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