Vanessa Kingori

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show Toyotathon is on So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year-end deals on the cars, trucks, and SUVs known for their legendary reliability Like the stylish and efficient Camry The ready-for-anything RAV4 Or check out a rough-and-rugged Tacoma or Tundra all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit BuyAToyota.com to find out more. Toyota, let's go places. Welcome to Ruthie's Table 4, a production of iHeartRadio and Atomize Studios.

0:47Last week, I spoke on a panel with Vanessa King-Ori, celebrating International Women's Day. Listening to Vanessa that evening, it became apparent that it really wasn't necessary for the rest of us to be there. It was her views on social justice, women in business, creativity and leadership that everybody wanted to hear, most of all me. Her path towards Chief Business Officer of Conde Nast International is a story of a young girl from Kenya achieving remarkable amount in a British world through sheer intelligence, motivation and determination. This we all know, but for me, the revelation was when Vanessa began talking about the food of her family, her culture, especially the cooking of her grandmother.

1:32Today, we're here together to hear more about memory and food, change and connectivity. As always, I will listen with awe, with love and deep admiration.

1:47The recipe that you chose, you love artichokes. I love artichokes and I love that you can only have them for a certain time of the year properly. And Italians do them incredibly well. I hope I pronounced this correctly, but it's for carciofi alla piperno. You want to explain a little bit about the piperno element? Well, first of all, carciofi, they're also called carciofi, which is a word for artichoke in Italian, a la Judea. And there's an area of Rome, which is called the Jewish Quarter, which I suppose, like in many Italian cities, was a ghetto. And it's right near the Colosseum. And there's a restaurant there called Piperino.

2:25And Richard and I used to go there. It's on the top of a little hill. And you actually can overlook the Campanile. And it's just a great little restaurant. And like a lot of Italian restaurants, you go there for one reason. One dish. Yeah, one dish. And so there it's the artichokes a la Judea. And we call them for the cookbook Artichokes a la Piperno because that's the name of the restaurant. Yeah. Oh, so nice. It's good. Well, I mean, Piperno, get ready to be absolutely swarmed with. Exactly. It's still there. It might not be there anymore, but we'll see. Okay. So this recipe serves six. You need 12 remanesco artichokes, sunflower oil, sea salt and black pepper, and three large lemons.

3:13Right, so you heat the oil to 100 degrees in your deep fryer. You need to have a deep fryer, first of all. Well, you can use a large saucepan with olive oil. Peel away the leaves of the artichoke. Cut the stalks two centimeters from the head. Fry the artichokes in batches until the leaves begin to crisp and the heart soften. drain on kitchen paper when cool peel off the outside leaves trim the tops of the artichokes increase the temperature of the oil to 170 degrees to fry the second time this is a healthy one it does drain off the oil i have to say it's not it's tasty it's healthy in love yeah so to fry the second time you place two to three artichokes at a time in a hot oil and fry until crisp for about two to three minutes then flatten out the artichokes set each on a board and gently separate out the layer of the head exposing the heart squeeze between two plates season and serve with lemon what an amazing recipe it's rather nice that an artichoke has a head and a heart I was thinking about myself in the...

4:32What do you eat at Vogue? Do you stop for lunch? It depends. So I'm very lucky because I entertain a lot our clients and business partners. So we go out to... We're in Mayfair and we go out to lovely Mayfair restaurants. So I'm at Scots a lot, Claridge's. I love the Mount Street restaurant and things. which I all now associate with work yeah right but then there are lots of days where I'm doing the business end so I don't leave my desk all day and my assistant will go and fetch me a salad and or some sushi I try to eat raw food in the day but the way it is at Vogue House is each magazine kind of dominates the floor so I worked on GQ for years I was running that business and I was that's the first floor and then you graduate up and Vogue is the fifth floor.

5:24And there was always this idea that nobody eats at Vogue, you know, so people would deliver, you'd see in the reception of Vogue House, you know, cakes and these amazing things being delivered and we'd all sort of scoff, oh well, they'll be in the bin, no one eats them up there and you know, at GQ we all sort of, there was food everywhere all the time, you know, and actually it's a big misconception because we all yeah we work really hard it's a really hard working team um the vogue team i still now i'm overseeing all of the brands at condé nas but i still sit with edward on the the fifth floor and um he loves to eat yeah he does we love to eat yeah um we love to plan a dinner we love to incorporate a bit of our culture into dinner So even when we did his wedding, his wedding was at Longleat and I helped him to plan that.

6:17It was amazing. But we were saying, you know, we need to have jollof in there. Which caterers can cook some jollof rice? Did you? Yeah, we did. And we had, you know, he loves spicy food. Anytime he comes here, he'll always say, can I have chili and chili oil? So we had chili sauces and everything. So it's talking about food, eating. A lot of times he and I will eat our lunch at desks, you know, across from each other. So he'll have steamed vegetables and, you know, some fish or chicken or something, and I'll have sushi, but we sit together and eat it if we're doing a working lunch. Otherwise, I'm out with clients.

6:55When we talked to Edward, and he spoke quite a lot about wanting to change the culture of, you know, the stick-thin model and the denial of food and the denial of pleasure in order to show clothes at their best. Now that you're in such a senior position at Condé Nast, does that into your world? Yes, yeah. What do you feel about it? Well, I think that, you know, the reason that Edward and I's partnership kind of is so important to me is we had been separately and a bit together talking about this challenge in our industry, not just about beauty being about stick thin, which is kind of a bit preposterous, But just the idea that magazines and media represented this kind of one really hard to reach version of being a woman, which we didn't grow up surrounded by.

7:48My friends weren't those people. And yet there were these magazines that we loved representing that and an industry which we loved and we were a part of, you know. and so you know the joy and beauty for both of us was all around in different shapes in different sizes in different color and what we did behind the scenes at Vogue was build a group of people who didn't think like us that's how you learn about new exciting things if you're all speaking to each other and you you know Edward and I actually have quite similar backgrounds um I was laughing with Steve McQueen about our mothers did exactly the same thing, nurses in the same hospital.

8:32The two mothers. Yeah. And so our background, you know, he can start a sentence, I can finish it because our backgrounds are so similar. And so what's really fascinating is talking to, I mean, I could talk to Steve forever in a day or Edward forever in a day. But what I really love is to talk to people who didn't grow up like me. That's where, And I think that's what I really want to challenge, not only the media industry, but any organization to do a little bit more is, you know, how can you connect with people and wider audiences if you don't have them in your midst? And food? And food is the great connection.

9:12Steve McQueen's a good eater. We did an interview with him, and he remembered me talking very much about growing up, like you. Very, very interesting conversations about his mother and the markets, you know, keeping the food of their parents and their grandparents and adapting to the food of the culture. The keeping food alive through, food is everything. You know, when everything was planned around food, I remember all of our great excursions on the weekends being about going to get food, you know. So particularly in London in the 90s, late 80s, 90s, where a lot of the foods that we ate in the Caribbean in particular were not readily available.

9:54You couldn't pop to, you know, Sainsbury's. So you'd go from West London to Dalston Market because somebody told you that there was something there or what have you. and Wembley Market, we used to go to Southall Market lots because the Indian community had lots of the ingredients and spices and so on that we used. And so that's really unifying. But I think with one of the best ways to get to know people and groups of new people when you're trying to connect and create these kind of diversity of perspective spaces where, you know, it's through food.

10:42Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Toyota-thon is on, and right now your local Toyota dealer is celebrating with can't-miss year-end deals on the vehicles that built Toyota's reputation for legendary reliability. Discover the stylish and efficient Camry and Corolla, both available with all-wheel drive, or go with a RAV4 or Grand Highlander. Versatile, adventurous, and ready to take you and your family wherever the road leads. Need muscle? Take it up a notch with a Tacoma or Tundra. Built tough and always ready for the long haul. And no matter which Toyota you choose, you'll find smart financing and lease options available to qualified customers, making it easier than ever to get behind the wheel of the Toyota you've been waiting for.

11:33But don't wait. These year-end savings won't last. Shop the entire Toyota lineup and find a great deal today on buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Where did that story come from? Book? Dream? Nope. It came from a conversation. Meet Miko Mini Plus, the AI companion that co-creates personalized story adventures with your child in real time. What color was the hamster's cape? And what did he pack for lunch? Unlock your child's imagination. Discover Miko Mini Plus and the magic of AI, exclusively at Costco.

12:16Where were you born? Start from the very beginning. I was born in Kenya, in Nanuki. My father is Kenyan and my mother is from St. Kitts in the Caribbean, St. Kitts and Nevis, a tiny little island. And they met here in London. It's kind of a strange pairing in the 70s. and it was quite a radical relationship there because at that time Africans and people from the Caribbean did not spend that much time together they certainly didn't end up in relationships and London is the great sort of unifying space right it's a true melting pot I think in the while. They met here, they fell in love. And my mother moved with my father to this strange land where she knew no language or the culture.

13:10Lots of her family didn't speak to her because of the move. And indeed, lots of his family didn't speak to him. Because it varied someone from... Yeah, from a different culture. And he was a very eligible bachelor. So I was born in this kind of context. But did they both plan to come to London for a short time and then go home? Yeah, my father, he did some of his education here. He was a military man, but he studied engineering, came to London with studies and work and things. And my mother, who is a great inspiration in my life, has moved here at 17 on her own. She took the flight and came to London to become a nurse with the NHS.

13:52And it was a time where British were recruiting heavily in the Commonwealth to establish the welfare state, so to come and become nurses and bus drivers and all of those things. And she had a big kind of dreamy heart and came here thinking, this is going to be an incredible life. And then she was transported to Kenya. Was it a small village? It's quite a small village, yes. And it's in a sort of mountainous area. His family were in coffee. So yeah, quite rural. But they were very well off. But my mother had a very difficult time settling in there. And this is where food comes in because she was encountering women who didn't understand her, literally and figuratively.

14:42She only spoke English and they often spoke five languages, you know. and so the language barrier was there she didn't speak Swahili she didn't speak the dialect as well and so food was her way to connect with people she used to say to me it's quicker to learn a dish than to learn a language yeah and I think one of the most ingratiating things you can do in a new culture is you know know some basic words to greet people and she looked at food in the same way if you could cook the food really well it was a show of respect so she learned to cook which I also found strange because she had cooks and nannies and all of those things but she loved to cook.

15:21Had she loved to cook before she went there? Yeah my grandmother was a great cook and grandmother in St Kitts. Yeah so we're all over the place yeah and my family are not a family who say I love you a lot but we're an incredibly loving family and it's expressed through stories like everyone in my family is a bit of a joker like you know funny stories and food yeah she's what was the kitchen like do you remember the kitchen in the house well I didn't I we left Kenya at when I was 18 months old I see I don't have any real memories but again she would cook the dishes to keep I guess the Kenyan in me alive so we left when I was 18 months old we moved to St Kitts and then we came to London and she would cook ugali and sukumawiki and mung beans and these are Kenyan dishes.

16:19What are the first two? I know mung beans but what were the two dishes? Yeah so sukumawiki is it's like collard greens or kale with tomatoes and onions and you tend to have it with rich dishes so like a beef stew or stewed mung beans and ugali which is like a maize kind of it's almost like a not a mashed potato but it's quite a firm dense carrier almost for stews and things and the sukma wiki is like a palate cleanser so she would make these dishes for us, my sister and I, I guess to keep that Kenyan culture alive in us. Growing up, moving around, living in, belonging to three places, food was a brilliant connector to places we'd left so that they didn't become lost, but also a really good way of connecting with somewhere new, with new people, with new communities and with a new life, almost.

17:24Tell me about it. Well, okay, so at two, we went to live with my grandmother. My mother and father got divorced. My mother came back to London to try and reestablish herself, buy a house and all of those things. And we stayed in St. Kitts with her, visiting frequently with my grandmother. So I was very young. So I was stuck to her all the time. and she is definitely the most powerful sort of figure in my life my mother's a very powerful figure we're very close but my grandmother is almost my heart you know and I gosh I'm welling up even talking about her it's because when we spoke about this she's still alive no she's not But she's very much alive.

18:12I think about her every day, not only through food, but also just her advice was amazing. Gosh, it's so funny. It's really evocative thinking about this. I'm getting emotional. Okay, do you want to stop? No.

18:29It's kind of happy tears. Yeah, of course it is. When someone leaves a mark on your life that's so powerful and kind of runs through everything, In my working life, whenever I'm up against any kind of challenge, in the way I raise my son, in the way that I connect to people and what I place as important, these kind of figures are so strong. And I miss her. I really miss her, but she's alive. What was her food like? Was she in the kitchen all day long? I don't remember her not wearing an apron or some sort of overalls. So she made food that needed constant nurturing. you know her house was also where everyone dropped in so my sister and I lived there on and off four of my cousins lived there my uncle's children and then she was sort of everyone's grandmother so her house was oh it was so fun it was a wash with children all the time and I was the youngest so I was always with her I slept in her bed and I was literally on her Apenstrang.

19:35So her food was very rich. It was like, almost like a warm embrace, you know, hearty and lots of sort of stews and meats and heavily marinated, delicious comfort food, dumplings and, you know, sort of starchy, delicious things. And she kept her own little farm at least it felt like a farm to me she grew her own vegetables she had her own fruit tree she would graft her own strains of mango she grew herbs and things that people would come and visit her to buy and she kept her own animals and I used to help her tend to those little gardens and then she'd make up these amazing dishes from food and she'd tell me stories of the food as well Did she grow up in poverty or did she grow up in...

20:30Yes, she did. And I look at sort of my life now, which is so much on her shoulders and all of the opportunity I have now. And I think about how important circumstances. So she was a really intelligent woman. She was the most prolific reader I ever knew. She was either cooking or reading. But she was forced to leave school at 14. And her mother was a, she also had a slightly strange parentage in that her father was previously a slave. And her mother was a. So your great grandfather was a slave. Yeah. In St. Kitts. Yeah. So what year would that have been? That would have been probably. Goodness.

21:19Well, like the Civil War, probably the late 1800s. Yeah. But her mother, which is really strange, was a Portuguese woman from a slave-owning family. So it's really, really unusual that way around. And her mother was not very maternal at all. And so they fell upon hard times. Her mother was seen, I think, as having made bad decisions. And so she didn't grow up surrounded, as I understand it, by lots of love. And so she created this love. loving world. But the reason it's important how she grew up is her food was very much worker food. You know, she made food that they would have made for men and women who worked picking cotton.

22:04She was picking cotton at 14 years old in the fields. And then after that, taking books under the house to read them in the evening and cooking and supporting, you know, the households and so on. So she had this really eclectic upbringing where she really valued education and missed her opportunity, I think, to have a full education. But food was also the key joy. Yeah. Yeah. And so would you sit down, would you go to school and then every evening come home and sit down for dinner? Would that be a dinner on the table for you at home? Yes. Yeah. so my grandmother always liked us to sit and eat together again because I think sharing stories and storytelling was really important and food's a really good way to get everyone together and understand what their days were like I was very young so I was always around the house so I looked forward to people coming home with their stories of the day and enjoying that over food and so So we would have great mounds of kind of rice and vegetables and these kind of incredible, and everybody would pile in and pour in and go for second plates.

23:23It wasn't a very formal sit and the table was also off the kitchen. So it was kind of part of the action. And it was just a really lovely way to be connected with the people around you. And breakfast, what was breakfast license I remember? Do you know what's so funny? I do not remember breakfast. What I remember really vividly at my grandmother's house is the back door of her house was at the base of a, we called it a mountain, but it was really just a big hill. And there were mango groves and things. And so we would take buckets in the morning. We'd just run out barefoot, all the kids together with the older kids, and go and pick fruit and slightly gorge ourselves on that.

24:06Mangos. So you left this kind of, your mother took you to London then, did she? Yeah, so my mother, while we were having this lovely time, you know, with my grandmother, learning these amazing lessons about life and opportunity and food and, you know, all of those things. My mother was in London toiling away. She was very focused on us moving to London and having the kind of cultural access that you could have in London. Being part of different communities was a big thing for her and getting a really, really great education. So she was working very hard. She'd managed to, on a nurse's salary, buy a three-bedroom house in West London, which was her dream.

24:49And all while coming back every three months to St Kitts to visit us. But this sort of sad thing happened where she became this kind of glamorous figure in my life. But I didn't really connect that we were ever going to live together. So when we came to London, it was a bit of a rude awakening, to be honest. I miss my grandmother terribly. Had you ever experienced either in Kenya or in St. Kitts any form of racism? You probably hadn't, had you? No. That was also really strange to me. I'm also really grateful for that because when I did encounter any forms of racism, it just didn't touch my soul because it just seemed preposterous.

25:38You know, the idea that I could be anything bad or good just because I'm black was silly because I come from these cultures where everyone's black, good, bad, you know, and everything in between. And so I think I'm really, with retrospect, you know, grateful to that foundation where I was never affected deeply by any kind of racist comments and things like that. It just felt a bit silly. I went to Catholic schools where there's a lot of immigrant communities anyway, you know, lots of Irish Catholics, Italians, Eastern Europeans. and so there was that unity and difference anyway and then I really think, I definitely remember two encounters in primary school.

26:34I told my mother and she was of course, you know, came down to school and frustrated but it just didn't really, really affect me. I think the comments don't affect me as much as seeing injustice. so more discrimination but I didn't I couldn't understand that until later on yeah yeah but I was very lucky to be surrounded by lots of people who um had had their version you know of of the kind of immigrant experience the other thing was my mother is an incredibly charming woman like everybody loves her she just brought people together all the time and so our house was always filled with quite people from all different backgrounds and again I'm really grateful to that now I tend not to walk into spaces and feel uncomfortable I don't mind being the only person of a I don't mind being the only woman in the room or the only person of colour or whatever I think that's because of her because she was hard not to like and I remember my mother used to host these dinners and Sunday afternoons and you'd have you know her friend her nursing friends the high commission of St Kitts would be casually there and like other sort of dignitaries at our little house you know and these people for you know the woman from the council estate around the corner who sometimes helped to pick us up from school because she was working and things like that and she just threw everyone together and served up food and did she adapt her cooking when she came here?

28:09Did she change to more British cooking or did she keep the cooking of Kenya? She kept the cooking a lot of Sinkit and Kenya, but we did do these sort of English nights. So Fridays we'd have like British food. Oh, wow. And we thought it was really exotic. What was it? We'd have egg and chips. Oh, yeah, for breakfast or for dinner? No, for dinner, which we kind of was really, this is so bizarre to us you know that's like wow potato and an egg and that's the whole meal and lots of different sort of um cuisines that you could get here which you couldn't get so readily and sink it's and things so fridays and sometimes saturdays were our days to either eat out or she'd recreate frankly with much more flavor yeah but um yeah no she cooked and i remember everybody loved her food yeah um I always thought when my friends came to my house they came to see her rather than came to see me yeah you know I just felt a little bit and would you go to other people's houses for food would it be very different from your own yes yeah and it was such a culture shock I always love to go I have a very close friend of mine is Polish and she in her house um her grandmother had a sort of annex in her house and she was blind actually her babcha and we became very close and now I think about it it's probably because I never really made the connection of my relationship with my grandmother but she would teach me to make pierogies and all of these amazing sort of Polish dishes which I would never have eaten before and I would have Irish stews at you know my Irish friends out my I had a friend called Margaret who had she was one of 13.

29:56I found initially the food really bland and my first encounter with English food was at school so it's kind of, you know, the worst. And then it sort of, London opened up to me through having these experiences with different families from different immigrant backgrounds and how they cooked and so on. So that was really important, me falling in love with being in London after arriving in that cold October and feeling ripped away from my favorite place.

30:38Hi, this is Shirley Strawberry from the Steve Harvey Morning Show. Toyota-thon is on and right now your local Toyota dealer is celebrating with can't-miss year-end deals on the vehicles that built Toyota's reputation for legendary reliability. Discover the stylish and efficient Camry and Corolla, both available with all-wheel drive. Or go with a RAV4 or Grand Highlander. Versatile, adventurous, and ready to take you and your family wherever the road leads. Need muscle? Take it up a notch with a Tacoma or Tundra. Built tough and always ready for the long haul. And no matter which Toyota you choose, you'll find smart financing and lease options available to qualified customers, making it easier than ever to get behind the wheel of the Toyota you've been waiting for.

31:29But don't wait. These year-end savings won't last. Shop the entire Toyota lineup and find a great deal today on BuyAToyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. Then the space hamster flew his hot air balloon all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Where did that story come from? Book? Dream? Nope. It came from a conversation. Meet Miko Mini Plus, the AI companion that co-creates personalized story adventures with your child in real time. What color was the hamster's cape? And what did he pack for lunch? Unlock your child's imagination. Discover Miko Mini Plus and the magic of AI. exclusively at Costco.

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32:54For real? No way. Mmm. Ah. What a deal. Your new morning groove. Iced coffee from McDonald's any size for just 99 cents till 11 a.m. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba. The idea of Vogue was that it was at the time that Edward took over exclusive, really in an excluding way, unfortunately, which was, you know, the style of the time. But the idea that you would critique the industry, which was our bread and butter. So the business of Vogue is advertising from luxury fashion brands who at the time celebrated very thin, very white, a very particular youth and a very particular type of beauty.