april showers
supper clubs, sustainability, reconnecting with our roots, and more
Hello, friends 👋
To the 24 new subscribers who’ve joined since my last post, welcome! I’m so glad you’re here! If you’ve been around for a while, you might have noticed that I’ve been on a blogging hiatus of sorts. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been pivoting my Instagram account (follow me @brooklynfoodlady!) to feature more of the food storytelling I’ve historically done here.
As a result, I’ve been brainstorming about the direction I want to take this blog. I could continue to share in-depth stories about food, culture, and community. Or maybe more personal essays about my own relationship to food, such as in remembering my grandfather through spaghetti, tomato, egg, and ham. I could provide more insight into my journey of leaving the corporate world to start my own business, and the highs and lows of being a content creator.
I’m excited about the possibilities for this blog, and I’m committed to blogging regularly again. If you have any thoughts on what content you’d like to see here, whether its restaurant recommendations or interviews with chefs or a peek into my week as a content creator, please let me know! I would love to hear from you at brooklynfoodlady@gmail.com.
Today’s blog post was inspired by a supper club I attended last month. It includes a hodgepodge of thoughts on spring, sustainability, the immigrant experience, the romance of youth, and the less romantic realities of being a full-time content creator. I hope you enjoy!
I can’t believe we’re already in the month of April. Every spring I feel a sense of renewal as a steady flow of rain washes away the gray of winter, revealing branches lined with blushing magnolia and gardens glowing with bright daffodils.
This particular spring, however, the slow unfurling of fresh leaves is juxtaposed with the rapid withering of democracy in the US, the beauty of the plant cycle counteracted by the despair of the news cycle. I oscillate between feelings of frustration, rage, devastation, and fear nearly daily.
And yet, the birds continue to sing, transforming my morning walks into symphonies of chirps and tweets. Going outside and touching grass feels like such a respite from the deluge of horrors that crop up on my phone screen until, inevitably, my thoughts turn to the ongoing climate crisis.
Every time I consider the rate of global warming, my anxiety bubbles, sometimes boiling over into existential dread. We’re destroying our planet and it feels like there’s nothing that I, an average civilian, can do about it! Then I met Roopa, founder of amrūt plant-based supper club, who has a much more hopeful take on the situation.
Meet Roopa
Roopa Venkatraman has an enviable career on paper: after graduating from Princeton in 2022, she joined the prestigious management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. However, after a couple of years in the corporate world, she noticed that she was feeling out of touch with her joy.
In an attempt to ground down, Roopa invited some friends over for dinner, and realized how much she loved cooking for others. Up until that point, most of her culinary education came from cooking at home with her parents, but once the spark was ignited, she knew she had to explore her interest in earnest.
In January 2024, Roopa took a sabbatical from work and enrolled in a plant-based cooking program at Le Cordon Bleu in London. She fondly described that time as the best three months of her life. Chuckling, Roopa recalled, “I just felt like I touched grass. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you came from, what you do. It was just can you cut an onion really well? And the answer was no I couldn’t—at least not then.”
When Roopa returned to New York, she thought that she would be reenergized for her corporate job, but it only became more apparent that connecting people through cooking was what she really wanted to do. That summer, she launched a supper club experience called amrūt, and earlier this year, she quit her job.
Sustainability and Individual Impact
Roopa founded amrūt, a plant-based supper club, based on the philosophy that individuals can have a positive impact on the climate through small daily decisions that add up over time. “Everyone has three or more opportunities throughout the day to choose what type of impact they want to have on the environment through what they eat,” she explained.
If you’re interested in learning more about how plant-based cuisine is good for the environment, check out The Case for Plant Based by Dr. Dana Hunnes for UCLA Sustainability. And to learn more about the inspiration behind amrūt, and how Roopa is prioritizing sustainability and building community at the table, check out this video I created:
The series was meant to provide hope and serve as a call to action to make more environmentally friendly decisions in our daily lives. However, one of the comments I received expressed a sense of frustration I am all too familiar with:
Sometimes I wonder if individual attempts to lead more eco-conscious lifestyles are futile in the wake of the cataclysmic damage corporations are inflicting upon the planet. It infuriates me that just 100 corporations are responsible for 70% of carbon dioxide emissions (Horný & Matějovcová, 2023), but I have to drink my iced coffee from a disintegrated paper straw.
I’m not deluded enough to think that individual efforts can curb climate change, but after chatting with Roopa, I realized that I’m also not defeated enough to not do what I can. Ryan Hagen of
put it really well in his article Climate Change: Can One Person Really Make a Difference? To summarize his points:Individuals do have an immense carbon footprint and small changes can prevent tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
Humans are a highly social species, so the changes an individual makes can have a ripple effect on those around them.
And perhaps most importantly, the micro dictates the macro. Governments and corporations exist to serve us, and individuals have the power to affect outcomes through their votes and their spending.
Connecting with ancestors through cooking
Roopa’s family is from the state of Tamil Nadu in the southern peninsula of India. Her parents immigrated to New Jersey in the 90s, and she grew up in environments where she didn’t see herself represented at all.
It didn’t occur to Roopa how beautiful India is and how varied its cuisine could be until she started cooking. To hear more about her journey of reconnecting with her roots, as well as the inspiration for the “Coming Home” menu at the supper club, check out the this video:
At 0:42, Roopa vocalizes a sentiment that most children of immigrants can probably relate to: “I think inherent in that [lack of representation growing up] is this desire to be the same instead of the other.” I have personally struggled with embracing the parts of my identity that I worked so hard to repress throughout childhood in order to assimilate to Western society.
This process of rejection and reclamation seems like a universal struggle for children of diaspora, and food is so often the entry point back to ourselves. In my Lunar New Year video, I reflected on my own journey of reconnecting with my Chinese roots through my parents’ home cooking, mirroring Roopa’s experience.
As I listened to Roopa talk about her recent road trip with her father through southern India, I felt a sudden desire to embark on a similar trip with my family in our ancestral homeland. It struck me that although Roopa and I come from different countries, we share an unspoken immigrant language of sacrifice and hope and a yearning to return home.
Final reflections
I’d like to tie up this post with some scattered thoughts about leaving the corporate world, the romance of youth, and how I navigate a content series that performs short of my expectations. This section is a little more raw compared to the rest of the post, and is reserved for paid subscribers.
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