Think Global, Eat (Gourmet) Local

Nadine Nelson’s culinary roots extend to Jamaica; her geographical roots, Canada. In New Haven, we’re reaping the benefits.

WNHH radio’s ​“LoveBabz LoveTalk” host Babz Rawls-Ivy dubbed Nelson (pictured) the ​“Epicurean Goddess,” during a recent episode where the two dished about ​“food, the politics of food, pop­ups, and why she ain’t got no restaurant.” Portions of the discussion follow.

Jamaican Culinary Roots

Rawls-­Ivy: Talk about your relationship to food. Because I’m a chef by trade, I don’t cook professionally anymore. I love food, I’m a foodie, and I have a severe dairy allergy, so it sort of limits what I can eat. But it doesn’t really, because I’m fat, so I’m eating something, right? But the food industry has really blossomed and grown a great deal since I was a culinary student. So tell me about your food life.

Nelson:I am the chef, owner, and educator of Global Local Gourmet, an interactive culinary event company. We specialize in culinary education. I’ve always loved food. I’ve always been fascinated by hanging out in kitchens and going foraging and hanging out in farms and gardens and being outside and being connected to where our food comes from. I think my love of food maybe comes from my family. I am Jamaican.

Rawls-­Ivy: Oh, I didn’t know that!

Nelson:I grew up in Toronto, I was born in Toronto, Canada. Toronto is a very multicultural city. I grew up, every Friday, going out to different neighborhoods with my mom and eating different types of food. The motto of Jamaica is ​“Out of many one people.” A lot of people don’t realize that Jamaica has obviously a great African influence; however there are lots of different people that have come to Jamaica. There’s a Middle Eastern influence, there’s an Indian influence, there’s a Chinese influence. My love of food has always been cultivated around lots of different types of people and having a curiosity for information and being comfortable in the kitchen. I think that going to Jamaica with my grandparents — my grandfather was a farmer, my grandmother was a cafeteria worker. My grandfather was also a fisherman. They grew up cultivating their own food because they had 12 kids. I grew up going to the beach and going out fishing with my grandfather and my cousins, and seeing my grandmother take care of chickens, seeing her kill a chicken, cooking over a coal stove. Then coming back to Canada, where I had friends from all around the world, and hanging out with their grandmothers and their parents in the kitchen. Learning about beef tongue from my Jewish friends or Scottish food from my neighbor. I have cousins who are Trinidadian or from St. Lucia or other islands in the Caribbean — learning about all their foods and having access to those foods all the time.

Rawls-­Ivy: I like that. So the Jamaican culture is rich. The food is very rich, like in a lot of black cultures. You have your staple items that have to be served, have to be made. Do you feel any pressure to stay true to the foundation of Jamaican cooking, or do you feel like it’s the foundation that everything else springs from? How do you work that?

Nelson:For me, I’m very connected to my culture, and I know how to make traditional food. As a teacher, I think it’s really important to have a foundation, to know the history of something. However, as a person and in my personal style, it’s very much to do things differently. I can make traditional rice and peas or curried chicken or things that people relate to as typical Jamaican food, but then growing up in North America, I am going to make plantains with fish tartar and jerk seasoning and a scallion drizzle. Is that typically Jamaican? Jamaicans don’t typically eat raw fish. Because I’ve grown up in North America, and one of my really good friends is Bun Lai from Miya’s sushi, I’ve grown up eating sushi. I love sushi, I love Japanese food, Japanese aesthetic, the spices, the way of preparing food has influenced me. I love raw fish, and is that typically Jamaican? No. But it has Jamaican flavors, and it’s who I am as a person. I’m staying true to who I am as a person. If someone asked me for traditional Jamaican food I’ll make it for them, but if I’m going to do something that is a reflection of me, it’s going to be something really different. I love tropical flavors, I love Jamaican flavors. I use curry, I use jerk. I love passionfruit, June plums, jackfruit and all that kind of stuff. But I’m going to twist it up and make it a little different with the techniques I’ve learned from different places. I want to create a continuum. I think that in culture, it’s really important that we have an opportunity to keep aspects of culture that we want to. For me, it would also be very boring for me to make rice and peas or curried chicken the same way. You were talking about having a restaurant. One of the things about having a restaurant — my personality is very spontaneous, and I like to improvise. That’s my style that teaches people how to cook. I can teach you a recipe, which you have to memorize, or I can teach you a structure, a strategy, or a formula. If I teach you how to make a [salad] dressing, I want you to understand the components of a dressing so that you can make it by yourself.

Who You Calling A Food Desert?

Rawls-­Ivy: Let’s change gears a little bit. I’m on the board of Common Ground [high school], and I have two children over there. This whole idea of farm-­to­-table — which isn’t a new concept because I think this is how we used to eat before fast food and highly processed foods — but there seems to be a great deal of interest in farm to table. What are your thoughts on this? How political is this for you? How personal is this for you, and are we having the right conversations around farm-­to-­table eating?

Nelson: I’m chair of the Cooking and Food Education Group for the New Haven Food Policy Council. I think that, as you said, the way that it’s couched sometimes within our society is that there’s a disconnect. When I’m doing trainings on wellness, and especially in certain populations, I’ll ask people the question, ​“Do you know someone who farms?” Most people have someone who farms in their family, or gardens. This whole notion that we have a disconnection to farm-to-table, we really are probably only starting the disconnection in one generation. A lot of people’s grandparents’ or uncle’s farm. So is there a renewed commitment to it? Yes, because people see that in eating processed food, you feel better when you eat organic food.

I don’t like using terms like ​“food desert.” I grew up in Newhallville, and people would say that Newhallville is a food desert. Are there any big box stores there? No. Are there a lot of community gardens, and are people growing food in their backyard as they always have been? Yes. Does that mean that Newhallville is a food desert? I like to look at things in a positive way, because then you can see a positive solution. So there are people growing gardens. How can they help other people to grow gardens? We have these sages in our community who have been [gardening]. How can we empower them to share their knowledge with other people, to inspire young people to garden and understand how to grow food for themselves? I do think a lot of these terms are political, and I do think that farm-­to-­table brings up the notion of ​“I can’t afford organic food.” I try to show people that they can afford organic food, like with our programming, and with our Master Cooks Corps, where your son is a junior member. We have people who are interested in cooking who we train. One thing we want people to understand is that they can feel empowered to do things and show people within the community to garden, to cook. To have access, and also education. A lot of people are not talking about education when we talk about food policy. If you want people to buy more organic food, they have to be educated on why it’s important to buy organic food, or how they can buy organic food with their budget. In the summer time, you can go to CitySeed Market and get organic collard greens for a dollar a bunch. They might not be as big as the ones in the supermarket, but if you knew the farmer who grew our collard greens and you knew that they weren’t sprayed with pesticides that could potentially give you cancer, it’s a really good investment. And it’s really not that much more expensive. And the more people who buy, the more you have supply and demand, which, as you can see at Walmart and Costco, people are growing more organic food as more people are buying it. That has all happened through education.

Rawls-­Ivy: So Nadine, are you noticing that people are starting to make the connection between their health and what they eat? That buying local helps support health?

Nelson: Eighty percent of our health is based on what we eat, not genetics, actually. I think more people need to realize that, that they have control over how they feel, and that food is medicine. My mom was a working woman, and she cooked a fresh meal, unprocessed, very old ­school Jamaican. Still to this day, she cooks rice and peas on Sunday, Saturday is soup day, we have a big pot of soup. I drink soup for breakfast because I find it very nourishing — it has beans, it has vegetables. Many people drink soup or congees or porridges all around the word. I try to meet people where they’re at.

Popping Up

Rawls-­Ivy: Let’s talk about pop­-ups. I had the owner of Lena’s Cafe on, and she bought the restaurant, already established, and she took the menu. She talked about how she didn’t dare try to be innovative because the regular customers were still coming there and they didn’t appreciate change. People get used to a menu, and like you said, they want it the same way every time, because that’s what they know. I understand that because I go to restaurants and I want whatever I want and it has to be the same, and I’ll be a little bit bent out of shape if it’s not there, or there’s a variation on it. So this idea of a pop­up, talk to me about that. Because this is a new cultural phenomenon. I’ve seen them around what you do with cooking, and I’ve seen them around boutiques and the selling of goods, jewelry and stuff like that. I’ve seen them around art. Talk a little bit about how you got into that, why it works for you, and why you like it so.

Nelson: People always ask me why I don’t have a restaurant. I know how to cook for a lot of people because I come from a big family. I do like to cook for people, I just don’t want to cook the same thing all the time. What I like about a pop­up is I can envision an idea for a certain period of time, I can commit to that, and I can do it really well. I like that aspect. Last year I had a pop­up called Downtown Table, and it was based on having brunch, because New Haven doesn’t have all that many places you can go to for breakfast on Sundays. So I saw an opportunity. Also I wanted to exercise my skills in cooking for a lot of people in a way that was fun and true to who I am as a culinary artist. So if was based on exposing people to seasonal foods and also eating breakfast foods from around the world. Bringing people from different aspects of New Haven together.

Rawls-­Ivy: I saw it, I saw it on Facebook, and I wanted to go. I think I talked to someone in your organization about it — you know I have this dairy allergy and I want to come, I don’t know if I can eat—

Nelson: One of the things that people love about me is that I know how to accommodate lots of people. No matter the kind of dietary restriction that you have, we would be able to accommodate it. What was great about it was there was no set menu, so coming in the didn’t know what they were going to have. We were cooking things right then and there. If we had an omelette with cheese, we could make one that did not have any [cheese].

Rawls-­Ivy: That’s what someone said to me. I wanted to go so bad, but I said, oh, I can’t risk it. But I was excited! I think that’s a wonderful idea, this pop­up. So the pop­up allows you to be innovative and cook all kinds of different things.

Nelson: Yes. Also I do pop­ups with Arts and Ideas. I have these pop up interactive cooking tents.

Rawls-­Ivy: My son participated.

Nelson: Yes, he did a demo. It’s great because you might not be able to make a commitment to having cooking classes all the time, but it’s a way to generate interest in something, and also introduce people to a concept. Then you can build on that if you prove to have a successful record. With the interactive culinary pop­ups, we’ve partnered with the libraries to have programs there. To fill the void of culinary education in New Haven. Hopefully we’ll be able to get funding for extended programming, but with these pop­ups we’re able to show proof of concept. With Arts an Ideas, we had over 500 people at five different popups.

Click on or download the above sound file to hear the entire interview, which aired on WNHH radio.

This interview is part of WNHH-LP’s ​“Open For Business” series on immigrant business owners and leaders in the nonprofit community. ​“Open for Business is sponsored by Frontier Communications. Frontier is proud to be Connecticut’s hometown provider of TV and internet for your home and business. Their phone number is 1.888.Frontier and their website is Frontier.com