123: The Power of Showcasing Immigrant Restaurant Stories with Maggie Leandre of CharisMaggie

“It’s very hard to get immigrants who have restaurants to talk about their story... They’re very humble, they’re very shy, they just want to be in the background. And with the world we’re living in today, where the hottest restaurant can get traction because of the power of social media, and they have a PR team behind them – your mum and pop shops in Toronto that are serving the most amazing ethnic cuisine, that’s really true to the taste of the country, they are usually at risk of not getting enough customers or coverage because they’re not as savvy. I want to get more of these stories out there, going beyond the food. ”
— Maggie Leandre, Host of Kitchens of Toronto

If you’ve been a regular listener to this podcast, you know that food is central to all of our discussions around identity, culture, belonging, and sense of place.

My guest today is someone who excels at bringing these relationships to life through her YouTube channel, and speaks to the layers of personal experience she has had growing up and living across multiple countries and cultures. Maggie Leandre is here today, who is the host and producer of CharisMaggie on YouTube. CharisMaggie content showcases countries and cultures through lived experience. Maggie’s cultural background is Guyanese, Haitian, and Jamaican, and she uses her YouTube platform to share her journey of learning about her roots while unlearning biases and stereotypes that society portrays about different cultural groups and countries. 

Through her visually stunning videos, she explores cultural histories, creole languages, and ethnic cuisine. Today, we’re speaking about how she structures her video content to position food as a learning tool for diverse cultural cuisines and languages, and she shares some of the stories about her brilliant Kitchens of Toronto series on her YouTube channel. Season 2 just dropped a couple of weeks ago so be sure to check that out after this interview, too!

Follow and Watch Maggie's Work! 

122: Celebrating The Diversity of Torontonian Food Through The Depanneur Cookbook With Len Senater

“The strength is in the diversity we have. The Depanneur, by inviting all these different people in, really became a mirror of the remarkable diversity of the city. And so that’s one of the things I’m proud of in the book. It’s going out with cooks from 80 different countries in one book. That speaks to the food culture of Toronto more than any one particular kind of dish.”
— Len Senater

When I think of a quintessentially Torontonian food experience, I tend to think of The Depanneur. Founded in 2011, The Depanneur was a tiny old corner store that transformed into a place where interesting food things happen, featuring hundreds of talented cooks and home chefs serving thousands of eclectic meals through unique Drop-In Dinners, cooking classes, table talks, and supper clubs. It was also the birthplace of Newcomer Kitchen, a non-profit social enterprise that helped create social and economic opportunities for Syrian refugee women through food-based projects. 

Today on the show is the founder of The Depp, Len Senater, who speaks to the way he created space in Toronto’s increasingly gentrified hospitality world to maintain experimental approaches about food’s role in building community and celebrating diversity. He shares the story behind his recently launched cookbook, The Depanneur Cookbook, which launched as a Kickstarter campaign in November 2020. Equal parts documentary, manifesto, and cookbook, the book features delicious food, poignant stories, and beautiful photography by Ksenija Hotic. More than just a collection of authentic home cooking from around the world, it is the only cookbook that truly captures the incredible culinary diversity of Toronto.

Learn More About Len: 

121: Exploring the Relationship between Fish Hacks, Porgy, and Black Maritime Culture with Dr. Jayson M. Porter

Anytime I get to talk about water and seafood on this show feels like a really special week for me, as I have spent most of my life thinking about how we connect with or form relationships around water. My guest, Dr. Jayson M. Porter, this week takes a really nuanced approach to this through a recent article he wrote called Fish Hacks for Distillations, which is a magazine and podcast that covers science’s historical impact on culture and society. In his article, he looks at a fish called porgy, which has often been dismissed as a “trash fish” but holds an important anchor in Black maritime culture in America.

 Jayson is an environmental writer and historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the Institute at Brown of Environment and Society. His research specializes in environmental politics, science and technology studies, foods ystems, and racial ecologies in Mexico and the Americas. He is also an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Outside of academia, he loves to connect with other black environmental educators, write creative non-fiction stories, and design environmental-literacy curricula for broader audiences of all ages. 

In today’s episode, he shares some of the stories and lenses he brought to writing this article, how he wove his family’s personal histories through his Poppy’s fish hacking with the broader ecology of ocean landscapes, Black-operated fisheries, and explores the nuances (and limits) of scientific and historic knowledges that can shape the questions we ask about our individual and collective pasts.

Learn More About Jayson:

120: Making Sense of Misunderstood Vegetables through Humour and Celebration with Becky Selengut

Often when we make our grocery runs, time and money are on our mind – which can quickly lead to following a stringent list of household classics and crowd pleasers. But sometimes, in the corner of your eye, you might catch a new to you vegetable and wonder what the heck it is, or how it works. My guest today, Becky Selengut, is here to provide knowledge and humour in getting to know these misunderstood vegetables more.

Becky is a chef, author, instructor, and podcaster based in Seattle, and her latest cookbook is Misunderstood Vegetables: How to Fall in Love with Sunchokes, Rutabaga, Eggplant, and More out everywhere today. Her earlier books include How to Taste, Shroom, Good Fish, and Not One Shrine. When she’s not the chef aboard the M/V Thea Foss, Becky is also the cohost of the local foods podcast Field to Fork, forages for wild foods, makes a mean Manhattan, and shares her life with her sommelier wife April Pogue and their loony pointer mix Izzy and vocally gifted cat Jinx.

 Becky is on the show today to explore the story behind her new cookbook, discussing what makes a vegetable misunderstood, how she works with learners and readers to make food and cooking more approachable and fun, the ways that foraging and misunderstood vegetables can connect us back to land and nature, and why it’s important to think about seasonality when writing a cookbook. While Becky’s humorous and playful approach makes these elusive vegetables less daunting, she also shares some underlying messages about how food and our own understandings of belonging are intertwined too.

Learn More About Becky:

119: De-stigmatizing Harm Reduction, Mental Health, and Drug Use in Alberta with Danielle English

We’ve spoken a bit this season about the drug poisoning crisis and how breweries can work to support their neighbours using substances, but with this affecting so many across Canada, I wanted to come back to this topic with some more dimensions. My guest this week is Danielle English, who’s on to share more about harm reduction strategies and unpack the misconceptions and stigma that surround drug use and poverty. 

Danielle is a harm reduction and mental health advocate who comes from a background of lived and living experience. She does grass roots activism and lobbies for policy changes that will support people who use drugs. Danielle advocates for safe drug supplies and safe spaces for people who use drugs, and uses her own experiences navigating the mental health system to demonstrate the issues with the province of Alberta’s current resources. 

In today’s conversation, Danielle explores the power, structures, and policies that are upholding harmful misconceptions about adequate and appropriate care for those who use drugs. Danielle provides resources, strategies, and lived experience knowledge to demonstrate how these are affecting many people throughout our communities, and how we can seek out resources and strategies to provide harm reduction to our own communities.

I will give a topic warning for this episode, as we discuss drug use, sexual abuse, and traumatic experiences that shape mental health. This interview is an incredibly important one for me, in how she speaks truth to so much fear and stigma around why people use drugs, and I encourage you to listen to her story.

Resources from Danielle: 

118: Pink Gold - Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico with Dr. María L. Cruz-Torres

The idea of fish industry tends to feel big, vague, and hyper-masculine – it’s easy to think of tales of fisherman and ideals of masculinity. But as my guest this week shares, there are so many complexities to how gender, fishing, and identities intersect. 

My guest this week is Dr. María L. Cruz-Torres. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and a cultural anthropologist whose areas of teaching and research include: political ecology; impact of globalization upon local communities and households; gender and work; sustainability and the environment; migration; food systems; and the environmental and social aspects of natural resource management. Her research has always combined a mixed methods approach of qualitative ethnography, ecological analysis, archival research, and household surveys.

She speaks today about the “shrimp ladies” in southern Sinaloa, Mexico, who are locally known as changueras. Through her new book Pink Gold: Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico, María describes how women shrimp vendors sell seafood in open-air markets that form an extralegal but key part of the local economy built around this “pink gold.” She shares the stories of how the women struggled and evolved from marginalized peddlers to local icons depicted in popular culture, and how their roles in Sinaloa and Mazatlan offer fresh insights into gender and labour, street economies, and commodities as culturally valuable experiences.

Learn More About María: