Food Stories

Kuku Yalanji woman and choreographer, Henrietta Baird, has an infectious smile. She’s dancing her way through making damper with the audience mimicking her actions. Baird’s words connect the packaged flour rendition of the soft, pliable bread she’s currently making with the kangaroo grass loaves made by her ancestors in Far North Queensland. This short performance, along with a series of ‘provocations’ introduced by multilingual programming director, Marian Abboud, invite attendees seated on long communal tables to consider the stories, emotions, and — quite bravely — the racism, we transmit through food. 

Food Stories was a one-off event in Think+DO Tank’s To Your Door Fairfield Nights series financed by a Culture Up Late - Western Sydney grant. The event and program set out to bring community together through culture, utilising the ways we know work to create cultural cohesion: live music, performance, creativity and sharing food. Alongside feeding our hearts and minds, the forty-odd strong collective of migrant and refugee women from the Wednesday Seed of Hope initiative filled our bellies. Food, elaborately decorated hummus, creamy labneh, sharp pickles and kabab tawah were scooped onto crisp Lebanese za’atar bread or encased in Iraqi bread plucked from local clay ovens. After one Seed of Hope participant and her daughter shared her family recipe for tabouli, we ate the results from big communal bowls with beetroot salad, platters of finely-grained kufta in tahini sauce freshened up with parsley, and fragrant Egyptian rice (ros bil shareya).

Riffing off the sounds you might hear in a busy restaurant, pianist, producer and DJ, Non Chalant, had us use what we had at hand to create an interactive composition in the manner of Alice Chance’s The Audience Choir (2018). What started as a cacophony of claps, clinking glasses, scraping cutlery, arguments over the bill, and laughter, built into an all-in-ruckus that, despite my early misgivings, I found both melodic and pleasurable. The sweetness continued into circulating trays of date balls and individual bowls saffron-rich zarda (sweet rice). This (free) event was the perfect antidote to the violence we have seen in across Sydney this month, reminding all who opted to attend, that the antidote to hate is love and social cohesion. My heart is full.