Meet Marin Milken | Founder, CEO, Chef & Food Equity Activist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Marin Milken and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Marin, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
In the midst of the pandemic, I found myself having read a million books, shared a million TikToks with friends, and walked hundreds of loops around the block – what else could I do? My older brother played video games with his friends online. This was not appealing to me, yet I understood why it was meaningful for him. He was thinking, creating and connecting with his friends. Since no one in my house is a good cook and we couldn’t order in, I started making dinner. What began as me teaching myself through YouTube turned into Zoom get-togethers where I taught groups of friends how to make the perfect latte, or tasty grilled chicken. They began cooking for their families. Then, my mom told our neighbors on our daily loop about my cooking. Somehow, I became the middle school chef who created a social connection activity for my friends – which ballooned into a social distancing gathering mechanism for our neighbors. Through these meals, I realized food’s power to bring people together – and that everyone should have access to these types of experiences and nourishment. But the more I read about how food shapes cultures, the more I also learned about food insecurity – how can people define themselves when they don’t have the access to the food they need to nourish themselves? What does a lack do for an individual/community/nation?
I founded Our Seat At the Table to help tackle these questions and issues, all while ensuring that more youth feel they have a seat at the table. Our Seat aims to use food as a means to connect people across sociocultural barriers and ensure vulnerable youth feel that they have a seat at the table — that they belong. Our Seat hopes to educate and inspire teens to go forth and serve hundreds of vulnerable youth in the Los Angeles area through food and culinary education initiatives and cross-cultural organized community events. With an emphasis on health and nutrition literacy, social justice, and fostering a deep sense of belonging, we are dedicated to educating, supporting and physically & psychologically nourishing vulnerable youth through food, cooking and community, and believe that everyone has a seat at the table!

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?

Our Seat at the Table is organized around four stools of enrichment: Food Equity, Nutritional Literacy, Culinary Diplomacy, and Identity Foundation, supported by in-person gathering events and supplemental programming. Though there are various food-related initiatives that Our Seat will continue to tackle through its programming, I wanted our first endeavor to help with the widespread national issue of food insecurity. Food insecurity, in simplest terms, is when people neither have enough to eat, nor know where their next meal is coming from. In order to help combat food insecurity, scholars and legislators have developed the term “food equity,” which is defined as the “expansive concept that all people have the ability and opportunity to grow and to consume healthful, affordable, and culturally significant foods.” But as research indicates, food equity isn’t just about access to healthy and affordable foods. Food equity is also about access to comprehensible and accurate nutritional information, a concept also known as nutritional literacy. It’s that a lack of adequate nutritional literacy – defined as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand nutrition information and skills needed in order to make appropriate nutrition decisions” – often contributes to and exacerbates food inequality. This creates a cycle: a lack of equitable access begets a lack of equitable food literacy, which informs a continuation of unhealthy food choices amidst already scarce resources.

In order to help combat the over 2 million people in Los Angeles who face food insecurity, Our Seat kicked off Nutritional Literacy programming with our Community Thanksgiving dinner with Foster Nation, a nonprofit that supports and empowers foster youth aging out of the system to become self-sufficient adults. As a result of my long-standing relationship with Foster Nation, I was inspired to fill a gap for these youth who have aged out of the foster care system who receive professional mentoring, along with the guidance to learn various life skills. I realized that I could teach basic culinary skills, which would dovetail into lessons about food equity and nutritional literacy: How to shop for 5 days on a budget. How to make basic food staples. How to pick produce at the grocery store.
After leading the Foster Nation youth through a grocery store trip together, I also created individual packets of recipes and meat and sanitation safety kits for the youth to take home. We prepped and cooked 9 different recipes, before sharing a community Thanksgiving dinner, all wearing matching sweatshirts with the Foster Nation/Our Seat logos, that I raised money to purchase. Inspired by events like this, Our Seat is creating additional events throughout the year as part of a “community meal” series. To continue to serve those who do not have access to healthy foods, I am cultivating a food and nutritional literacy masterclass module that will be taught through Foster Nation and launched in February as a pilot program.

But our literacy masterclass is not the only February project Our Seat has launched. Motivated by the conversations I shared with the youth during our Communal Thanksgiving, I got the idea to have a women-supporting-women “Galentine’s” Day event, which just happened on February 10th! We hosted several female foster youth in a culinary women’s empowerment workshop, where we taught these female youth, who have aged out of the foster care system, how to bake cookies and cupcakes from scratch, decorate them and create a sense of belonging for another set of vulnerable women. We then packed up gift bags with all the baked items and teddy bear donated from an organization called Bear Givers, before dropping them off with Upward Bound House, a transitional living shelter for young women who are unhoused with children.

As part of our Food Equity and Identity Building series, this event empowered the female foster youth to have a space to teach and support the message of women supporting women in need while they simultaneously created nourishing and delicious desserts in support of other local unhoused women. Through our event, we wanted to express the idea that women in a vulnerable situation can empower women who also find themselves in vulnerable situations. We all have something to contribute to the world. We all matter.

As we look towards the future of our programming, we are excited about launching a “Breaking Bread” series where I will bring Jewish and Muslim youth together to “break bread.” Motivated by the tenets of cultural diplomacy, our “Breaking Bread” dinner will create a gathering place to share culinary traditions and values, and maintain human connection in a conflict that aims to dehumanize the “other.”

Though Our Seat has evolved many times over the course of the past few years into its current iteration, my commitment towards it – and my dedication to providing these seats at the table – has never wavered. I am so excited for future meals, gatherings, and seats to create!

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Over the weekends, I love to bop around to my favorite Farmer’s Markets – the West LA one has my favorite sourdough starter, while the Santa Monica one provides (in my opinion) the freshest fruit options. A bonus incentive to visit the Santa Monica market is the chance to catch up with one of my closest temple friends, who lives not too far from the market. If I don’t have too many perishables, I’ll often stop off to hunt for some thrifted gems at the Crossroads in Santa Monica, where I recently scored my favorite pair of wide-legged jeans.

After a quick pit stop at home to put my groceries away, I love doing homework while sampling the matcha offerings at a local coffee shop. Because I wrote a matcha review of best matchas in LA for my journalism class, I consider myself a bit of a matcha expert. Yet, TBH, the healthiest one is the one I make at home. And is much more cost effective.

LA offers some of the best hiking year-round. I love finding off-the-beaten-path trails – you can’t beat the ocean views of Charmlee Wilderness Park, while the sunset at the top of Parker Mesa feels other-worldly.

Any friend who’s visiting would accompany me as I make my rounds to friends in order to pick up extra spatulas and bowls in preparation for my next Our Seat event. At any given time, you will find me driving around with no less than four rolling pins/measuring cups/ladles in my backseat – it all comes with the territory!

Finally, returning home, we’d set up for one of my potlucks, where we take inspiration from conflict facilitator, strategic advisor, international speaker and acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker. Through her digital course The Art of Gathering, Parker helps others create meaning with and for our people. Her notion that “Gathering is one of the most important ways in which we shape the world we live in… how are you shaping yours?”

Beyond my work with Our Seat, I’ve become obsessed with hosting intentional gatherings – gatherings with meaning. Inspired by Parker’s templates, every potluck is slightly different. One dinner, everyone was required to bring a mystery friend, while tonight’s instruction is for everyone to bring “one of your favorite people – and dessert.” All these gatherings aim to provide space for my friends to build community, all while we contemplate the notion of why are we here? Through Parker’s guidelines, I am able to ensure that the gatherings I host for my friends and those I host for Our Seat are “infused with meaning and connection”!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Our Seat is very privileged to do the work that we do through the efforts of our incredible partner organizations. For our Thanksgiving event, I initiated a relationship with the CEO of Foster Nation, Maggie Lin, who collaborated with me on our communal Thanksgiving dinner. Connecting with filmmaker Peter Decherney, I led a field trip of local teens engaged in the intersection of dual Black and Jewish identities this past January, where we saw his Abayudaya Jewish Communities photography exhibit in LA as a collaboration of UCLA Alan D. Leve for Jewish Studies, the Penn Global Documentary Institute and Hillel at UCLA, for our first Culinary Diplomacy event. We are continuing our Culinary Diplomacy events thanks to the support of IKAR, a faith-based community in Los Angeles, and Samara Hutman, the Director of Second Nurture Los Angeles. Motivated by the conversations I shared with the youth during our Communal Thanksgiving, I got the idea to have a women-supporting-women “Galentine’s” Day event. In addition to Foster Nation, I was lucky enough to partner with two other extraordinary nonprofits: Bear Givers, which donates teddy bears as a means of providing joy and comfort to those who need it most, and Upward Bound House, a transitional living shelter for young women who are unhoused with children.
Finally, I am lucky enough to have an incredibly supportive family, and share a very close bond with my mom. While cultivating Our Seat, I watched as my mom created and launched her own initiative during the pandemic: The Flexible Neurotic Podcast, where she interviews various influential experts to help women navigate the “ughs” and “fabulosities” of midlife. Watching my mom inspire others through her interviews has motivated me to always get the conversation going, as there’s no better way to cultivate community than through dialogue.

Website: https://www.our-seat.org

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/our.seatatthetable/

Image Credits
Sarah Milken