From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
Alicia Kennedy
www.aliciakennedy.news
2 Listeners
All episodes
Best episodes
Top 10 From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
A Conversation with Sandor Katz
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
03/16/22 • 22 min
You're listening to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture podcast. I'm Alicia Kennedy, a food writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Every week on Wednesdays, I'll be talking to different people in food and culture about their lives, careers and how it all fits together and where food comes in.
This week, I'm talking to Sandor Katz, whom you likely know from his books Wild Fermentation, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, The Art of Fermentation, Fermentation As Metaphor, and now Sandor Katz's Fermentation Journeys, which maps fermentation practices around the world, to show how traditions that preserve abundance have been maintained. It's perhaps my favorite of his books, because it tells so many stories through fermentation and introduces you to so many people around the world.
Katz has become a legend for his work, but he maintains humility as a conduit of knowledge rather than a keeper. His approach is a real inspiration to me. It was wonderful to get to talk to him about how he organized this book by substrate rather than nation, that why he names the ills of neocolonialism, and a lot more.
Alicia: Hey, Sandor. Thank you so much for being here with me today.
Sandor: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
Sandor: Well, I grew up in New York City, on the Upper West Side. And we ate all kinds of things. I feel very lucky that my parents liked different kinds of foods. They liked vegetables. We ate lots of different kinds of fresh vegetables.
But I mean, I would say that my mom did most of the day to day cooking. She had her repertoire. I remember she liked to make pot roast. Sometimes she made great lasagna, but also lots of kind of simple things that she would leave me a note as I got older, just to reheat something. ‘Set the oven to this temperature, put this in the oven.’ My father also liked to cook. He was more of the classic weekend chef. But that also meant that he could be—He was very creative in his cooking. And he's 87 years old now. And he still loves to cook.
And we were in New York City, and we ate Chinese food a lot. China-Latina food, the Cuban Chinese restaurants, we ate them a lot. My mother's parents, who I was close with growing up, were immigrants from what's now Belarus. And my grandmother was a great cook. And she would come over from time to time and make blintzes for us, I mean, she would make dozens of them. And we’d eat some fresh, and then she’d wrap them up and put them in the freezer. And we would defrost them and fry them to eat them. She made a chopped liver. She made matzah ball soup, gefilte fish, all these kind of classic Eastern European Jewish foods. We ate really beautiful versions of them at home.
Alicia: And you've written mostly about fermentation now, to kind of fast forward in life. But I also love your book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, which came out in 2006. And I wanted to ask, because I recently reread it, how do you feel about the food movement it described in 2006 now in 2022?
Sandor: Well, I guess one thing I would say is that it doesn't describe a food movement. It describes a lot of different, grassroots movements. And I mean, I guess, some of them have been more successful over time than others have been. I mean, I think very much, it's not a centralized movement with a singular aim. I think people who get involved in grassroots movements or organized around food have a lot of different ideas and a lot of different objectives.
I mean, certainly the local food movements have been very successful. And there's a lot in most parts of the U.S. at any rate, there's a lot more variety of locally grown foods available. In some places, I think that there have been more successful efforts to make that accessible. I've visited some farmers’ markets where they take EBT card,...
2 Listeners
A Conversation with Tunde Wey
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
09/03/21 • 48 min
In many cases—most cases, if I’m honest—I’m doing an interview in order to work out a problem I’ve been thinking about, and this one was no different. We waded into whether food can really be an agent of change in a capitalist world, because I’ve been wavering on that idea myself, and Wey has the economic knowledge to discuss why it isn’t so in depth. Listen above, or read below.
Alicia: Hi, Tunde. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Tunde: Thank you.
(:07) Alicia: And I know you are in Lagos, now. Can you tell us about how that's going, what you're doing there?
Tunde: Oh, I'm actually not in Lagos. [Laughs.] I was supposed to fly two weeks ago, and my COVID result didn’t come in time. So I just pushed for my flight till a couple of months from now. Next month or something.
Alicia: Ok, cool.
Well, can you tell us about where you grew up and what you ate?
Tunde: Yeah.
I grew up in Lagos. I ate regional Western Nigerian food, I guess. So I'm Yoruba, so I ate Yoruba food. My mom is Edo, so I ate that food as well. My dad is also part Efik, so I ate that as well. So I'd Yoruba, Efik, and sort of the Delta region food, so Edo, Itsekiri food. And then we ate, I guess, white food too.
Alicia: Which white food?
Tunde: When we were growing up, we used to call it breakfast things. But when I came here, then it was lunch meats and s**t like that. So sausages and hams and stuff like that. So, we ate that. So it was a mix.
We usually would eat that on Sundays. My dad would cook, and we'd go out to this store. My data would buy a whole bunch of things, and then he'll cook. Pasta. My mom would mix s**t like beef stroganoff, just random s**t. She went to school in England, so she came back with certain notions around food. So, we have those kinds of things.
And growing up in Nigeria, I came from a middle-class background. It wasn't out of the norm for folks to eat that kind of stuff. So cereals and pancakes, stuff like that. Plus, we also watched a lot of American television with that kind of stuff on the TV.
Alicia: Right, right. Yeah.
And you self-identify as an artist, a cook and a writer. And I wanted to ask, which were you first and how did the rest come? [Laughter.]
Tunde: Which was up first? [Laughs.]
Alicia: Yeah, yeah. Which identity? Or which came to you first, in terms of your work?
Tunde: Right.
I don't know how to answer that question. I feel like it just depends on who I'm, who I am talking to. I think I say I'm an artist because it's just easier to convey what I'm trying to do. I remember, I was trying to raise money for a restaurant. And I was telling people that this restaurant is not going to make any money. And they couldn't understand that. They were like, ‘Huh, what does this mean?’ But then if I was talking to, say, a curator, and I'm like, ‘Well, this project is this and I need this amount of money,’ then they get it. So it just depends on who I'm talking to.
So I guess in the chronology of what is on public records? Artist came last, and it's probably still not on record. So, maybe that’s the first time.
Alicia: Well, it is difficult, I think, for multi-disciplinary people to use that word, to make themselves legible, I suppose, in a world where you have to make everything legible to obtain what you need to do your work at all. You have to be very, very strict about what you are. That is really funny that saying artist allowed you to get the capital for the projects that you needed, that you wanted to do. [Laughs.]
Tunde: Yeah, I have a friend who's a curator. She's a friend, but she's also a colleague. She's based in Pittsburgh, Chenoa, and she was the first person—I did a dinner in New Orleans, and she happened to be there ’cause she was there for the opening of some hotel or something. And she had read about it. She just came through. And then, that's how we became friends. But she saw it as art. And then she gave me sort of the words to be able to describe myself to myself and to other people. And then she sponsored the project as art. So I'm like, ‘All right, I f**k with this.’
Alicia: Right.
And your work focuses on power, colonialism, capitalism, racism. You've written for food sections and food outlets...
1 Listener
A Conversation with Millicent Souris
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
05/25/22 • 62 min
You're listening to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture podcast. I'm Alicia Kennedy, a food writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Every week on Wednesdays, I'll be talking to different people in food and culture, about their lives, careers, and how it all fits together and where food comes in.
This week, I'm talking to Millicent Souris, someone I have long wanted to make my friend. Millicent is to me just wildly cool. She talks about food equity and drinking bourbon, and there was no one I would rather talk to you about the dichotomy of being politically engaged with food justice, and also stocking your pantry with very nice olive oil. She's also one of my favorite food writers period; her pieces in Brooklyn Based, Bon Appetit, Diner Journal—they kind of redefined the genre. As a longtime line cook who now runs a soup kitchen and food pantry in New York City, she's someone who simply knows food—its highs and lows and is cool as hell. Did I say that already?
Alicia Kennedy: Hi, Millicent. How are you, Millicent?
Millicent Souris: I'm doing all right. How are you, Alicia?
Alicia: Did I say your name right?
Millicent: Yep!
Alicia: Actually, we should have done that before. [Laughs.]
Millicent: I know. Yeah, my name is Millicent. And is Alicia correct for you?
Alicia: Yes. Alicia is correct.
Millicent: Great.
Alicia: Yeah, I'm Alicia sometimes, but only if you're a Spaniard. [Laughs.]
Millicent: Fair, I'm not going to pretend...
Alicia: Yeah, yeah...well, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
Millicent: Yeah, I grew up in Baltimore County, north of Baltimore City, and in Towson, Maryland, and Lutherville, Maryland—which is of course home to John Waters and Divine, and also in North Baltimore County.
So my dad's parents had immigrated from Greece, so I grew up eating Greek food. And then my mom's family had a dairy farm, so I grew up drinking—when I was up there—unpasteurized milk, which I would say about 10 years ago, I made the connection was raw milk. And country food, you know—my grandfather would grow his own corn and tomatoes and zucchini, and that would be summertime. We ate a lot of crabs in the summer, because it's Maryland, and then also, like, oysters were definitely a part of my mom's family. Like we'd have oysters stuffing and raw oysters at Thanksgiving, because her dad would bring them and shuck them.
But then also because it's the ’70s and ’80s, straight-up shitty American processed food, was a gift, you know, for our household because my mom worked and my dad worked, and there's three of us. And, you know, even on the farm, my uncle and his wife, they would buy Steak-umms, even though they had ground beef from the steers that they sent to slaughter. You know, we would drink Tang, and we ate Stouffer’s lasagna, so it was a real hodgepodge, I think, of all that stuff.
And then there was, when my mom left my dad and there was the episode called “divorce food,” which was Lean Cuisines and Hamburger Helper and La Choy and a lot of Mandarin oranges in tins.
Alicia: Wow. Yeah. Was that on behalf of your mom’s side?
Millicent: That was on my mom's side. And then my dad would just take us to his friends’ restaurants or bars and we’d eat there.
Alicia: [Laughs.] My parents, when they got divorced, I always say, when I knew something was going wrong was when my mom started to make instant mashed potatoes.
Millicent: Yeah...
Alicia: I was already like, 20. So it wasn't like I was a kid. But you know it was always seared in my mind that the instant mashed potatoes were the beginning of the end.
Millicent: It's the tell...it’s the tell... except I, when I did eat instant mashed potatoes and I think I was 21 I first had them, I was like, What is this magical stuff that just turns into mashed potatoes?
Alicia: No, it's super cool.
Millicent: It's...I mean, science. It's science.
Alicia: Yeah, well, you know, as you were just talking about the dairy and also your family had a bar as well, you know, how did you end up in food, personally?
Millicent: I ended up in food...uh, I mean, my Yaya would cook—Souris’s started as a restaurant in 1934. And so it was a classic Greek restaurant, which is American food and then Greek specials. And then when my dad made it a bar, there was a grill, but there was a flattop behind the bar, and so my Yaya would make totally frozen hamburgers...
1 Listener
A Conversation with Angela Garbes
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
05/04/22 • 50 min
You're listening to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture podcast. I'm Alicia Kennedy, a food writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Every week on Wednesdays, I'll be talking to different people in food and culture, about their lives, careers, and how it all fits together and where food comes in.
Today, I'm talking to Angela Garbes, the author of Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy, and the new Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change. We discussed how her past as a food writer continues to inform her work, what mothers who are creative workers need to thrive—spoiler, it's basically what all workers need to thrive—informal knowledge building, and the significance of having an unapologetic appetite as a woman. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or adjust your settings to receive an email when podcasts are published.
Alicia: Hi, Angela. Thank you so much for being here.
Angela: Thank you so much for having me, Alicia.
Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
Angela: Sure. I grew up in rural Central Pennsylvania. So—people can't see this—but this is roughly the shape of Pennsylvania, my hand. And I grew up here in what I call the ass crack of Pennsylvania. And it was a very small town, about 4,000 people. And I was one of very few people of color. And my parents are immigrants from the Philippines. You know, I would say that from a very young age, I was, like, born different. But, you know, we have a fairly typical...like, my parents are both medical professionals. So we had a pretty typical, I would say, fairly typical as you could get, middle class upbringing.
And as far as what we ate, I look back on it now and I think of it as like a perfect combination of like 50 percent American, quote unquote, American convenience food, like a lot of Hamburger Helper, a lot of Old El Paso soft shell tacos, a lot of Little Caesars Pizza, a lot of Philly cheesesteaks.
And then the other half we ate Filipino food: sinigang, adobo, arroz caldo, tinola... and, you know, I remember my dad, like, hacking up pig's feet, you know, I would come downstairs and he'd be cooking up things like that. And so when I look back on it now, I think it was—I mean, I love Filipino food so much. But I also, I mean, I love all kinds of food. And I kind of eat anything. And it's partly, I think, because I was just exposed to a lot of things.
But my parents, you know, we lived in this really small town, and they couldn't get all of the ingredients that they wanted to make traditional dishes. But they kind of improvised with what they had. And because they were so committed to cooking Filipino food, sort of against the odds, I would say, you know, we did a lot of...there were not vegetables that [were] available, like you couldn't get okra or green papaya. So we would use zucchini, and, you know, frozen okra to make sinigang. But it was such a way for them to stay connected to their cultures and I feel so grateful to them because what they did was really pass that down to me, from an early age. I was like, Oh, yeah, this is—this is my food, like, this is who I am. And I've never lost that. And I've always loved [it] and, yeah, so it was sort of this wonderful, healthy mix, I think.
Alicia: For sure, and, you know, it was so interesting to realize, because I don't think I'd realized it before, that you were a food writer. [Laughs] Until I got into your books, I was like, Wait...
And Like a Mother, your first book, starts out like, so...like, such a rich piece of food writing. And I'm like, Wow, now I understand. And then I realized, I'm like, Oh, she is a food writer. So you know, you've come to write your two books about motherhood, but you know, you're also a food writer, and you're writing about food in these books as well. How did you become a food writer?
Angela: First of all, thank you for saying this now because I miss food writing. And I think at heart, I am a food writer. And I think it informs, you know, the way I portray sensory detail and physical experience...
1 Listener
A Conversation with Amanda Cohen
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
01/08/21 • 34 min
It’s hard for me to properly state what I perceive to be the significance of Amanda Cohen. For more than ten years now, she’s been the chef-owner of Dirt Candy in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The restaurant was once very small (it was once, indeed, in the space that now houses Superiority Burger), then she moved it to a larger space. Now, it’s rather small again, operating only on the patio with a lot of heat lamps, and she long ago adopted a no-tipping policy in order to pay staff a living wage. She’s only ever cooked vegetables. With Lekka Burger, she’s added veggie burgers in a fast-casual setting to her oeuvre, and the result is stunning.
I don’t think she has gotten enough credit for any of this. The reasons are sadly obvious: she’s a woman, and she cooks vegetables. Even vegans, I found out recently, despise her for occasionally consuming a piece of meat or fish in order to study flavor and texture, in order to put out food that really is on par with what omnivores are accustomed to (and while I usually say “f**k the omnivore’s palate,” I have to acknowledge that when my fiancé—only recently converted to vegetarianism—eats her food, he can barely speak because he’s focused on how delicious it is).
Anyway, I’ve interviewed Amanda many times for different pieces because her perspective is so essential to me, but this is a broad one. Listen above, or read below.
Alicia: Hi, Amanda, thanks so much for coming on.
Amanda: Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
Amanda: Sure.
So I grew up in Ottawa and Toronto in the ’70s and ’80s. And certainly, Ottawa was a winter city. It's funny, because I look back on it and we didn't have a huge amount of produce at all times. It's cold in Ottawa, in Canada, so the winter—vegetables were pretty pathetic. But my mother would always try as hard as she could.
At the same time though, both cities were pretty international cities. Toronto is the capital of Canada, super cosmopolitan. Sorry, Ottawa’s the capital of Canada; Toronto's the capital of Ontario. And because Ottawa was the capital, it's filled with diplomats. So we had all different kinds of restaurants that we constantly were sort of going to. My dad was in government. We were meeting other families.
And so I had this sort of really varied variety of cuisines. And I have this memory of going to the supermarkets when I was younger, and particularly in Toronto, which again is a much more cosmopolitan city filled with all different ethnicities and nationalities, where the — it's pretty exciting if I look back on it now. But the grocery store was filled with products from all over the world.
And so if you were an adventurous cook, which my mother sometimes was — she wasn't always — we'd have really random fun ingredients in our kitchen cupboard. I think we ate all over the map. But also, it was a family of five kids. So we had a lot of pasta and pasta salads.
Alicia: And so, what got you into food actually?
Amanda: Well, I think there was a variety of things that got me into it. I am the youngest of five kids. And there's about a five-year difference between me and my — the next sibling who's closest in age to me, but all my — all those other siblings are about two years apart. So my brother's 12 years older. And then there's three sisters in between. This is a whole family history.
But by the time I became a teenager, my mother had been cooking for about 25 years for her family. And kudos to her, she just sort of like, ‘I'm not doing it anymore.’ I swear, she looked at me and she was like, ‘You look pretty capable. You seem to know your way around the kitchen. You want to have dinner? Figure it out yourself.’
I mean, it wasn't quite that blunt. She didn't have to cook for a family of seven anymore, every single night. It was just sort of me and her and my dad. And I think she was kind of done with it, which I think we all understand now having cooked through the pandemic, how hard it is to cook every night.
And I liked it. I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun, I get to figure out what I want to eat. And I get to play around.’ And I loved cooking magazines. And so I would cook recipes from them. I'm sure they were all terrible. My parents were certainly nice enough to suffer through some awful meals.
But I liked it. I liked the challenge of it. I liked reading the recipe and figuring things out and seeing it come to life. I was a kid that was always so disappointed that I could never get what was in my imagination to come through on a piece of paper. Or I'd write a story and be like, ‘Oh, I imagined it so different.’ I’d paint a picture. I'm like, ‘I'm a terrible artist.’ But in my head, I'm an amazing artist. But something with — like a re...
A Conversation with Frances Moore Lappé
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
11/12/21 • -1 min
Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé was released in 1971, making the statistic that 80 percent of farmland provides only 18 percent of calories through livestock a rallying cry for better, more equitable agriculture systems. This book gradually grew to sell over 3 million copies and irrevocably changed the way we talk about food, hunger, and culture. Fifty years later, there is a brand-new updated edition, out now, to meet the urgency of our current environmental moment. Visit dietforasmallplanet.org to learn more and get your copy.
Alicia: Hi, Frances. Thank you so much for being here today.
Frances: Thank you so much. I love it.
Alicia: [Laughs.] How are you? Where are you? You're in Cambridge, Massachusetts?
Frances: I'm in Belmont, which is just very close to Cambridge, where our office is. But I'm working at a cottage in my home now because of the COVID isolation.
Alicia: Well, can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
Frances: [Laughs.] I grew up in Cowtown, literally called Cowtown as a nickname, Fort Worth, Texas. And the stockyards were never far from my smell distance.
That was the ’40s and ’50s. And we ate meat at the center of every meal. ‘What's for dinner, Mom.’ ‘Oh, pork chops, or meatloaf,’ it was, that was the center of the meal. And, I mean, we ate healthfully in the sense that my mom never got on to the processed foods. White bread was a really big deal when I was growing up. We had a big, white bread factory on the way to town. You could smell the smell. But my mom always served us whole wheat bread. When she made after school cookies, she always put in a lot of nuts and things that were good for us.
But generally, we ate the typical diet, but we—without the soda pop in the fridge, we never had that. But it was pretty standard.
Alicia: [Laughs.] Well, as the author of such a historically significant book on diet and the environment, I would think people are curious about how you eat and shop for food on a regular basis. So I wanted to ask what your weekly kind of eating and food shopping and acquiring look like.
Frances: Well, for years now during the summer—and we still are getting them—we are part of a community-supported agriculture. So we get this huge bag of veggies every week, too much for me and my partner to eat, so we share them with a neighbor. So that's a lot of our veggie, fresh veggie intake. We're very big on eating organic, and the only access is primarily Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, as we're trying to get Trader Joe's to carry more organic. But when we don't have our community-supported agriculture, we rely on those sources for fresh veggies.
My kitchen—if you could see it, it has this huge shelf of jars with all the various, the quinoa, the brown rice, the black beans, the chickpeas, all dried. And so, I have a lot of stuff. We could probably live for a few months on what we have on those shelves.
I'm a cook, but I kind of wing it. I really encourage people not to be intimidated by recipes, but just to be inspired and motivated by recipes and think of recipes as just a source of ideas. But not, you don't have to be a slave to them and to feel free to add more or less of your family's favorite herbs and substitute veggies.
It's funny that somebody with so many recipes in her book [Laughter] is not—I’m advocating, ‘Don't be a slave to them.’ I guess I've always hoped that our recipes would be inspiration and motivations, that ‘Oh, I didn't know you could do that with that.’
And I was just talking to somebody yesterday about one of our recipes from the very, very first edition called Roman Rice and Beans. And the concept was to take the basi...
A Conversation with James Hansen
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
05/22/20 • 35 min
I didn’t expect to spend this installment asking James Hansen, of Eater London and the In Digestion newsletter, to be a representative of his nation, but as a recovered Anglophile—who, in high school, had a Union Jack cover on her first Nokia cell phone—I got a bit in the weeds asking for the scoop on why UK food writing, as perceived from the other side of the Atlantic, is so stratified and filled with social media beefs. There are the newspaper critics, who, as he explains, have a combined 125 years of tenure at their jobs between them, and there are the new wave, like James himself, Jonathan Nunn, Anna Sulan Masing, and Ruby Tandoh, who have sought to broaden the landscape of what is considered food writing and worthy of coverage in their country. How does it all play out in reality?The only thing I can hope is that this sort of thing is interesting to anyone but me. Please read on, or listen, and excuse the moment where I leap in to find out just how he got into this food thing at all.
Alicia: Thanks so much for coming on, James. How is it over there today?
James: Thanks for having me. It's okay. The UK government's response to all this has certainly been suboptimal, but I think that people are increasingly acknowledging that this is going to be with us for quite some time and reacting accordingly. Despite the many concocted horror stories about parks being flooded with people not socially distancing and such. Yeah. How is it in Puerto Rico?
Alicia: Well, we have some tourists who are here not wearing face coverings. It's pretty cheap to get here right now and pretty cheap to stay, so people are taking that opportunity to visit for some reason, even though there's nowhere to go and nothing to do—just stand in the street. I guess sometimes it's fun to have a different setting for your isolation, but it would be nice if they wore their masks.
People are—I've been trying to figure out a way to say this and get an answer from a scientist—but the information that has been shared that it's okay to ride your bike or to run without a mask basically makes it so that no one wears one, because everyone acts as though they're out exercising and they're not, necessarily, and also if everyone is out exercising and not wearing a mask then it kind of defeats the whole purpose of trying to keep this under control.
But we've been in very, like, severe lockdown with a curfew for over two months now, without a lot of good information or tracing, which is the issue in the entirety of the United States, so... it's been a journey, as it has been for everyone. And luckily, you know, on the good side of it, I’m not sick; no one I know is sick. So for now, I'm, you know, one of the lucky ones in the situation. Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
James: Yeah. So I grew up in a small town in the UK called Cheltenham, which I'm certain no one listening to this podcast will have heard of before. It's famous for two main things, which are a horse-racing festival, which has been this year—not the Cheltenham one, but it was one of the main reasons that the UK has possibly suffered such a bad Coronavirus crisis, is that they didn't cancel a leading horse racing festival which had many tens of thousands of people attending just as things were starting to become clearly bad. Another thing is famous for is that it's a spa town, so in the sort of Edwardian Georgian 1800 times, people who were wealthy enough to do so would come to take the waters in the belief that it would cure them of all ailments and also make them virtuous and excellent, which is probably a very strange precursor to the wellness industry.
Neither of my parents are particularly invested in cooking. They both obviously cooked meals for me and my sister and I think did a very good job of that. But I wouldn't credit my like, interest in food to them, so to speak. I was always given the task of doing the “magic stir” at dinner, which was a single stir that would make whatever was being cooked perfect.
Alicia: How did you end up getting into food then?
James: I mean, I read a lot of cookbooks when I was quite young. And I think the first one I got given was a book by Nigel Slater who was a UK food writer who I admire a lot called Real Food, which was divided into chapters based on individual foodstuffs. So I think the main ones were garlic, cheese, chocolate, potatoes, sausages, and I think chicken—all of which are quite appealing categories to someone who's 10 and is interested in cooking. And then I think it mostly started when I finished university and I moved to L...
A Conversation with Karla Vasquez
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
05/21/21 • 45 min
Karla Vasquez is a writer and keeper of culture documenting the women who are keeping Salvadoran food tradition alive in the United States. Her project SalviSoul is putting oral tradition down on paper so that it can’t be lost, and it also points to the significance of specificity when discussing Latin American traditions: The U.S. considers the Latinx community a monolith, when it is actually wildly diverse.
I wanted to discuss with her the inspiration behind this, her experience so far working on a cookbook proposal, and how she expresses her voice authentically on social media. Listen above, or read below.
Alicia: Hi, Karla. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat today.
Karla: Of course! I'm so happy to chat with you today.
Alicia: [Laughs.] Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
Karla: Yes.
So I grew up in L.A. It's where I am right now. And I grew up in a very Salvadoran home. So, that meant a lot of—yeah, a lot of the Salvadoran staples. A lot of polea, a lot of rice, a lot of tortillas. The occasional carne asada over the weekend. Because we were new immigrants in this country, the food was really what told me we were from El Salvador because we didn't have things that I saw other Latino families had around in L.A. There wasn't tacos at the party. It was pupusas. It was tamal de pollo. Yeah, it was a very Salvi-saturated food upbringing.
Alicia: And so, what led you to working in food and founding SalviSoul?
Karla: [Laughs.] There were a few things that led me to this work that I'm doing now. And I guess I can summarize them by pointing to three reasons.
I mean, the fact that my family are just storytellers, and this was—we carried our histories through storytime. So I think wanting to do good storytelling just became a part of just legacy that my family has. When we would sit at the table, when we would have dinner time, it was automatic—we were going to know, we were going to find out more about where we came from and our histories.
So apart from that, a huge reason that led me to SalviSoul and to starting this work was because I had a very personal experience with my health. I became a person who had to deal with a chronic illness. I am a Type 1 diabetic. And in my early 20s, when I was diagnosed, there were a lot of doctors who had good intentions. And a lot of what they said to me were, ‘Diabetes has everything to do with food. And you're Latina, and Latinos eat very poorly. So we would advise you not to eat XYZ.’
And as I mentioned, my upbringing, food was what told me we were from somewhere else. So when I got to experience my culture, it was at the table. And so hearing this kind of recommendation from several doctors and nurses, and it just broke my heart. And I felt like I had to make a decision of, ‘Do I cater my diet to my health, or do I try to figure out if they're—if they maybe don't know the whole truth?’
And that's really what got me into food justice advocacy. And before I did food writing, I was managing farmer’s markets. I was working in low—income areas here in L.A, doing cooking classes, free cooking classes, where we would talk about all the things you can do with all the harvest from the farmers. And so that definitely informed my work.
And as I started to research different cookbooks and really just getting obsessed with the food world and becoming familiar with all the work farmers do to give us options at the farmer’s market, I started to look for Salvadoran cookbooks. And by this point I had been going to cooking school doing a cooking program here in L.A.
And the results that I found when I started researching Salvi cookbooks, I found two. I found two books, and I just thought, like, ‘There's millions of us here, internationally.’ We have had to adapt a transnational identity because so many of us have had to leave El Salvador. And it just felt completely absurd that there wasn't a library, or that the library we had of cookbooks were so limited.
And also that the two books available were not—they weren't things like books from 50 years ago or anything. They were recent, within 10 years—yeah, I think when I found the first English cookbook, it was 2015. And that book had been published in 2013. So, it was relatively new. And I longed to know more. I longed just to understand where—what foods did my family have for fest—for the days of festivals? What foods they have for lazy Sundays? Food was really a way for me to understand where I came from.
And it was a way for me to know, in that passports w...
A Conversation with Jenny Dorsey
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
02/16/22 • 36 min
You're listening to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture podcast. I'm Alicia Kennedy, a food writer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Every week on Wednesdays, I'll be talking to different people in food and culture about their lives, careers and how it all fits together and where food comes in.
Today, I'm talking to Jenny Dorsey, a chef, food writer and executive director of Studio ATAO, a nonprofit think tank that works on changing inequitable systems in food and beyond. We discussed how she went from business school to kitchens, cultural appropriation in fast casual restaurants, and launching a newsletter as a way to find her voice in writing.
Alicia: Hi, Jenny. Thank you so much for being here.
Jenny: Thanks for having me.
Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
Jenny: Yeah, of course.
So I was born in Shanghai, but I grew up in New York. Both my parents were getting their PhDs at Albert Einstein University up in the Bronx. So I feel when I was little, I ate a lot of just food at home. My family was definitely the ‘Why would you ever eat outside? You're wasting money’ sort of vibe. So everything was at home.
There was a lot of eggs and a lot of breads. And of course, every meal has to have a veg. So I kind of grew up with a lots of vegetables and never really understood that idea of like, ‘Vegetables are gross. Kids don't like vegetables.’ I think pea sprouts are my favorite vegetable in the world. Ate a lot of tomato and egg growing up; I think that's a classic Chinese staple. So things that were easy for young 20-something-year-old parents that had no cooking experience and worked all the time to make.
Alicia: [Laughs.] Did you grow up in the Bronx, or did you grow up in a different borough?
Jenny: Yeah, we grew up essentially in the student's compound within the Bronx. So there was some other, yes, children of fellow students that I hung out with. I felt we occasionally were actually able to go out and be with the rest of the Bronx. But a lot of times we were kind of confined in this little area, and so didn't really honestly get as much interfacing with the world outside as I think would have been beneficial to growing up, unfortunately.
Alicia: Yeah, no, I remember Albert Einstein College from driving past. I went to Fordham. So I remember just being like, ‘Ah, the signs.’ That's all I know of it. I'm like, ‘Oh, the signs for Albert Einstein on the Pelham Parkway.’ [Laughs.]
But that's so interesting, to grow up in that kind of environment with—and that's interesting, because I think when we think of the Bronx, we think of Arthur Avenue and we think of so much food diversity and that sort of thing. Do you go back now?
Jenny: Sometimes.
I mean, I try. But I feel I don't even know. Yeah, I didn't know to know. I feel sad about that all the time. I feel elementary school, at least I was able to go to public elementary and kind of learn about the fact that there are such a diverse group of folks up in the Bronx. But so many times when we were just in the student compounds, we’re so sheltered from everyone else. You don't interact with anyone.
And I think this is now, in retrospect, when I have kind of conversations around race and class and social status and immigration with my parents, they were so busy being students, heads down, that they had no concept of what was kind of happening, which is unfortunate. But I think that is—that's kind of a manifestation of how so many things happen here in the U.S., is that you have your own little silo and you don't realize you're in a silo until you're out of it. And that can take years. That could take your entire life.
Alicia: Right.
Well, what was your route to getting into food and becoming a chef?
Jenny: So, I had always been a food person growing up. I loved eating. I planned all of our vacations around eating. So when I was little, my parents really liked going to Vegas. This is after we had moved to Seattle. We weren't going from New York to Vegas. Because of the buffets, and there's a lot of food. And it was fairly inexpensive to go and have a good time. And so, I remember—I think I was like 10. We were going to Vegas, and we never gambled or anything. We would just go and eat at buffets. And I'd be like, ‘This one has this and this one has that. And it was all about the food.’
And so, my mother and father had always been like, ‘Yeah, you kind of like food. But that's not a real career.’ It was ...
A Conversation with Preeti Mistry
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast
02/09/22 • 55 min
Today, I’m talking to Preeti Mistry, a chef, host of the podcast Loading Dock Talks, and an activist for equity in hospitality.
We discussed how they ended up a chef and closing their really well-received Oakland restaurant Juhu Beach Club, being on Top Chef, launching their podcast as an antidote to the whiteness of food media, and more.
Alicia: Hi, thanks so much for being here.
Preeti: Thanks for having me.
Alicia: I think it's wild that this is the first time I'm interviewing you, because I feel like we've been following each other on Twitter for a long time. [Laughter.]
Preeti: I know! I was thinking that. I was like, ‘I don't think we've actually had a conversation that wasn't in 140 characters or DMs.’ [Laughs.]
Alicia: Right. [Laughs.]
Well, I'm excited to finally have that conversation. So can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate?
Preeti: Well, I was born in London, and then we moved to the U.S. when I was five. I mean, I pretty much just ate Gujarati vegetarian food, traditional Gujarati vegetarian food, which is like dar, bhat, rotli, shaak, which basically means dar is dal. Bhat is rice. Rotli is whole-wheat flatbread, and shaak is just whatever vegetables are in season or that my mom cooks in various different ways, from things that are super saucy and spicy to things that are more of like a dry stir-fry. Could be okra and potatoes, which I was not a fan of as a kid. I liked the potatoes, not the okra. Or spinach, or eggplant, or cauliflower. You name it.
And then, I really craved everything that wasn't that. I was super curious about what my family calls ‘outside food.’ And I always wanted outside food. I was just curious. I just wanted to know what other things, you know? You watch TV, and you're like, ‘What is Ponderosa? What happens at a steakhouse? I need to know. Red Lobster.’
I mean, especially the meats and seafood and stuff that I never experienced at home, or at anybody else's home. And my parents were not about to take me there. At least I mean, you don't know. But my parents were not going to take me to those places. I mean, mainly because we didn't have enough money to go to Red Lobster and my mom would just never even step foot inside. She’d just freak out. She's a very staunch vegetarian. My dad eats chicken and lamb and some other random things. I helped him try a scallop once. He was pretty excited about it. He enjoyed it.
But yeah, I mean, so then it was like McDonald's, Taco Bell, that kind of stuff when it wasn't traditional Gujarati Indian food. And we would go out to Indian restaurants, which was the first time I tried all these things that people think that somehow Indian people eat at home, like chicken tikka masala and naan. Newsflash, my mom doesn't have a tandoor.
And just yeah, Mexican, Italian. I don't know if you've heard that before. But generally speaking, most Gujarati Indians that moved to the U.S., the two foods that they generally gravitate towards when not eating Indian food are Mexican and Italian, mainly because they can be made vegetarian relatively easy. And also because they tend to use spices. Obviously, Mexican more so with the heat. And then, my mom is just like, ‘Make me a pasta, put vegetables in it, add chili flakes. I'm happy.’ [Laughter.]
And then for us, it was like, ‘Oh, we could order other stuff.’ So it was, ‘I want to try the chicken fajitas or shrimp cocktail,’ or just all kinds of things that we had never tried before. So, pretty classic Midwestern fast food with a mix of everything from scratch vegetarian Gujarati Indian cuisine most nights.
Alicia: Well, how did you go about getting a culinary education beyond the staples of what you grew up with?
Preeti: I didn't learn. I didn't really have an interest in cooking. I just saw it as another chore and women's work, and I didn't necessarily see myself in my mother. I didn't look at her and think, like, ‘I'm going to be like that one day.’ And so, I wasn't really interested in cooking as much as curious about food.
So it wasn't until I left home. And Ann and I, my wife, we moved to San Francisco. And then I just started getting really bored of outside food. [Laughter.] And so, I started cooking. And that's all how it all started. I just started cooking. I would go to the now famous Bi—Rite grocery store in the Mission and look at what the vegetables were and what was in season, and they had really great fresh pasta, so I'd buy some of that. And I was st...
Show more best episodes
Show more best episodes
FAQ
How many episodes does From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast have?
From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast currently has 115 episodes available.
What topics does From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, Podcasts, Arts and Food.
What is the most popular episode on From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast?
The episode title 'A Conversation with Sandor Katz' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast?
The average episode length on From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast is 37 minutes.
How often are episodes of From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast released?
Episodes of From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast are typically released every 7 days.
When was the first episode of From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast?
The first episode of From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy Podcast was released on May 31, 2018.
Show more FAQ
Show more FAQ