CULTURE KITCHEN
Who
A tech-guru with a big heart, Adrianna Tan runs Wobe, a tech startup in Indonesia that works with low-income Indonesian women around digital payments and businesses. She is also working on the Gyanada Foundation, a scholarship board for young Indian girls in five cities across the country. On top of all that, she runs Singapore-based Culture Kitchen, a citizen-driven food project.
What
Culture Kitchen hosts a free-for-all dinner party every quarter that shines the spotlight on a specific non-citizen community in Singapore. The last dinner not only showcased the cuisine of The Philippines but it gave diners an insight what the community does, what they eat and stories behind the food. As Culture Kitchen puts it, “Every Kitchen is different. Every Kitchen is delicious.”
Diners are required to pay a nominal fee of $5-10 to get a deliciously authentic meal as well as the chance to meet people from the showcased community and to learn a little bit about their lives and cuisine. However, the dinners are temporarily put on hold for a few reasons relating to venue size and impact. Tan shares that Kitchen Culture is now working to come back with greater capacity and impact and the next cuisine and culture to be featured would very likely be Kerala.
Why
Having been born and bred in Singapore but away for five years before returning in 2012, Tan found her senses heightened to realise how quick we were as a society to point fingers at foreigners whenever the topic of overpopulation arose; in particular, foreigners with the lowest social and economic capital - the migrant labourers.
“You can't even refer to them as a group in other ways - migrant workers, domestic help, migrant retail assistants, foreign workers, whichever way you spin it - without having those terms indicate their status,” Tan lamented. “I decided I wanted to start something small to examine what I can do later - that would have more impact. The dinner parties were the genesis of the Culture Kitchen that is taking shape now.”
