Diversity and Inclusion
Allrecipes is and always has been a community built around love. We are people who love food, love to cook, and love to share recipes and stories. There is no room for hate, racism, or inequality in our community. The 60 million cooks who make up the Allrecipes audience are extraordinarily diverse. We strive to celebrate the home cooks who bring Allrecipes to life, featuring them on the website and in the pages of Allrecipes magazine.
We are committed to the goal of having contributors, featured cooks, featured recipes, and stories reflect the diversity of the Allrecipes community in our digital properties and in the magazine—and know that we still have much work to do.
We are working to highlight more of the stories and traditions of our diverse audience. In 2022, we are reviewing and editing content representing 20 percent of our traffic, with the goal of removing any bias in language and instances of cultural appropriation, including language around race, gender, sexual orientation, and glamorized colonialism.
We are also focused on recruiting more diverse voices and diverse contributors to our staff, our freelance pool, and our Allrecipes Allstars brand ambassador program. And we are working to ensure that our video and voice programming features the same diversity as our audience.
We are dedicated to working with recipe developers, food writers, editors, food stylists, photographers, videographers, podcasters, illustrators, and models who reflect the strength and diversity of our community.
Source: “About Us,” Allrecipes.com
What can I say to the question, how are we? I was at my Arabic lesson, while Natan, Dan and our nanny Vika were at home. Usually, Natan and I would have been returning from the beach right at this time. Everyone was expecting Iranian missiles, so some of the students were looking at their phones during the lesson. In Hebrew, which we are forbidden to speak in class, there is no word for “terrorist attack”; the word used is פיגוע — “assault,” “infliction of harm.” We hadn’t had time to learn it in Arabic. When the woman sitting next to me uttered it in conjunction with the name of our street, we decided to take a five-minute break to make sure everyone was okay. Dan said they were fine, but that there was the corpse of a very young guy lying outside the house and that he was afraid it was someone from the neighborhood. (We moved in three months ago and haven’t met everyone yet.) Itai, Dan’s son, could not reach him and texted me to lock all the doors urgently, as the chase was still on. So I started calling Dan and Vika again, but couldn’t get through right away. Then the siren went off and we had to go to the bomb shelter in the upscale building next door. Normally, sitting in a bomb shelter in Israel is pretty fun and privileged, but when your child and loved one are sitting in an old building with huge windows on all sides and you don’t really know when it’s going to end, it spoils the fun a bit. When the sirens stopped, I jumped on my bike as quickly as I could and raced home. The whole neighborhood was cordoned off, and no argument that I lived there and that my child was there had any effect. The back entrance from the street parallel to ours came to my rescue. The next corner was also cordoned off, and chockablock with cops and ambulances. While I was fiddling with my bike, a woman said, “That’s the second terrorist,” pointing to a long black rubbish bag in the middle of the block, which several people were lifting and packing into another rubbish bag. I glimpsed it all very quickly, and I was in a hurry to get home, to pack Natan’s things in case we had to go to the bomb shelter on the next block. But then it was sort of over, and the phones started ringing off the hook.
This morning was quiet and so idyllically beautiful, as it almost always is here, that I felt like getting out of bed and just living. The entire street in front of our building and the building next door was still splattered with blood. I ran to find out from the neighbors if everyone was alive. They said they were. They had rescued a few people from the bus stop by dragging them into their yard. (Yes, these are the same neighbors who yell at each other in the evenings in such a way that it looks like a murderous rampage is about to kick off.) The woman from the supermarket opposite said that her nephew and niece and their mom had been on that tram. The three- and six-and-a-half-year-old children saw a head shot through, and blood and brains pouring out of it onto the floor. The boy vomited all night, while the younger girl panics when she sees a tram and screams רכבת שרמוטה (“Fucking tram!”) at it.
The murdered mom with the baby in the sling turned out to be the wife of Dan’s colleague. He visited us a couple of months ago, and we talked about whether AI can assist non-verbal children in communicating. He and his family had recently gone on holiday somewhere in Asia. Dan says that the last time they had met, he was beaming with happiness.
Now there are flowers, candles, notes, and (for some reason) an Israeli flag draped over the bus stop. There are many journalists on hand, but most people refuse to be interviewed.
For the second time in the last year and a half, death had missed us by about a quarter of an hour. I couldn’t say I have any strong feelings about it. I had no time to be scared for myself or even for Natan. It was either that there is so much anxiety in a mother’s everyday life that there are no reserves of fear when it would be warranted, or the realization that for almost a year now the enormous number of murders, deaths from malnutrition and other savage things happening every day has dulled the feeling that the disaster happening on your doorstep is one of a kind.
Apparently, the very young man who was lying outside the building had been one of the shooters. Dan saw them cut his shirt open. I don’t know the proper word for what happened. An act of terror? An act of desperation? An act of stupidity? An act of struggle? Revenge? Madness? An attack? A suicide?
Remembering the acute orphan-like longing when your mom leaves you to sleep at someone’s house and goes away. Fearing that a nine-month-old baby will live his whole life with that feeling — along with tens of thousands of other children.
Source: Olga Jitlina (Facebook), 2 October 2024. Translated by Thomas Campbell. Ms. Jitlina is a friend of mine whose artwork and writings have been featured on this website on several occasions.
Western leaders and politicians are calling for an end to the airstrikes in the Middle East. Do they even want to know and understand what is going on here?
Israel is the only country of freedom and democracy in this part of the planet. It has made serious progress.
Source: Gennady Gudkov (X), 3 October 2024. Translated by the Russian Reader. Gennady Gudkov is a Russian liberal opposition politician and businessman who lives in exile in Bulgaria.
