Storytelling through Food: Ricesome (The 50th Article!!)

Well, here we go....writing this for one last time...not like "last time last time" but you know what I mean. Let us not go down this rabbit hole. But, here we are baby!! 50 ARTICLES!! WHOO!! I didn't expect to do 50 worthwhile of anything ever and now that I have done it......it is not as awesome as I thought it would be. Don't get me wrong, I am proud of writing 50 blog posts every week for a year but I expected myself to feel like I will know the answers to life itself...but I guess that's how it is. You improve but you don't see it happen and you don't feel it, yet it's there....(I hope so in this case).

Ricesome's 50 Articles

I had decided to write one article per week purely as a writing exercise for myself, just to see if I could write something original and comprehensible, at least to my eyes. My idea of doing this every week was just to give me something to look forward to and hopefully, I have done the same to some of you. The challenge was not to write something every Friday, it was to come up with something to write about every week. But enough chitchat for now, we will get to that later. Now all I want to talk about is....

What is "Storytelling through Food"?

There are very few moments for all of us that make us stop and reconsider some things about ourselves, our interests or our goals, right? Not for me. I have never experienced that. The closest thing I ever came to experiencing that was while watching the Fried Chicken episode on the show "Ugly Delicious". I have talked about this multiple times in my previous posts and how it took over my life. This was something that I never saw coming and it was something that whispered to me rather than yelled. As a cook, I was always interested in making good food. How do I achieve a particular ingredient or dish's full potential most efficiently and effectively possible? Sounds romantic, doesn't it?

But after being introduced to a world, where the food we eat defines us as much as we define it, my whole perspective changed. It felt like my horizons expanded. This is what I have been looking for. It was sitting there waiting for me all along. Did someone read my subconscious mind and create this world, one day only for me to experience it? What is this world that I speak of? Well, this world exists right in your hands. 365 days a year, 7 days a week, and 3 times a day.

We eat every day, yet we never take a moment to stop and think about what is it that we consume so incessantly. Where does it come from? Who makes this? and are those people happy?....

My First Blog Post

Dapanji (Big Plate Chicken)

....That's where the Uyghurs came in. My first article was about the struggle of Uyghurs and how they yelled to the world that they existed through their food. That's what caught my attention, first the dish, then the story. I even decided to make the dish and posted it on my Instagram page. I don't know who you are and where you come from. Irrespective of my assumption of you as a person, I know one thing for sure that is common between us. We. Both. Don't. Care. About. Each. Other.

No one does and rightly so. We don't care about each other's stories because we already have ours to write and worry about. So, how do we be more inclusive?...........Oh, what's that? Chocolate, a sweet that I enjoy and lifts me in times of depression is made on the backs of many African children? That is absurd! Isn't it?

We gotta bribe each other. People empathize with emotion and there is no greater and powerful emotion than hunger, the desire to eat. It unites people across the world. If there is anything, that we understand about each other all over the world is that we all want to be fed and we all want to feed our people. Stories need to be relatable, and good stories always are and good storytellers make sure that they always do. There are no bad stories, there is just bad storytelling.

Food, pain, and stories are three things wherever we go, we encounter them and they unite us.....more than anything. I want to tell those stories in the best way possible. I always felt that I don't have stories of my own to tell others, but it is the stories of others that I feel are my own that motivate me. (I don't mean cultural appropriation, Liberals)

Ricesome exists for that and Ricesome is not me. It is something much bigger and better than me. Hopefully, it will grow into this idea in the future. I might not be writing anytime soon, but I will be changing my garage and its operations, something different, something new, and something better!

I have yapped enough already, and it is time for me to close the shop. Well....that's it for this time. See you nex-

My name is Sashank Sattiraju and we shall meet again soon!