Cooking for the sake of harmony

Workplaces around the country celebrate A Taste of Harmony Day

A Taste of Harmony (18-24 March, 2013) is Australia’s biggest and most delicious celebration of cultural diversity. Work colleagues around Australia brought in dishes and shared stories about their different cultures, and many sampled dishes from other countries for the first time. With more than half of Australia’s population born overseas, or having at least one parent from another country, its workforce is the perfect place to celebrate diversity through food. The message from Harmony Day (21 March) was that ‘Everyone Belongs,’ and the theme from this year was ‘Many Stories - One Australia.’ Indian Link asks four workers what they did for A Taste of Harmony Day:

PRINCIPLE OF INCLUSIVENESS Sunny Kansara, Cricket Victoria, Melbourne

Harmony in Cricket is one of the important programs at Cricket Victoria. Celebrating it at Cricket Victoria has given me the opportunity to learn other staff’s cultural background and also gave me the opportunity to showcase my cultural background. I am proud to work for Cricket Victoria where such days are celebrated. Harmony in Cricket is based on the principle of inclusiveness, no matter of a person’s cultural background. I think this shows what the game of cricket has to offer all of the community. On Harmony Day, we had food from around the world and it was a good experience to see staff gathering in the kitchen with their traditional dishes. I was unfortunately unable to make any Indian food myself, which I now regret. I have two newborns at home and therefore majority of the time at home passes in taking care of them”.

dIVERSITY TASTES GOOd Falguni Madhavani, Performance Education, Sydney

I made a vegetable rice dish with a spicy masala twist to it. A Taste of Harmony is a positive way of bringing everyone together to celebrate cultural diversity at our workplace by way of sharing delicious food and interesting stories. Performance Education truly epitomises the essence of A Taste of Harmony where we want to celebrate the cultural diversity by learning more about each other and what a better way is there to learn this than sharing food! We primarily work with international talent coming from different parts of the world like India, Nepal, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam etc. A Taste of Harmony was widely enjoyed and generated interesting discussion and understanding of students coming from different cultural backgrounds. Life is about eating, travelling and meeting new people. It was an absolute super hit! Diversity surely tastes good!”

EXPLORING TRAdITIONS Lindy hyam, Singleton Council, New South Wales

It was great to see the diversity of our community reflected through our Harmony Day activities with a mix of newer and older cultural groups bringing a wealth of knowledge, traditions, food and ways of living to our town. We’re enriched as a society because of it and it’s an opportunity for children and our older groups to interact directly with other parts of our community. Harmony Day participants had the opportunity to learn about other cultures which is especially important in more rural communities where they don’t have the same exposure to other nationalities.” (Singleton had sixteen countries represented on the day, including India)”.

A MARAThI dISh FOR ThE OFFICE Svetlana Mahajan, Underwriters Laboratories, Sydney

We had Italian, Scottish, Bosnian, Chinese, Hong Kong, Bangladeshi, Australian, Mexican and Indian. The rest will last us the week for sure! Everyone loved the balloons and certificates. Will definitely do it again! I tried/made a Maharashtrian dish (I am from a state called Maharashtra in India), called Kolhapuri Rassa. Though the parent company is big, we are a fairly small office in Australia, with 15 staff members. So we are close-knit as a team, but A Taste of Harmony was a way to communicate with each other about our cultural backgrounds, and exchange stories about the food brought by everyone. Most are Australians, but were encouraged to bring a dish that represents a country of their heritage, so we had much variety. The overall response was awesome. We have a contractor who works four hours a week, she got pesto pasta and made pesto from scratch. Everybody did their best without any incentive, so it was pretty cool. The best dish to me was Queen Mary’s Pie from Scotland. I don’t usually like sweets, yet I had two pieces. Luckily, it was not very sweet, and had a subtle flavour of fruit mince. There were no leftovers.”