Joy Beat

Arun Rath: The news can break like relentless waves of crisis, conflict and catastrophe. We know because we’re in it every day. But there is another side to the story. Joy is out there, not just in fleeting moments — it’s a force, a movement and, in many ways, a choice.

Do we choose to take in the good news as well as the bad? That was our choice, and apparently, it’s yours as well because you are listening to the Joy Beat, where we spotlight the real people doing the real work to make the world a better place.

From our newsroom to your ears, we’re telling the stories that deserve to be heard.

By sharing what we love with others, we are spreading little seeds of joy. It comes in all shapes and forms, including through food. Let’s start today by heading to the kitchen with the nonprofit organization ChopChop Family.

Cooking with others can teach valuable life skills like time management, creativity and effective communication. Sally Sampson, founder and president of ChopChop Family, knows this firsthand. She also knows the joy of cooking goes far beyond fundamental life skills; it creates meaningful bonds, connects us with our ethnic heritage and fosters a sense of community through a common goal.

But the art of preparing a meal and enjoying dinner as a family sometimes feels like a relic of a bygone time. Sally is working hard to change that. Today on the Joy Beat, we’re celebrating the work she does through ChopChop Family, which inspires families to cook whole and healthy meals together and show the world that you’re never too young — or too old — to cook.

We’re lucky to be joined by Sally today. Sally, welcome to the Joy Beat!

Sally Sampson: Thanks for having me! I’m thrilled to be here.

Rath: ChopChop Family has grown quite a bit since its founding. Take us back to 2010 — how did you start off, and how did you get to where you are now?

Sampson: So, my background is as a cookbook writer, and I started to really get interested in the obesity epidemic. It seemed to me that if children learned how to cook and be responsible for some of their own eating and caretaking, it might really have a positive impact.

We started out by being distributed in pediatricians’ offices. Back in 2010, pediatricians were mandated to talk about healthy eating and physical activity, and they didn’t really have any tools. So when we started, we were really just in pediatricians’ offices.

Today, we’re wherever you find children. We’re in pediatricians’ offices, we’re in schools, after-school programs, hospitals, community health centers — really, wherever you find children.

Rath: I’m pretty sure it was a pediatrician’s office where I first encountered ChopChop Family. How has the organization grown since then? When it started out, was it just you?

Sampson: It was pretty much just me, actually. There was an editor and a designer, and none of us got paid. We just did it because we really… It was a passion project, I guess you’d say.

Today, we have about 15 employees, and everybody is paid. Now, we have a business side and designers and things like that, so it has grown both internally and externally.

Rath: You’re talking about starting kids off young with engaging with cooking. Was cooking a big part of your childhood?

Sampson: It was huge! I’ve always really loved to cook. My mother cooked. To be honest, my mother cooked through the Joy of Cooking, and she was a big Julia Child fan, so she cooked through all of that.

I grew up in a time when you ate what your parents gave you. You know, your parents cooked, and the food that was on the table was what you ate, so I have a pretty wide palate and kind of grew up eating everything, and then, eventually, really loving to cook.

Rath: How does that shape the way that you’re bringing this to other people now?

Sampson: Well, what we say is that we look at everything through the lens of food and cooking. For instance, in the magazine, we have classic recipes, but then we also have math. We have science. We have financial literacy. We have cultural literacy. We have geography.

Let’s say you have a child who’s really interested in geography, and they’re not interested in cooking. Maybe you start talking to them about where an ingredient comes from, and then they get more interested in that ingredient. And then, they get more interested in what you do with that ingredient. We really feel that you can teach just about anything through cooking.

Rath: I’m curious about how the publications, how ChopChop publications evolved. Did they start out simply as recipes? How did you get to where you are now with this magazine that covers so much and engages on so many different levels?

Sampson: Well, I would say over time, we’ve expanded quite a bit in terms of what we see as ways to engage a child. We started out with mostly recipes and then whatever we thought was interesting about those recipes.

But more and more, we’ve expanded. Now, we review books that are about food and cooking. And when I say food and cooking, I mean that in a very, very loose sense. So our intent is to bring your child in really through any door, if that makes sense.

Rath: You talked about your mom and how that generation was passionate about that book, the Joy of Cooking. It’s just sort of striking me how that was, I think, kind of a reaction in some ways to eating so much processed food. Did you get a sense that you were getting to an untapped audience here that people are — forgive the pun — hungry for this kind of approach to food?

Sampson: Yeah, I think so. I really do. I mean, so much food that people eat is either processed or prepared by someone else. I think that health outcomes as a result of that are pretty gloomy. If you think about almost anything that’s wrong with you — from diabetes to depression to lupus to migraines — get the junk out of your diet and cook your food.

Rath: Absolutely. I’m curious — again, getting back to the evolution of the publications — when did you start to think that it would be a good place to talk about things like financial literacy and cultural literacy?

Sampson: Well, cultural literacy sort of came naturally, right? So, if you’re talking about a dish from another country, and it’s a delicious dish, you talk about where it came from and the history of it — you’re just sort of introducing that naturally.

Financial literacy is maybe an obsession of mine. I mean, I feel like this is a whole nother thing, but I feel like people are financially illiterate — and not just children! If you look at the pandemic, we really learned that people weren’t saving money. They don’t understand how to shop. You know, all those things, I think, are really critical. We decided to introduce that into ChopChop so that it’s things like, “Kana and Arun go to the grocery store. We give them $10. They need to get these things.”

You know, they’re like standard math problems just to get kids thinking about it. Is it advantageous to buy the larger one that costs less money or the smaller one that you’re actually going to use up? It depends on the setting. What does it actually cost to make a meal?

People think fast food is so cheap. It isn’t, really. If you try to reproduce something from a fast food restaurant with real ingredients, you begin to learn that there’s not much of a difference and, in some cases, it’s actually less expensive to make it on your own.

Rath: You’ve brought the joy of cooking to a lot of people now. I know that phrase is probably trademarked to the book, but in terms of the words as they are, talk about what that joy means for you.

Sampson: For me personally, I love to cook. It’s amazing. I think it’s so satisfying. But we really see that with kids. For instance, we did a photo shoot this past weekend, and what we do is bring in regular kids who are not models, and we have them cook the different foods that are going to be in the next issue.

These are kids — some of them have cooked before, some of them have not — but they go from start to finish. They take an ingredient, and they make a meal that they can eat, that they can share with their family, that they could bring to a relative or a neighbor who is sick or housebound for some reason. I mean, we see kids really being thrilled in a way that a child in an art class brings home a painting and wants to see it on the refrigerator. They’re sharing it with you. They’re sharing it with everyone else. You see that with food.

We also have an online cooking club, and there are 13 recipes that you get through. Each time, you get a sticker for each achievement. I think the first one is making a smoothie. So you make the smoothie, and in order to get to the next level, you have to send us a photo of the smoothie you made or of you making the smoothie.

Every photograph of these kids — they’re glowing because it’s an adult skill, which is pretty thrilling to master. Most of our kids are younger, and every now and then, we have a 15 or 16-year-old. The dynamic between, say, a six-year-old and a 15-year-old is kind of unbelievable. It’s like the six-year-old knows that the 15-year-old isn’t an adult, but they know that they’re also not a little kid either.

Some of our most beautiful photographs really are seeing the young kid looking at the older kid with such adoration, just like a role model. It’s really cool. And I just want to add that the food that’s in the magazine is real food. It’s not smiley faces, you know, it’s not kid-centric, but it is simple and doable for a child to master.

Rath: One of the things I love about that is that those kinds of images you’re describing sound like an antidote to a lot of the rubbish that they’re subjected to on social media — or, at least, an inoculation, maybe.

Sampson: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think that it is. I mean, it’s almost like an old-fashioned life skill. That’s really critical.

Rath: Sally, it’s been wonderful speaking with you about this. Thank you so much.

Sampson: Thank you for having me. It was a thrill. It was a joy, in fact!

Rath: That’s Sally Sampson, founder and president of ChopChop Family.

Next, let’s go to Ashland, Massachusetts, to the 33 All American Diner. Peter and Norah Zoummar have their hands full operating and owning the restaurant. That, plus a young daughter, should be enough to fill anyone’s plate, but they didn’t stop there.

Inspired by Norah’s upbringing in Uganda, the couple also dedicates their free time to running the Neshlyn Children’s Foundation. The nonprofit helps raise money for children in Namwendwa, the village where Norah grew up.

The foundation helps provide essential aid like nutrition, education, shelter and health care to help break the cycle of poverty. And if that weren’t enough — all of their restaurant tips from Tuesday through Friday go directly to the foundation.

We’re fortunate to be joined by the honorees themselves. Peter, Norah, welcome to the Joy Beat!

Peter Zoummar: Thank you for having us.

Norah Zoummar: Thank you so much for having us.

Rath: First thing I want to ask about, Norah — we were getting introduced and talking about this — you just received an honor.

Norah: Yes, I did. I’m still in my dream. I’m still dreaming. I can’t believe it because I’m just a girl from Namwendwa out of poverty. I, myself, am an orphan, and never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I would be honored for anything because I do these from my heart. I don’t require anyone to honor me or do this, but it was just a shock. It was such a nice thing.

Rath: Tell us what the award is.

Norah: I was nominated through the Black Excellence on the Hill. I was nominated by Representative Lewis. I’m still in shock. I’m still sleeping. I think maybe one day I’ll wake up, but it’s such an honor. I’m beyond honored to have this award.

Rath: And you said it sort of takes your mind right back to your home village.

Norah: Yes. For me, this honor is not for me. It’s for the people in the village because I love the children. I want to give all the little children orphans out there in my village hope that it doesn’t matter where you come from, what you look like — you can still do great things in the world.

Rath: Tell us a bit more about your upbringing.

Norah: Well, my parents passed away from HIV and AIDS. I was born in ‘86, so it was like a pandemic — an HIV and AIDS pandemic. When my mother had me, she was given a blood transfusion. She lost a lot of blood, and she was given blood that was infected because, in those days, people didn’t really check. The doctors didn’t have so much knowledge about how it spread.

So when she had me, my mother was given the wrong blood, unfortunately. She passed away when I was two-and-a-half, and my grandmother took on the role of raising me. She breastfed me — which is so weird! Every time I tell somebody that I was breastfed by my grandmother, they’re shocked. They’re like, “How? How is that true? How is that even possible?”

But in my country, we have a lot of herbs, and she had to take sme of those. That’s how she was able to produce milk and take care of me. My aunt — my mom’s sister — took over the education part, so I was educated. I have a degree in mass communication. That’s how my life has been — just aiming to do better.

Rath: Peter, the two of you built this really beautiful life here. At what point did you decide to start getting involved in philanthropy?

Peter: It was around the time when the COVID pandemic took effect here in the state. We would send some money back home to Uganda to help with the education of the youngsters back in the village of Namwendwa.

Norah just recently said she’s going to take the tips we make during the week and send those over to help with the process of taking kids to school, educating them and giving them hope that one day, through education, they can have a solid life and good career.

Rath: Trying to provide education to kids in Uganda sounds pretty wonderful.

Peter: Yeah. You know, education as a whole in Uganda — to go to school, it’s $20 a year to send someone to school in the village of Namwendwa, so you can imagine every little bit would help us in raising these funds.

Eventually, our hope is to build a school to offer a larger group of children the ability and accessibility to go to school. We’re currently on GoFundMe, so it’s a tax-deductible donation that people can make towards the foundation to build the school.

Rath: You must be so busy with the restaurant and the foundation and also raising a child.

Peter: Oh, yeah.

Rath: So this question is to you both: how do you manage it?

Norah: During the week, I’m the waitress, and Peter is the cook. He cooks all week from Tuesday to Sunday. On the weekends, we have a little help, so I join him in the kitchen to help him cook.

And then, we have our hands full when we get home with Alba. She finishes school at about 2 or 3, so we have enough time to go pick her up, take her to activities, do homework and then make calls back during the day — we make so many calls back to Uganda to see what needs to be done. What more money do they need? I tell them how much I made in tips, and then I put it in the children’s bank account because we have a bank account for the foundation.

It’s a lot. I don’t know how I do it, really, but somehow I manage.

Rath: I’m trying to think of how to say this. I am someone who is a child of immigrants who came here with nothing and built a life for me and my brother while also helping family back at home. There’s a kind of reverence that we have for people like you of that generation that are doing that. Even though it’s not where I’m from, I kind of just want to say thank you.

Norah: Aww. For me, it’s the sadness I get every time we go home to Uganda. I just feel so sad because most of the children have no hope. I kind of call them the “Forgotten Children of Namwendwa” because it’s like no one cares. Every time we go home to the village, the little kids all run towards us. It’s like we’re bringing some sort of … like we’re coming to save them. They feel like we’re coming to save them.

But we, ourselves, don’t have a lot. They’ll run around my husband because, for them, every time they see somebody that’s white, they assume they’ve come to give them money or clothes. We can only do so much with the little tips that I have and send home. But it would be nice to send more, too.

At the moment, we’re only sending about 20 children to school, with the school fees and all the necessities they need — books, pencils, pens. We even buy clothes, because a lot of them come to school without shoes. They don’t have clothes.

We’re trying to do the best we can. It doesn’t make sense for someone to live comfortably when, where you come from, they’re so poor. They live below the poverty line. If there’s a line of poverty, Namwendwa is like, a thousand times worse than that because people can’t even afford $0.50 a day.

Rath: This seems like a great moment for me to tell people that if you want to help, put into Google the Neshlyn Children’s Foundation, and their website is easy to find if you want to help.

You know, the segment is called the Joy Beat. I’m wondering, personally, what brings you the most joy?

Norah: What brings me the most joy is seeing the faces of the children in my village smile. I just, I love giving. I love people. I love children. I only have one child, but I feel like when I go to the village, all those little children running around are all my children. I just feel like, as a mother, I don’t know what else I could do. But if I could adopt all the children in my village, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Even during my birthday, I always have a celebration. A lot of people at the restaurant were giving me money. “Oh, happy birthday Norah, happy birthday!” I said, “I’m not really going to be happy just taking this money, going to the store and buying myself new shoes or a new handbag or anything like that.”

I decided to celebrate with the children of Namwenda, so I threw a big party for them. I had drinks, sodas — because children like a lot of sodas. I had people come cook food, and we served all the children. We had bags of rice, which is like corn flour. It’s one of the staples in Uganda that they eat.

I was so happy just to see how they celebrated and how they were drinking the sodas. It just brought a lot of happiness and joy. I was like, “Oh my God — I don’t need anything. I don’t need anything else because I love people. I love children.

Rath: And Peter, let me ask you the same question. What brings you the most joy?

Peter: What brings me joy is seeing other people being happy, nourished, well-fed, well-dressed, especially because at their young ages, they don’t know … It’s only what we give them as an example, how to carry themselves. If they can just do the same and give them good milestones to reach and have good goals in life — that’s what gives me hope.

Also, what brings me joy is that my wife is also a talented singer as well. She’s done a few songs — produced a few songs in Uganda. Neshlyn is her stage name, so that’s something maybe she didn’t share with you.

Rath: This is a revelation!

Norah: Yeah, I am a singer. I’m a professional singer.

Rath: No kidding.

Norah: Yeah, that’s where the name comes from — Neshlyn is my stage name, so that’s where the name comes from.

Rath: Wow. Where can people hear or see you sing?

Norah: I’m on YouTube. I’m on Spotify, Apple Music — all the platforms. I’m on TikTok and everywhere.

Rath: Norah, it’s been so wonderful talking with you. I wish you could see — I’ve got such a big smile on my face. Thank you so much.

Norah: Thank you for having us.

Rath: Peter, thank you also. It’s been really great talking with you. Thank you for spending the time with us.

Peter: Thank you. Absolutely.

Rath: That’s Peter and Norah Zoummar. They run the 33 Diner in Ashland and the Neshlyn Children’s Foundation.

This is: Joy Beat. I’m Arun Rath. Our final Joy Beat honoree for this episode brings the joy of food to those who may not have the means to do so. We’ll let the listener who made this nomination explain how:

Caller: I volunteer at the West Roxbury Food Pantry, run by a woman named Darra Slagle. She’s a fantastic person and a great organizer — coordinates all the food, wrangles volunteers and does a great job at dealing with lots of people and makes everybody feel good about what they’re doing. She gets the job done, feeding thousands of people every month.

Rath: Darra Slagle is the executive director of Rose’s Bounty, a food pantry in West Roxbury that strives to alleviate food insecurity and, per its mission statement, do so with ‘open hearts and helping hands.

Joining us today is the nominee herself. Darra, welcome to the Joy Beat!

Darra Slagle: Thank you, this is such an honor! I know Fred, obviously, and for him to nominate me is even more of an honor, so thank you for having me on.

Rath: What was going through your head hearing that? Were you expecting that?

Slagle: Nope. When you told me that somebody had nominated me, I had no idea who it would be.

Rath: Awesome. So, we could tell, just getting set up for this interview, you are very busy with your work there. Tell us a bit about Rose’s Bounty and the range of what you do.

Slagle: We started seven years ago as a food pantry. We opened up two days a month to the public, and we started to expand our programs when we realized that we were serving people who could come to us. But we wanted to make sure that we were getting food to people who couldn’t come to our food pantry.

We first started to identify students, so we partnered with the elementary school, and we send bags of food home over the weekend for students who have been identified as food insecure, and we make sure that they have food over the weekend.

We connected with the VA, and we work with the homeless and disabled veterans. And then, we started — and this is what I call the silver lining of the pandemic — we were able to make this connection with ETHOS, which is elder services for Southwest Boston. We’re serving 50, 55 elderly, homebound neighbors who can’t come to our food pantry, and so we pack and serve them every week.

Rath: That’s brilliant. Tell us about the Rose of Rose’s Bounty — who this was named after.

Slagle: Rose was a parishioner at the Stratford Street United Church, and she was a woman who always set up the coffee hours so that we could have coffee and conversations after church. She was a wonderful human being, and when she passed, her family donated money, and we were able to take that money and start Rose’s Bounty seven years ago.

Rath: Wow. I mean, what a great, real material tribute.

Slagle: Exactly.

Rath: How many people, on average, would you say come to the food pantry each month?

Slagle: Between our two open pantry days, I would say we have well over 400 families, and those families serve probably 700 or so.

Rath: Hearing Fred talk about you, it sounds like you’re obviously inspired to do this work, but it seems like you have this ability to inspire others. He says, “make people feel good about getting that work done.”

Slagle: That’s so wonderful. I mean, I feel like maybe I don’t see myself as other people do. I just come in and do what I can, and I don’t like a lot of light shined on me, only because I feel like our volunteers are so fabulous. We have so many volunteers who are so dedicated and so passionate, so I don’t want to take away from them. They’re really doing all the work.

Rath: What is it that motivates this passion, because it’s not easy work that you’re doing?

Slagle: No, it isn’t. It’s very, very hard work. We’re getting probably 13 to 14,000 pounds of food a week. It’s all going out, so there’s a lot of physical work.

You know, there’s the emotional aspect of it too — you know, the people that are coming and helping who have big hearts. It’s hard to see this many people struggling.

Rath: Since you’ve been running the organization, you’ve also implemented a number of other programs in the community, right?

Slagle: Yeah. I mentioned we have our homebound neighbor program. We get an intake sheet for each person who needs food. It gives us an indication of the sort of things that they would be willing to accept. Then, we just have to kind of extrapolate what we do have and what they’ve indicated that they would like, so we pack up a nice box of fruits and vegetables.

I just want to interject — that’s one of the things that we really try to do. We try to make sure that people get chicken, cheese, and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables because those tend to be the most expensive things. We really try to make sure we’re sending healthy things for people to cook and make at home.

The veteran program is run much the same way. We pack and then deliver, and that’s done with a combination of social workers and volunteers. Much like our children’s program, where we send kids home with food for the weekend, we have an adult day program we support.

There are two locations for our children’s program. There’s a little offshoot that we do called “Kids in the Kitchen,” where we’re trying to inspire kids to not just grab something that’s quick but really get engaged in the cooking aspect in hopes of trying to break out of what I noticed is sort of like cyclical poverty. They tend to reach for the easy, quick things, so we’re trying to expand so that kids will be excited to be in the kitchen.

Rath: You clearly bring a lot of joy to your community, as evidenced by your nomination. What brings you the most joy?

Slagle: Wow, that’s a really hard question. I think, at the end of the day, I feel like I might have made a difference in somebody’s life. I might have made something just that little bit easier for them.

Rath: Clearly, you’ve made a lot of differences in a lot of lives in a really powerful way. It’s been really wonderful talking with you — put me in a good mood. Darra, thank you so much for joining us and spreading some much-needed joy.

Slagle: Thanks, Arun. Thank you so much. It’s quite an honor.

Rath: That’s Darra Slagle, executive director of Rose’s Bounty, a food pantry in West Roxbury.

These brilliant people show us just some of the ways that food can bring us together by spreading joy through food, cooking, serving, donating and more. They’ve helped make the world a better — and tastier — place.

If you would like to nominate someone or something for the Joy Beat, let us know! Leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-BEAT [2328].

Joy Beat is a production of GBH and is distributed by PRX. A big thank you to all of our guests and to our team, who helped make this show possible.

Kana Ruhalter produced and edited this episode. Jackie Martin is our senior producer. Devin Robbins is our editorial producer. Mei He is our project manager. Special thanks to Dave Goodman, who helped mix this episode. We had engineering support from Bill Piacitelli. Don’t forget to hit that follow button if you haven’t already to keep up with new Joy Beat episodes that drop every other Tuesday.

This is Joy Beat. I’m Arun Rath. Thanks for listening.