Shared Lunch
Article summary:
Broadcast M.A.P. does monthly shared lunches where the one rule is bring a plate.
The spread reflects the team's diversity naturally.
Food does what corporate diversity talk can't: a question about a recipe turns into stories about childhood, home, and culture.
In a fast-paced world (or rather a fast-paced work environment), it's often difficult to create real connections. The kind that goes beyond "how was your weekend" to something a bit more human. Which is why, every month or so, we have a little pause.
Usually spearheaded by Jayne Brown or Kavitha Sadasivam, we have a shared lunch with one simple rule: bring a plate to share. For an hour, laptops close, meetings stop, and conversation moves away from products and timelines. It's just us (most of us anyway), gathered around tables, talking about anything and everything.
What has quietly emerged from these lunches is that the plates themselves reflect who we are — a diverse mix of Indian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Chinese, Filipino, Swiss, Bangladeshi, Portuguese, and Kiwi. You see it the moment the food starts lining up on the table. Indian dishes are rich with bold, aromatic flavour. Portuguese desserts are sweet but never cloying, with their notes reminiscent of Filipino desserts. And the Kiwis here, as it turns out, love their sushi.
Each plate brings its own flavour, but it also brings context because food is rarely just food. It's what our families make. It's what we reach for when we want comfort. It's celebration, it's memory, but more than anything, it's identity.
By the time people are done filling up their plates from the spread, they're not just trying new dishes, they're actually having a taste of someone’s story. A conversation starts with "can I have this recipe?" and somehow ends with someone talking about childhood, home, or migration.
Diversity gets talked about in corporate terms a lot but here, we just experience it a little more simply: it's in the plate we're holding.