One of my favorite parts of national heritage months is the opportunity to take a deeper dive into U.S. history and to celebrate something or someone I may not have known before. Since February is Black History Month, I’d like to help kick off this heritage month with a little Alaska flair by shining a spotlight on Charity Blanchett, a biracial Black Indigenous entrepreneur who hails from Wasilla, Alaska.
Our team recently interviewed Charity to ask her about her work as the founder of Dipping Spoon, her fledgling nonprofit foundation that hopes through education to advance BIPOC women, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and femme students as they break into the culinary industry. Dipping Spoon is also in the midst of developing an afterschool FoodSTEM curriculum called #SelfFSTEAM for the Lower Kuskokwim School District in rural Alaska, where most of the student body is Indigenous. Many of the students who live in this rural, isolated region have limited access to fresh produce integral to Indigenous cuisine, which makes it very difficult for them to understand or even take an interest in their traditional foods and values.
Charity’s curriculum, which she’s adapted from Alice Waters' The Edible Schoolyard Project, explores Indigenous cultural identity through cooking while empowering students with practical skills that they’ll be able to take along with them to their future endeavors. Her program expands out globally, too, embracing different types of cuisine and adapting it with local ingredients that traditionally would be utilized in a subsistence lifestyle.
You can read all about #SelfFSTEAM, more about Charity’s exploration of her own unique cultural identity, and even about how she likes to prepare seafood (hint: simple approaches with high-quality ingredients!), in the profile that is up on our blog now.
Being an enthusiastic foodie, Charity also shared with us a few of her favorite Black chefs who are working in the industry today. She mentioned Emmy-nominated Sophia Roe who you might know from Instagram or from her show on Vice, Anchorage-born Kaylah Thomas who works as a chef and baker out of South Carolina, and Mashama Bailey, the head chef at The Grey in Savannah, Georgia.
Beyond talent, a common thread between these chefs is their willingness to be vulnerable when sharing about their personal and professional struggles working in an industry where only about 4 percent of head cooks and working chefs are Black women. I was particularly thrilled to see Mashama on Charity’s list, as I have had Mashama’s memoir Black, White, and The Grey on my reading wishlist for a minute! Mashama won the prestigious James Beard Award for Best Chef in her region in 2019 for her work at The Grey, one of the top restaurants in the nation, if not the world. I am eagerly looking forward to a quiet moment when I can curl up with this book to follow her story.
I hope that you, too, will find a moment to appreciate the stories that our shared heritage months have to offer.
Live Wild,
Monica
P.S. You may have noticed we’ve been featuring cultural awareness months in our Anchor Points newsletters. It’s part of our ongoing commitment to celebrate and promote diversity, inclusion and equity — which we aim to lovingly foster in our workplace and among our community. We invite you to read more of Monica’s Anchor Points here and in your inbox every week.
Pictured above: A portrait of Charity Blanchett looking fierce on a rocky, snow-covered shore somewhere in her home state of Alaska. (Photo credit: Joy Demmert of Juneau, AK)
