Recipes for Equity is a blog hosted by Onward that shares ingredients and instructions for bringing people together. Some recipes are for meals, and other "recipes" provide strategies for making more inclusive communities.
Food connects us to our culture and our family. It’s a way to show care for each other. But what do you do when you live in Arkansas and you can’t find the ox tail and fermented shrimp to make Filipino kare-kare the way your family taught you? You improvise some sotanghon instead.
Check out Marielle Narcisa’s spin on her family recipe for sotanghon, and her perspective on how food connects us to loved ones, past and present.
Read a letter from Thaly Germain, Onward’s founder and CEO, welcoming you to Recipes for Equity.
“She’s gonna make a mess. They’re gonna be a bad mess about her. She’s a jail bait all set on the trigger. That Curley got his work cut out for him. Ranch with a bunch of guys ain’t no place for a girl, specially like her.”
~ George. Of Mice and Men, Chapter 3, by John Steinbeck
“We knew that there could be no real sisterhood between white women and women of color if white women were not able to divest of white supremacy”
-bell hooks
Michael Scott: “The most fundamental thing about sensitivity training is that you cannot make fun of a person for some thing or some action that they have done that they regret. You can only make fun of things that they have control over. Like, Oscar is gay. That is his choice. We can make fun of that. I did not choose to fall into a koi pond. . . .”
Toby Flenderson: “Michael you still can’t make fun of people for race or gender or sexual orientation or religion…”
~ The Office, “Koi Pond,” Episode 608 (2009)
How do you define “culture?”
At Onward, we think of culture as the day-to-day habits that we live in, the assumptions that we don’t question. It’s the stuff that surrounds us all the time, that has been handed down to us, or that we’ve gotten used to. Culture defines what we think of as “normal.”
Everyone laughs. Across cultures and places, something can tickle your funny bone and before you know it, you’re laughing so hard that your sides ache and tears are on your cheeks. Laughter is something that unites us.
Except when it doesn’t.
