Aarti Sequeira is a chef, journalist, cookbook author, TV personality, and the brains behind the enticing aromas that lured hundreds of eager students to the Appleton North commons on Wednesday, Feb. 7.
“My hope is to help create curiosity,” conveyed Chef Aarti, as she arrived at North alongside Chartwells amidst a cross-country mission to expose young people to global cuisines. “If we don’t viscerally, with our bodies, interact with things that we’ve never seen or tasted before, our natural instinct is to push it away,” she said. To Sequeira, food is a gateway to adventure far beyond our taste buds.
Sequeira’s journey to the culinary world was something of an adventure itself, with cooking only emerging as a professional career path when she won season six of “Food Network Star.” Intending to pursue journalism as a long-term career, Chef Aarti admitted that she “took a huge risk,” but that food has since proven to be a through-line in her life.
Sequeira is an Indian woman who grew up in Dubai and attended a British school. While her cultural background is extraordinarily rich, Sequeira felt that she could not entirely fit in with any of her individual cultural identities; she felt isolated. “I think all of us feel like we are on the outside in one way or another, and for me, one of the ways that I could always kind of bridge that divide was through food,” she remarked. When it comes to cultivating connections with food, spices are the driving force for Chef Aarti. Nicknamed “The Spice Queen,” she emphasized that every spice contains a history, a journey, and a story that “helps connect…cultures all over the world that normally would not have had a conversation.”
Crossing cultural barriers, expanding our worldview, and appreciating the incredible range of stories around us is a vital part of the human experience, and it starts with food. Alongside Aarti Sequeira’s infectious love for cross-cultural connections, young people might begin to see food as more than something that simply looks nice or tastes good; it is a cultural experience, a means of displaying identity, and an opportunity for discovery.
