It wasn't until I came to New York and started to see the African American community, but also the Ethiopian community here, and started to eat the food, started to understand the music. I said, you know, I got to go and understand the culture. So me and my sister went.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the importance of cultural appreciation and understanding through personal experience.
Marcus Samuelsson emphasizes the transformative power of experiencing different cultures firsthand. By engaging with the African American and Ethiopian communities in New York, he highlights how immersing oneself in food, music, and cultural practices can lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of diverse backgrounds.
In practice
In a discussion about multiculturalism, you might quote this to highlight the value of exploring other cultures.
I'm engaged in food on so many levels, and I love that. So my work, my craft, is around food, and writing is one aspect of it; communicating a narrative, cooking online is one aspect of it; solving the food chasm that we have in Harlem and finding a farmers market is another one, and all of them are equally exciting for me.
To become a good cook is to know yourself, and I, at this point, know myself. I know myself, and I know the cook I want to be and the cook I am striving to be.
As a chef, I always have in mind how to properly feed the public, but at times it's easy to forget that some people have trouble even getting any food, much less adequate nutrition.
I came into this environment where there was so much love, so much positive energy. I never heard my parents say, 'We have adopted kids.' The minute my sister Linda and I landed in Sweden, we were their kids.
I've been lucky to travel and work all over the world through the lens of the back of the house, and I love that monocle. I love that lens, because it's real people.
Children want to mimic adults. They notice when you choose to prepare fresh vegetables over calling in another pizza pie for dinner. They will see that food made with love and care outweighs going through the drive-through window.
Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society
Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.
Down through the centuries, the Czech Republic, the territory of the Czech Republic has been a place of cultural exchange.
I haven't come to you only to take , I haven't come to you empty handed : I bring you poetry as great as yours but in anther tongue , I bring you black eyes and golden skin and curly hair , I bring you Islam and Luxor and Alexandria and Lutes and tambourines and date-palms and silk rugs and sunshine and incense and voluptuous ways
...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
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