Through her budding foundation, Dipping Spoon, Charity Blanchett is developing an afterschool FoodSTEM curriculum for the Lower Kuskokwim School District in rural Alaska. Through this program, Charity, a Black Indigenous entrepreneur who hails from Wasilla, Alaska, hopes to empower the next generation of scientists, creatives, and leaders with education and access to opportunities within the culinary industry. The most important ingredient in this afterschool curriculum? The students’ Indigenous cultural identity.
Adapted from an existing curriculum created by Chef Alice Waters’ The Edible Schoolyard Project, this afterschool program — which Charity has named #SelfFSTEAM to fully capture the spirit of the program — explores food and cultural identity through science, technology, engineering, arts, and math, preparing the students with practical skills that can follow them into their future endeavors.
“Our students are learning everything about cooking, having a clean kitchen, learning the anatomy of a knife and how to use it properly, and all the different terms like dicing, slicing, julienning,” Charity explained. But her program is empowering them with more than just practical skills. “Everything I’ve created for Dipping Spoon is really rooted in my identity. It’s important to me to make sure the next generation understands their cultural identity is unique magic, it’s so special.”
Notably, many of the students who live in this rural, isolated region are Indigenous. Because of the geography of the region, they 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. Just look up Charity’s mother’s home village Tuntutuliak on a map. You’ll see that the surrounding region resembles a Monet-like masterpiece daubed with blue and green brushstrokes, tucked between the Yukon and the Kuskokwim Rivers. Every incoming arrival — food, the mail, or even visitors — must arrive via air or boat to their villages.
“Growing up as a little girl, I grew up eating traditional Yupik cuisine,” said Charity. “Lots of fish, wild game, caribou, moose, seal, whale (we call it muktuk), seal oil, dried fish, smoked fish, herring, herring eggs… sometimes they were frozen, sometimes they were raw. Everything was dipped in seal oil.”
In Alaska, because indigenous cuisine hasn’t been studied by the USDA or FDA, it’s illegal to purchase many of these foods in restaurants or the grocery store. Charity emphasizes how much this limits access to Indigenous ancestral foods, a federal hurdle that harms Indigenous communities by severing them from their own heritage. “But I feel like if our students are able to action out science and math, they could essentially lead the way in public policy change for the State of Alaska and maybe set a precedent for other areas.” Eventually, she’d like to team up with food science programs in higher education so that the barriers around Indigenous cuisine can be lifted.
Exploring Indigenous Cuisine Through Education
But first, she’s busy sparking the curiosity of younger students through #SelfFSTEAM, where students get to make everything from scratch while exploring their unique cultural identity, as well as other cultures. “We have moose, so let’s make ground moose meat or ground caribou! We can make our own caribou curry, our own tacos, our own stir fry with it. Showcasing to our students that they literally can do all these amazing things with [traditional sources of] food has really been exciting.”
“At the end of the day, Indigenous food is really healthy for you! It’s good for you,” she added. “When you live a subsistence lifestyle, you’re not relying on things that have been made from science to keep things tasting great for long periods of time in your cupboard or your refrigerator.”
Charity has created a subsistence harvest map of every single thing that’s available seasonally in rural Alaska: wild game, fresh berries, different types of leaves. “We’re going to use our subsistence way of living and integrate that into this already existing curriculum.” She reminded me that in the tundra, it’s deep winter nine months out of the year, so seasonality is on a very specific timeline — and greenhouses certainly aren’t a thing.
Charity pointed out that a subsistence lifestyle is what people might consider “organic.” Reclaiming the concept of organic through an Indigenous lens will help to empower the students when they go to the big city or to Anchorage where “organic” is synonymous with “expensive.“ “They don’t realize that actually farm to table is nothing new! These students need to realize that all these terms that they deem expensive is actually a way of life that they have been living.”
Forging Identity Through Family and Food
Though Charity doesn’t come from a teaching background, she grew up with what she calls “a champion mentality,” something that has served her well as an entrepreneur in the nonprofit sector. She credits this champion mentality to having five brothers. “It wasn’t until I was 15 years old that my parents adopted my little sister from birth, so for the most part, for the majority of my life, I grew up with guys. I had to be very loud to make sure my voice was heard.”
She’s also the daughter of community leaders, so it seems only fitting that she’s found her own calling as a leader whose work serves the community. Both her parents have worked as pastors for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church — her father, who is Black, set roots in Alaska after serving in Vietnam; and her mother, who is Yupik, is from Tuntutuliak.
Her namesake, too, reflects her spirit of service. “My Yupik name is Qalutaq. It means dipping spoon, and the literal meaning of dipping spoon is From one dip you serve other people, dip into water and the water is given to everybody, it grows and keeps going. So my western name, Charity, and my indigenous Yupik name, Qalutaq, are both names rooted in love and sharing and serving and community.”
Her strong sense of identity she attributes to her mother’s traditional Indigenous values. “She made sure that even though we didn’t grow up in the village, we still had access to our cultural identity, and a huge part of that is traditional food,” she explained. “All my life I saw my mother and my aunties working with their hands and they weren’t afraid of anything.”
She described walking into the kitchen to find the women breaking down a beaver or moose, hands covered in blood and bone. “To see hands just covered in raw, natural elements… I was just so fascinated. To this day I’m very attracted to hands. I’m like, ‘Oh nice to meet you!’ and I immediately look at the person’s hands.”
When her mother wasn’t preparing Indigenous cuisine, she was cooking out of her Betty Crocker Cookbook or sneaking global cuisines into her childrens’ diet, something that helped to shape Charity’s interest in food. “Had my mom told us what exactly she was cooking, I don’t think my brothers and I would have eaten it! We would’ve been really picky.” It wasn’t until Charity and her siblings were older that they realized they had been eating a lot of Thai food or Japanese food, for instance.
“What I really remember, since there’s so many people in my family, when there was a birthday of any sort, my mom would have a big feast and she would do Thanksgiving cuisine eight or ten times out of the year,” Charity recalled. “She’d do a big turkey and all the fixings on one table, and then on the next table she would have all of her Indigenous food. That would be every single birthday, and of course every single holiday. And it actually was a nice way to introduce our food to our classmates as well. They would be like, ‘What’s this?’ My mom would be like, “FOOD.” And then she would just load whatever it was on their plate.”
A Pivotal Shift
Charity set roots in New Orleans a couple years ago, which ended up being a pivotal move for her on a personal and professional level. For one thing, New Orleans’ unique food scene expanded her conception of flavor and culture, as it does for most newcomers. “No matter if you are Black, white, Creole, Cajun, a mixed family, everyone is an excellent cook here,” she observed. New Orleans food culture also resonated with her personal relationship to food. “Everyone has a grandmother’s gumbo recipe, and they’re passed down from generation to generation. That reminds me of where I grew up. Everything was passed down from generation to generation.”
Despite the vibrant food scene, it was in New Orleans that Charity was inspired to found Dipping Spoon. “It wasn’t until I moved here that I realized there was a complete lack of cultural and gender representation in the culinary and hospitality industry. But not just those industries. Every single industry that food touches."
It's not for lack of talent. Since we interviewed her shortly before Black History Month, she shared with us a few of her favorite Black female chefs who are working in the industry today, including her dear friend Kerry Stewart, the head chef at Willie Mae's in NOLA's history Treme neighborhood; Anchorage-born Kaylah Thomas who works as a chef and baker out of South Carolina; Mashama Bailey, the James Beard award-winning head chef at The Grey in Savannah, Georgia; and activist-chef Sophia Roe, whose show Counter Space on Vice earned her an Emmy nomination.
"And then it made me think about where I come from, where I grew up. Did I ever see my culture anywhere? And the answer was no.”
Charity had no experience in the nonprofit world, but her champion mentality carried her through. “I went to Barnes and Noble and bought the Nonprofit Kit Book for Dummies,” she unabashedly admitted. To take things to the next level, she applied and was accepted into a fellowship called Vital Voices that cultivates the next generation of female leadership. Vital Voices helped to structurally organize Dipping Spoon and set her up with access to different types of networking opportunities.
Through Dipping Spoon, Charity was prepared to launch BIPOC women, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and femme students into the culinary industry by offering a full-ride scholarship and support to the New Orleans Culinary & Hospitality Institute.
A Return to Roots
And then 2020 happened. The pandemic foiled Charity’s best-laid plans for Dipping Spoon. “All of the fundraisers that I had planned for Dipping Spoon in New Orleans were canceled, and I went through a moment of deep self pity and wallowing,” she admits, laughing. But she quickly pivoted her focus to developing #SelfFSTEAM, a program that she’d already had on her mind.
#SelfFSTEAM got a serious jump start when Charity received some early press in a local Alaskan paper for her work with Dipping Spoon. She was contacted by Alex Bernard, the director of a program called Gear Up, who proposed partnering with her to build an afterschool culinary science program in the LKSD.
The program is off to a good start with students meeting every other week, giving the program enough time between sessions to have food shipped in for the next meeting. #SelfFSTEAM is currently being piloted in three schools within LKSD. “The first school we piloted was actually in my mother’s village — I’m related to everyone there, so I’m incredibly honored,” said Charity. But she’s got her sights set on loftier goals. “Our goal next year is to be in every single school in the district. And then I would love to grow it nationally!” Her intention would be to expand the program to other Indigenous communities where students have limited access to fresh food.
Charity gearing up to lead an in-person culinary intensive for the LKSD in April. “My inspiration is Samin Nosrat’s show Salt Fat Acid Heat,” inspired by Nosrat’s cookbook which goes beyond recipes to break down elements of taste and make cooking accessible. Charity explained that the first four days of the intensive will be dedicated to one of each of these culinary elements. “And then on the fifth day, we're going to combine everything we’ve learned to create a beautiful meal for the elders.”
Through #SelfFSTEAM, Charity ultimately hopes that Indigenous students will be empowered by their culture. “I want them to definitely understand your cultural identity matters. Your cultural identity isn’t just what you look like, it’s traditional values. It’s our food, it’s our language. I want them to not feel any shame behind it because it’s their raw power, an ancestral blueprint that has been passed down from generation to generation.”
How Charity Likes to Cook Wild-Caught Seafood
For Charity, crispy pan-seared salmon is comfort food:
I believe the most simple ingredients create the most lovely, vibrant flavors! I really do love just a pan-seared, crispy cut of salmon. A few minutes on one side, turn it over, a few minutes on the other. I love fresh cracked pepper, a great olive oil — and Maldon sea salt is my jam! I love Maldon sea salt. That’s typically my go-to. It’s healthy, it’s delicious. But it’s also a comfort food as well.
Halibut en papillote is her favorite way to freestyle:
I love halibut wrapped in parchment paper, and I typically will do it with olive oil, butter, and whatever my heart desires. A mandoline of fennel, or asparagus, or capers, or shallots, and wrap it all in parchment and pop it in the oven. It’s just delicious — and easy cleanup! I don’t mind doing dishes, but if it’s a dish where I don’t have to do a lot of dishes, I’m all about it.
