Food Education

The project provides joyful experiences around food, its production, its preparation, and its consumption. Young individuals are introduced to the social practices of cooking and eating from a perspective of care and labour.

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body describes Roxane Gays relationship to her body and how it was defined by trauma. She writes:

"I started getting fat when I was twelve years old, after I was raped. The weight was a shield, a wall, a fortress. It protected me from the world, from men, from myself."

Roxane is not the only one struggling with food, many do, including us. Therefore we want to build a space that nourishes body and soul through the joy of caring for, growing, and preparing food with its different flavours and cultures, not thinking about calories but of balance.

Working with children aged 12 to 16, we want to teach the practices of care around food, create a safer space for the children to learn about caring relationships around food, body awareness, and acceptance. The space facilitates different activities such as caring for plants, cooking, and cleaning for a community, eating together and loving oneself.

The programme inhabits six pavilions each fulfilling a different function: dining, washing, cooking, cleaning, planting, and storing. Each of these functions are connected to one another, to the garden, and its surroundings. The design proposes a non-hierarchical open floor plan with adaptable furniture to fit all types of bodies, a glass façade for natural lighting, open corners to connect inside and outside, and a folded roof to connect the pavilions.