printable versionThe Kitchen Sisters serve a feast of stories at Dec. 7 Aurora Forum appearance
BY BARBARA PALMER
The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, have created several award-winning radio series over the past 25 years for National Public Radio, interviewing people around the country in search of offbeat stories.
Davia Nelson, one half of the radio team working as the Kitchen Sisters, feels sad for kids of today, who are inundated with the message "Don't talk to strangers," she said during a campus visit last month. As a child of a father transplanted from the East Coast to Los Angeles, Nelson trailed her dad as he wandered the city, striking up conversations wherever he went, in search of "New Yorky" experiences, Nelson said. Her dad's mantra: "Let's go talk to strangers!"
Nelson and creative partner Nikki Silva have made talking to strangers their life's work, creating with producer Jay Allison such award-winning radio series as Lost and Found Sound and the Sonic Memorial Project, both broadcast on National Public Radio (NPR). For their most recent NPR series, Hidden Kitchens, Nelson and Silva—who neither are sisters nor claim any special cooking expertise—use food as an entrée into the lives of dozens of mostly unknown but anything but ordinary Americans.
"The kitchen is the room in the house that smells the best, where the best stories are told and where the parties begin and end," Nelson said during a Dec. 7 appearance with Silva at the Aurora Forum. The event's mood was warm and informal as Nelson and Silva played audio clips from Hidden Kitchens and talked about their work with the evening's moderator, Alan Acosta, associate vice president and director of University Communications. Nelson, Silva and Acosta, a former deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, have been friends since all three attended the University of California-Santa Cruz as undergraduates
The idea of using food as a way of examining American culture and social issues was born in the back of a San Francisco taxicab, Silva said. Nelson, a San Francisco resident who hates to drive, heard from the city's cab drivers about a clandestine portable kitchen set up each night around midnight near a cab yard. It was operated by a Brazilian immigrant to provide the flavors of home to the city's taxi drivers, many of whom hail from the same small town in Brazil as the cook.
Since then, the Kitchen Sisters have crisscrossed the country on the trail of other secret kitchens. They interpret the term "kitchen" broadly: They have interviewed a homeless man who uses a George Foreman grill to cook under a Chicago underpass; traveled to rural Kentucky to talk to volunteer cooks who stir iron kettles filled with the local specialty, burgoo, with wooden oars to raise money for their church parishes; and, for an upcoming special on Texas kitchens, talked with a man whose dream is to put the first interplanetary barbecue grill on the moon.
Often the voices they record are heavily accented, like those of Vietnamese manicurists, who, the duo discovered, bring in food after hours and transform their nail stations into communal tables. The stories of immigrants are seldom heard but vitally important, Silva said. "These voices that are hard to understand, that's what America is right now," she said.
The Kitchen Sisters have worked together for a quarter of a century; they have displayed from their earliest collaborations a knack for uncovering the offbeat. (While researching the subjects of their second story, a pair of father and son lumberjacks near Santa Cruz, they discovered the men had captured and tamed 36 rattlesnakes, which they dressed in "senorita gowns" and trained to pull a Conestoga wagon.)
After 25 years, "the wave has caught up" with the original style of the duo, Acosta pointed out. With producer Jay Allison, the Kitchen Sisters have been awarded numerous honors, including a 2006 DuPont-Columbia Award for Hidden Kitchens and a 1999 Peabody Award for their work on Lost and Found Sound.
The pair, who teach radio journalism at the University of California-Berkeley, credit their recent acclaim to their subject matter, as well as to the renaissance of public radio in a contentious political climate.
"Story is as basic as food," said Silva. Born into a tight-knit Portuguese family in Oakland and now living with her family on a commune in Santa Cruz, Silva grew up listening to her mother tell stories. "It's really an important thing a lot of our culture is losing," she said. "People don't come to the table much more and talk."
And as the tenor of the voices in broadcast media has gotten angrier and angrier, NPR has become more important to listeners, she said. "People want the truth and they want other sides of the story. That's not happening in a lot of television and a lot of radio.
At NPR, there is an effort to be fair—even more than fair, she said. "I think people are hungry for that."