“My best memory of food has to be from like two years ago, where at my college, we hosted Ed talks, which
was like a student-led student driven conference. And during lunch, we had different people prepare different things. And in my room, I prepared lunch, it was called Langar. I practice the Sikh religion. In my faith, Langar is a community kitchen. And in our community kitchen anybody is welcome regardless of whether you are Sikh or not. Your religious background or political background does not matter. Everybody comes together and you sit down and you eat together. So for my lunch I had a staple of Langar which is dal, which is lentils and rice. I got to tell everybody that came into my room my story about how I came to service.
I got to serve everybody as they would come in. So I’d give them a bowl and I’d give them a variety. And then throughout that experience I got to sit with all the people that are coming into my group, which are some of my peers and some I’d never known before and I had conversations with them. I felt the space we created in that room was very loving. There was a new member of my next scholars group and I hadn’t really had a chance to talk to, but I found out that her kids are half Bangladeshi. I had never known that about her, and she shared her stories about how she cooks with her sons and it was just very powerful to me. Just sitting together with my community. It felt really good to feed them because everybody loved the food I prepared and ‘I was like, thank you!’ Even though it was a lot of work, like I stayed up so long the night before to make the food. But just in that moment, it was very nice to see it all come together. Everybody loved it.”