways to 00:12:55.560 --> 00:13:00.660 introduce Taiwanese restaurants and coffee shops and food products to a foreign audience. 00:13:00.660 --> 00:13:07.000 And Peru started a gastrodiplomacy program that helped make Peruvian food more 00:13:07.000 --> 00:13:12.470 recognizable to a wider audience, and Peru itself was recently ranked the number one culinary 00:13:12.470 --> 00:13:18.550 destination in the world, and it expects to see one billion dollars in culinary tourism just this year. 00:13:18.550 --> 00:13:27.560 So this might seem really simple, but gastrodiplomacy is actually really working as a tool to 00:13:27.560 --> 00:13:34.530 introduce audiences to the food and the culture of a new country. Food is an easy and incredibly 00:13:34.530 --> 00:13:41.040 effective way to introduce an unfamiliar culture to a foreign audience and then suddenly overtime 00:13:41.040 --> 00:13:46.690 make the country itself more approachable, as was the case with Thailand. And on a more 00:13:46.690 --> 00:13:51.340 personal level, sharing our food culture with others and letting them share theirs with us 00:13:51.340 --> 00:13:58.390 can create an immediate connection. This is a picture of me mixing cake batter in Uganda 00:13:58.390 --> 00:14:07.440 and simultaneously trying to make gaucho pants happen. (Laughs) But when I was there, 00:14:07.440 --> 00:14:14.970 we cooked together as a family nearly every day, and we were usually cooking the food 00:14:14.970 --> 00:14:20.150 from the farm. So it was during those moments when we were cooking and we were eating that 00:14:20.150 --> 00:14:24.590 we actually got to know each other outside of the context of work, and it was also during 00:14:24.590 --> 00:14:29.360 those moments when I felt most included in the family unit itself and most connected to 00:14:29.360 --> 00:14:36.190 Ugandan culture. Similarly since starting Global Kitchen, I've been able to witness connections like that 00:14:36.190 --> 00:14:41.750 happen all the time. One example that really stood out to me was when we had an Ethiopian 00:14:41.750 --> 00:14:47.310 class and we had three couples come in who had all adopted children from Ethiopia. And they wanted 00:14:47.310 --> 00:14:51.940 to learn about the food and the culture in order to share that experience with their children. 00:14:51.940 --> 00:14:58.060 I thought it was a really wonderful example of what Global Kitchen is trying to do, and it inspired me 00:14:58.060 --> 00:15:03.820 to continue working to preserve culture through food, and I hope it's through this example and 00:15:03.820 --> 00:15:17.745 others out there that will inspire you to do the same. Thank you so much.