What is Kindred Kitchen?
Kindred Kitchen was started out of a combined passion and need for community building and cultural uplift in the face of so much adversity. Our vision is to educate our audience on the significance of various cultural communities both here in America and globally, and to shine a light on issues being faced by each of these communities through two universal connectors: food and movies. For each blog post, we select a film, do research into creating a meal that features and pays homage to each culture's cuisine and ingredients, and create a written narrative that highlights the community and draws attention to adversities being faced by them. To truly make this a success, we feel it is important to feature and support restaurants, local businesses, and food producers belonging to these communities in each and every post. Our hope is for our blog to become a vehicle for the creation of a local, national, and even global community of small businesses and producers. We hope you will join us on this journey and become a part of our food family!
Diane Melano
Diane loves food. She also has a passion for learning about cultures through food. Using her background as a Functional Nutritional Therapist and Microbiology and Fermentation allows for questions to be asked. Questions like: what is nutrition around the world? What has formed the items and accessibility for the “superfoods” known today?
Over the past few years she has been developing a research and practice approach that activates food studies research to explore cultural and social issues and contexts, introduce innovation in future The Beneficial Bakery products, and provide support to small companies and businesses.
Diane’s approach to this blog is understanding of culture that bridges food heritage and traditions in the present with the future through trends, expectations, aspirations while exploring conflicting priorities, needs, and values, which shape the negotiations taking place around food and the food system. For both her and Kate, it is critical to cultivate a teamwork attitude that can lead to collaborations with farmers, artists, small businesses both locally and internationally.
Kaitlyn O'Malley
Kate has had a lifelong love of food, learning the importance of family food traditions and connecting generations through recipes from her grandmother and father. Earning a degree in anthropology and sociology, she had a need to connect her love for food to her passion for uplifting the local and global communities she noticed facing so much adversity that was getting swept under the rug by mainstream media. What started as a fun idea to do themed dinner and movie nights quickly transformed into something much bigger than both Kate and Diane, using both of these things as a vehicle to create social change and raise the voices of these community members who have been calling out for so long.
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