Ellen Cosgrove founded and runs Dinner & Dialogue which is a monthly occurrence where people can sign up online to join a dinner or meal hosted by Ellen surrounded by a specific theme. Ellen picks the theme each time and the people that join have to bring a dish or food item that connects to the theme or topic of discussion for that meal. She's done a lot of thinking and facilitating using food as a launch point for discussion and as a tool for community building. Here is a link to the website for Dinner & Dialogue: https://www.dinnersanddialogue.com/
Question #1: How did you find your love for food and cooking?
Ellen answered, "I think it started very young. I think I was always curious about what was going on in the kitchen, and I always loved helping my mom cook, and I just really liked eating good food." She then spoke about her time in a monastery school when she was younger. "...you get to choose these different activities of what to do, and so in preschool, the choice I always went to was the one where you had to cut the apples..." She also said that it was a huge part of her family and she always loved food.
Question #2: When and how did you start Dinner & Dialogue?
Ellen said, "I started it 3 years ago, and I have a background in peacebuilding so I have worked abroad. I lived in Northern Ireland for a couple of years, did my masters in co-existence and conflict, I was in northern Uganda doing work, in Kenya, and so I have done a lot of traveling and I've met a lot of people you know from all over the world, and I found that food is such a wonderful way to create this connection with people. You can ask people about the food that they grew up with, or they eat every day. Some people get so excited about it, they want to talk about it, and so it kind of creates this instant connection that I've found in every place I've ever been. I also think a lot about how to create a space for people to sort of really see each other...I'm always trying to create situations where people get to see each other's humanity, and food I think is something that everyone has a story about. So in grad school, we used to talk about doing a 'food for peace'...I always had this idea of using food as a connector to bring people together but I never had to do it." Then she mentioned that after she quit her job and done some traveling, she was in the middle of looking for a new job but then decided to do something a little different. "...So I invited people over to these dinners that were themed and people brought food around the theme and I facilitated a conversation around that theme." Ellen said those first people that came to the dinners were only people she knew, but they didn't know each other. Then she told me a little bit more about that first dinner, "We didn't have a big table, so my sister went out and bought a door that day and we fashioned this door to make a large table for everyone to eat around." There were 15 people at that dinner, but she's done dinners for as little as 5 people, and she's done one for 21 people and she said that's the most she would do because she wants it to still be intimate.
Question #3: How do you choose what theme to do for each discussion? How do you choose what to make?
Ellen answered, "I choose the theme based on sort of what's happening in the world, and things that I'm thinking about, and things that inspire me. I love making connections..I've been thinking about what to do for this month, I do virtual ones now. I think about the time of year, what's happening in the world, and I also kind of think about what's going on in my own sort of personal life because I think the theme if it always works is something that you can kind of relate to food, or relate to a personal experience, but also relate to society. I find those to be the most powerful." Then she mentioned, "I facilitated a conversation that Friday for a group of, I'm doing some staff-based stuff, some work-based stuff, and we were talking about identity. So we started with food, they talked about which food made up their identity, but then we got into kind of like other aspects of their identity, and work and their identity. So I think to me it's all really about making those connections, and where you start with the food, you bring that story about the food. But then you kind of set the stage to be able to talk about how it related to your life, or relates to society." Then for the second part of the question, Ellen responded, "It depends because if it was an in-person one, it would usually be depending on what other people are bringing, I would bring something that would round out the meal. But always have a story around it." Then she said, "In the end, it doesn't really matter what you bring, it just is a way to tell a story about yourself." Ellen said that people were not obligated to cook what they bring, they can get take-out or just a drink. She also mentioned that now that it's online it's really just about the story that people bring, they don't even have to bring food. However, they can mention what food they would have picked up or made if they could for the purpose of their story.
Question #4: What has been one of your favorite themes/discussions so far pre-covid or during covid? Why?
Ellen told me that though it's a great way to meet strangers and get to know them, it's also an amazing experience to do with people she knows and her family. She talked about the fourth dinner/discussion she ever did, "..still very much an experiment, I held at my parents' house in Albany New York...it was more like a family-friends and family attended one, and the theme was home...we talked about our experience of home, but also got into sort of the times you weren't at home, how you recreated home or talking about people that were homeless, and refugees and immigrants and how they had to kind of leave their home to come here." Ellen said she learned a lot about her less immediate family members like her aunts and uncles, but she also learned new things from her parents. "...Even if you have it with people you think you know well, it creates this different space for you to sort of listen and hear stories that you've never heard before." She said the discussion lasted for a couple hours, and that she brought a chicken dish that she made to the discussion and her mom used to make it when she was younger. It reminded her of growing up and the theme "home". She also mentioned that her household ate very healthy which was "annoying at the time" but she realizes now that she is very grateful for that. "There's some nostalgia there that I was trying to create."
Question #5: Can you tell me a story that you shared at one of your themed dinners? Pre-covid or during covid?
Ellen answered, "I grew up in a neighborhood in Albany New York that is a city you know but it's a smaller city obviously than New York. My neighbors across the street were very good friends, I grew up playing with their son and the woman, she was Syrian her parents were both from Syria, and so there was a time when we used to go to her parent's house sometimes and they lived like an hour away...and her mother was always like, "oh I have nothing to feed you". Maybe we just showed up and we didn't tell her we were going to stop by...She somehow created this magical meal out of seemingly nothing. I just remember as a kid I just couldn't believe it...she also made her own Syrian bread, her own pita bread, she got that stuff out of the freezer, toasted that up, we had fried potatoes, tomatoes. Some of them were sort of new tastes too that I've never tasted before. I just remember being in complete awe of this woman...And so for a dinner, I made (a dish I cannot spell) in honor of Imeh that's grandmother in Arabic I believe, because it was a dish that reminded me of that, it was a lentil and rice dish where you cook down the onions for a while, so it's a very flavorful lentil and rice dish...growing up with those Syrian flavors in my life really fueled my curiosity to want to learn more about food from other places." Ellen said that she was around eleven when she had this influence.
Question #6: You mentioned that you have gone virtual because of Covid, has this impacted Dinner & Dialogue in any way? Has the format changed, and does it feel different?
Ellen said, "It's a lot different because you're not with people around a table, you can't share the food, you can't eat the food that they're talking about. You're not eating the same thing, so I think there is a level that just can't be re-created. But what is cool about it is that it's way easier to set up for, definitely shorter so it's less of a commitment whether it was like before it was a 3-hour thing, it can be an hour or an hour and a half. So you can get people to come that don't maybe have that much time, also you can have people join from anywhere, so there's this geographical diversity that gets infused into it which I think adds richness to the conversation, and sort of allows for more unexpected connections in some ways. But it is on zoom, and some people are so sick of zoom...you still kind of have to get people there, but I think once people are there, still, there is a real sense of intimacy that is formed and I think in some ways zoom allows for taking your turn in talking and listening." Then Ellen went into talking about a discussion that she facilitated on zoom, "The most recent one I did last month was on hope...I think all the conversations especially this year have been wonderful to do because they really have brought so much hope at those moments...Just having these moments to be able to hear other people's stories, and realize you're not the only one going through it, is such a relief. It just makes you feel so much less isolated." Then she mentioned that she finds the most interesting conversations to be intergenerational. She talked about the conversation she had during the discussion on hope and that it was a beautiful conversation about where people were getting hope at this time. There was also a lot of great advice being shared. Ellen told me that she doesn't them monthly now, but about a year ago when the pandemic first started in April and May, she did them weekly. "I just felt like a sense of urgency to do something, and my mostly doing something was staying home and not contributing to the virus at all, but I think I felt very hopeless at the time." She also said that her plan a year ago was to get the dinners out of New York more and to do them in other places. In February she went to Nevada, and she did one in L.A. with some friends around Valentine's day so the theme was love and it was very emotional. Ellen had a lot planned around the US but it fell through, but now those people join online. She also mentioned that she hasn't had anyone yet from another country because of the time difference, but she hopes to do it in the future.
Question #7: Do you have any tips/tricks/flavor tips you want to share about cooking?
Ellen responded, "...for cooking if you can get the recipe down, and the methodology down, then you can add what you have, and kind of change it a little bit to the way you like it. Sometimes recipes frustrate me because I don't have that special spice, or I don't have that thing. The way I cook something I usually look up a ton of different recipes and then figure out the way it's done and then do it my own way. So I guess I wish people would be more empowered to experiment and not just follow recipes." Then Ellen mentioned that with baking it's different and "you got to follow the rules".
Question #8: Have you had any discussions surrounding sustainability or the food industry, government involvement, homeless people in times of covid, etc?
Ellen answered, "Yea, and actually one of the organizations that I do some consultant work for provides housing for formerly homeless people, so I have done a lot of cooking classes actually in the before times for formally homeless people. Now I make recipes for them that they can cook in a microwave or a one-burner because even if they were in this kind of traditional housing thing they still don't have a full kitchen...Everything that we had going wrong has just been exacerbated by covid, so we see that even our food systems are inadequate, we see how we don't have the support put in peace to really keep our population safe, and make sure that everyone has enough. Also, my sister was a farmer for many years, and in Crown Heights where I lived for 20 years, I was part of the CSA there, which is the community that supports agriculture, where we brought food directly from an organic farm upstate into the neighborhood." Then Ellen said, "If we can support farmers that are trying to do the right thing then we can disrupt the system. I think money really talks...but if we as consumers support and put our money towards the systems that we feel good about, I think we can try to shift a little bit, but until then I think it's also about supporting your local soup kitchen and making sure to support those in our society right now that bandaids that are trying to help a broken system."
Question #9: Tell me about your work before Dinner & Dialogue.
Ellen told me, "I went to Fordham University, and I worked in advertising...Then I got a job in Northern Ireland so I moved to Belfast and worked for a peacebuilding organization called Peace Players International. Which used sports, used basketball actually as a way to bring kids together in a divided society. So I did that for 2 and a half years, I then went to grad school and studied co-existence and conflict...After grad school, I did some work for a bunch of non-profits, I think the sad thing is that there's not a lot of resources for those kinds of things in our society right now, so it was hard to get a job." She ran afterschool programs for kids and other work like that. Now she is doing consultant work for some non-profits and running those projects and trying to see if there's a way to fund the work she does with community-based organizations. "You need to find work that energizes you." Ellen told me that cooking was always a "safe space" for her to bring herself back after doing the difficult work.
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