If there’s one thing Madhushree Ghosh has faith in, it’s the power of a great meal to unite people across whatever might divide them. Anyone who’s met her will tell you the first thing out of her mouth after “hello” is usually, “When can I feed you?”
By day, Ghosh works in global oncology diagnostics and strategy, a career she calls her “paycheck” job. Her passion, though, is as an author and culinary and immigrant advocate. Ghosh’s 2022 memoir, “Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory and Family,” led to speaking engagements around the country, including a popular TEDxSan Diego talk, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Food.”
The San Diego resident also launched KhabaarCo, a supper club exploring literary and social justice conversations around food, featuring guest speakers. We talked to her about what’s behind her fervent belief in food’s uniting power.
Your writing is often not only about great recipes, but is a meditation on the greater meaning behind the meals you prepare. When did you know this was important to you?
If you come from older cultures, you’re used to the kitchen being the source of great excitement and wonder. My childhood memories of visiting Kolkata (from New Delhi, where I grew up), where my parents settled post-partition of India, were of going to my father’s and my mother’s family homes.
Each summer, we headed to Kolkata, and every morning I woke up to the scents and smells of a coal tandoor/oven heating up the water for tea, women of the family cutting vegetables, fish, chicken, even goat; others grinding turmeric and cumin mixes on a shil nora (a flat mortar and pestle, a very Indian kitchen implement); the men bringing the day’s catch from the fish market, or haggling with the vegetable seller on the price of beans and eggplant — a fine division of labor, interspersed with daily gossip, calling out to the children to sit down to eat, telling the staff to clean the dishes, set the table, fill the glasses with water from earthen pots…
What I mean is I grew up with the joy of cooking, watching my mother cook to feed, my father picking the best fish, chicken or cauliflower for the day’s meals, and my extended family showering us with love through what they fed us.
To sit across from each other, and share a meal is the ultimate act of love within family that we did every day. Not once a year. Not on Mother’s or Father’s or Thanksgiving day. Every day.
When I started writing about what I knew, it came from exploring what homesickness meant to me. It meant a deep missing of what used to be love without words, of recipes that generations passed down word of mouth, of spirited conversations — on politics, patriarchy and Bollywood — around meals.
All this to say, I knew recipes, meals, food; they’ve always meant a deep connection to my ancestors from childhood. All I am doing now is giving words to it.
Tell us about KhabaarCo, and what you hope to accomplish with it.
KhabaarCo literally translates to khabaar or food in Bengali, and “co” meaning community. It solidified while I was writing “Khabaar,” my food narrative memoir and the pandemic actively told us to focus on what was important.
To me, what was important was to build community through food, to listen, to grow and to make the neighborhood a happier place to be by acknowledging who grows our food, who cooks the ingredients and how immigrants, migrants and refugees continue to influence our San Diego neighborhood.
What started as a dinner for friends, where I used greens grown by East African refugee women in San Diego to cook Bengali meals, and what started as conversations with community leaders, thinkers, chefs, authors and changemakers on what we could do to make our community tighter, more effective and, frankly, kinder, is now a monthly event where KhabaarCo has a lively interactive conversation with a change-maker and their work — be it in community, activism, food, culinary arts or literary exploration — and as a group, engage in community and world citizens.
KhabaarCo has global events where I cook, showcase immigrant restaurants and chefs, and continue to champion human rights. We have been fortunate to host events and conversations in San Diego, New York, the Bay Area and forthcoming in London. We have interviewed and highlighted the works of urban planner and author Megan Groth (author of “Places We Love”), screenwriter and memoirist Priyanka Mattoo (author of “Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones”), poet Ivy Raff and San Diego culinary superstar and “MasterChef” Season 6 winner Chef Claudia Sandoval. We have exciting events planned with amazing chefs, authors, community leaders and change makers in the next few months.
Now we’re excited to announce our next phase — three-day and 10-day global culinary explorations of colonization, immigrant food and how they’ve traveled throughout the world from India to London, as well as Mexico and Portugal. More details will be announced at @writemadhushree and @khabaarco as well as the website.
Is the secret to community and happiness as simple as having people over for a meal? I’m warning you now, I’m a mediocre cook!
The secret isn’t a secret at all! Have you met a cook/chef? All they want to do is feed you. The joy we get watching something that we created give a consumer that sensory pleasure is out of this world. The thing about food is, we have to eat to survive. But if you want to thrive, you want to cook with love. And then the diner will feel love in each bite.
You can be a mediocre cook, but your taste buds aren’t. You will know food through the emotions it brings you — comfort, joy, memories. One can be a mediocre cook, but if one is curious, and open, one can learn — to be a cook and a more mindful diner.
You’re also an avid gardener. What does it mean to you to grow your own food?
Oh, you should see the disasters I have in my backyard garden! I am a messy gardener — which means, I plant whatever I want, whenever I want and however I want to. Which is okay in San Diego, because the weather is so forgiving. Sometimes the plants thrive, and sometimes they survive despite my black thumb.
More ‘Big Idea’
This story is part of a collection of stories printed in November 2024.
Does the approach to treating opioid addiction need a radical overhaul?
Why aren’t mobile homes considered among affordable housing fixes?
A small nonprofit in Long Beach wins some battles in the long war on plastics pollution
Read more ‘Big Idea’
More SCNG Premium content
To me, my garden — which I started during the pandemic in all earnestness — represents the chaos that is life. Right now I am arguing with the rabbits that are hell-bent on consuming my beet greens, so it’s a negotiation process, since I refuse to destroy their lives in order to consume the beets myself. It’s this wonderful place of conflict management, negotiations and co-existence that represents how we live, and my garden is proof.
But yes, when I am able to harvest my mustard greens, or radishes for a salad, or the green chilies in a vinegar-based fresh pickle, or my papayas in a sticky sweet chutney, it just brings me back to my native land, India, the food my Ma fed me, and it helps me connect with my roots even as I grow my roots in my adopted city, San Diego.
What’s one thing you want people to change in the way they approach eating?
It’s very simple really: find out who your grocer, farmer, butcher is. Know where your food came from; just ask your local supermarket person behind the counter, which farm they got the chicken from. It’s really that simple. Once you know where your food comes from, teach your children. Try to grow vegetables and you’ll discover this huge respect for farmers. Invite your neighbors for a meal, and cook for them — don’t potluck, feed them. Live, learn, laugh. Life is too short to not share a meal with a neighbor, or a stranger. It’s that simple.