Food for thought: Jinich thrives on cultural and culinary connections

During her short visit to Fort Wayne, chef, author, and television host Pati Jinich ate garbage for breakfast at Cindy’s Diner, a hot dog for lunch at Coney Island, and a slider at Powers Hamburgers as a late-night snack. Fortunately, she also got to spend quite a bit of time Thursday on the campus of Purdue University Fort Wayne as its final guest for this season’s Omnibus Speaker Series. Jinich’s descriptions of Mexican food had many salivating and ready to find their own savory dishes on the way home.

Because of the Mexico City native’s passioned and alluring skills as a communicator, Jinich created intoxicating word recipes that practically required audience members to wear bibs.

Even PFW Chancellor Ron Elsenbaumer drew laughs by announcing to the crowd that he was hungry after Jinich’s presentation.

Encouraged by relationships created through a love of food, Jinich has used her platforms to study the relationships between the United States and Mexico, particularly the people living on both sides of the border. She loves describing how important conversations become less stressful over meals. 

“The older I get, the more I want to do tougher, more difficult stories,” Jinich said. “I kept plowing forward and I’ve gotten to know incredible people and stories using the noble power of food.”

Strangely, she had to leave “traditional” political analysis and journalism to be able to cover the issues she wanted to explore about the people who live along the border, using cooking and culture platforms to examine broader topics. 

Her latest effort, “Pati Jinich explores PanAmericana,” premieres on PBS in April and looks at the Americas—from Barrow, Alaska, to Argentina—following the Pan-American Highway. Previewing what viewers can expect, Jinich described walking off the plane in Alaska to find wonderful Caribou burritos.

“I really believe that food helps tell stories that you can’t otherwise get,” Jinich told her audience Thursday night at Auer Performance Hall. “The things that you can’t talk about at the negotiating table, you can talk about when you push a big plate in front of everyone.”

Many of her experiences include talking with people from both sides of the border who generally admit they have more in common than the headlines might suggest. That was the focus of her PBS docudrama series “La Frontera.” 

“I loved sharing the reality of the borderland communities,” Jinich said, “not just people trying to cross the border, but the 31 million people who live in the borderlands. Take anyone from the border and put them anywhere in the world and they can navigate. They can switch from not only languages, but cultural etiquette.”

Her message was encouraging for a group of PFW students during an exclusive afternoon session in the IDEASpace at Helmke Library. Sofia Sicoe, a freshman majoring in biology, shared that her parents are Romanian immigrants, which helps her relate to Jinich’s story of how her grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe.

“Being an immigrant, you can’t really have a strong hate for anything because you have lived everywhere, and every country has given you something,” Sicoe said. “I know people living in either Mexico or the U.S. have strong feelings about it, but her being from both worlds and merging it through food helps people see the great perspective that she has.”

Senior Gideon Prumm said, “Being in political science, I constantly see the border as a political aspect, so I absolutely love her perspective. There’s so much shared culture between the southern part of the U.S. and the northern part of Mexico, and what she said was absolutely beautiful.”

Jinich encouraged her audiences to jump into passions rather than slowing down to research them before committing. 

“It’s not about suddenly finding your passion or unexpectantly becoming enlightened with what you find in your role in the world,” Jinich said. “Your path really gets built as you walk it, and the important thing is to find the joy in the walk.”

The Omnibus Speaker Series has been sponsored since its 1995 beginning by the English-Bonter-Mitchell Foundation.