Living Cultures was a three-month focused exploration of the concept of Food Citizenship, where every day, every mouthful, we can become active and powerful in shaping our food and farming futures. Our work with the Sustainability Institute embraced working with the chef and kitchen team, gardeners, tutors and students, to improvise menus from the Food Garden. At the heart of our shared engagement with the living food cycle of growing, cooking, sharing and recycling of food waste was a sequence Ritual Workshops for skills-sharing practices in making compost, fermenting cabbage, and nurturing the ecology of honeybee colonies. These were hosted as safe spaces for imagination, feelings, memories, intuition to surface as part of exploring new visions of what is possible.
Living Cultures embedded Food Citizen practices within the Sustainability Institute, helping to build new partnerships with local food hubs and growers, embed food citizenship lunches within its food culture and enliven both its Masters Programmes and agroecology teaching programme. The Ritual Workshops became a map for personal and social change. In the months that followed, participants spoke about developing the skills for maintaining the soil and growing, fermenting, and storing food to tackle some of the problems in their communities and townships, in which long hours commuting and working outside the home are eroding the art of cooking, and coupled with the lack of refrigeration, contributing to serious health problems.
