Curriculum:
- Community! Everyone has a relationship to food and eating, we are all forced by the media to see and compare ourselves to societal standards. This space is incredibly necessary because as a community we don’t talk about these relationships enough and by doing so we build empathy, support, and break down stigma
- Mental health and our connection to eating – we pick up a lot of habits from our parents and families
- Cooking and intentional eating has been my personal self-care journey / reclaiming negative relationships to cooking, eating, and my body. For me, this is a story I get to continue to write which is why I encourage the food journals/cookbooks
- The energy we put into our food, we put into our bodies. This is why its best to make food homemade or eat foods you grew yourself. Have you ever eaten something your parent made when they were really mad? Could you “taste” the difference?
- Because eating is such a communal activity, it’s really easy to become influenced / affected by the people around us. If someone was mean to you around food or made fun of your food, it may change that relationship – has this happened to you?
- Cooking is a way to deepen our relationship with food, families, and places.
- Show and tell of recipes
- Make pasta e fagioli (have soup already going when we have our talk / share recipes from home – have kids harvest kale and garnish)
This week we talked about family recipes and food memories. I opened our cooking program by sharing anecdotes about my own relationship to food.
“In my family, meals were often paired with hostility. I experienced the privilege of home-cooked meals almost nightly in a family whose lineage was defined in shared meals and communal cooking. What a juxtaposition it was. No matter how delicious the food might be I could always taste the disdain, malice, spite, and yelling that occurred alongside its preparation. Not every meal was like this – it was mostly holidays or when tensions were high for reasons my childhood self wasn’t capable of seeing. But this made me dislike meals. I had no interest in cooking. What should’ve been beautiful, suburban, ‘white picket fence’ memories are clouded by uncomfortable experiences.
This set the tone for my young adult self’s relationship to food and eating. The stress surrounding meals paired with societal pressure of obtaining a body image was a recipe for disaster. After years of unhealthy dynamics and shame, I wanted to reclaim that part of my life, so I did. Now it’s my passion and joy. Now I want to share beautiful meals with people because it’s in my control to do so. I hope if there is anyone who has experienced similar circumstances, that the act of cooking together can help heal them too – if even just a little bit.
Shared company, preparing food for those you care for, allowing space for conversation and vulnerability to flow, and strengthening bonds and relationships are such special things we have the control of experiencing. If not in our daily lives, then we have it here and we have it together. This space will be where we laugh and share stories of the day, facts and things we’ve learned, and talk about our experiences.”
We made my mother’s Pasta e Fagioli recipe and went around the circle allowing everyone to share a recipe they got from their family. Some had their favorite meal one has made for them, some had a weekly staple, some had a dish that is only made on special occasions. It was wonderful to hear everyone’s stories and imagine what their recipe tastes like. There wasn’t a drop of soup left by the end.
