Have you ever enjoyed a meal together with friends and strangers alike?
Can you imagine a square hosting a big table that neighbours share for dinner in summer nights?
Is it possible to raise awareness and fight food waste by launching a public banquet prepared out of leftovers?
In recent years numerous initiatives worldwide have arisen using food to challenge the way people engage in urban public spaces. Combining various backgrounds such as art, architecture, activism or anthropology, this interventions have been put into practice without any commercial purpose but holding multiple intentions that range from enjoyment and celebration to education or political protest.
City Cook Book is a collection of initiatives enhancing public spaces by bringing people together through food culture. It aims to explore how food can be an effective tool to both transform our common spaces into sites for encounter and social interaction, as well as to engage with larger issues that shape our everyday urban life. Through its digital platform and its print-it-yourself publication, City Cook Book intents to visualize this phenomena, reflect upon it and inspire other initiatives.
contact[at]citycookbook.org
City Cook Book is a non-profit initiative developed by Claudia Sánchez and Íñigo Cornago.
This web and publication has been designed by ereslomastumas and programmed by Andrés Sedano.
Proyecto financiado por Ayudas Creación Injuve
Project funded by Ayudas Creación Injuve
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DIGGERS DINNERS are exercises in radical sharing – of food and of knowledge. They can take place in small settings among friends or in public and open to all. The events are basically a potluck but with one ‘rule’ – each participant’s contribution must be primarily made from ingredients that they have either grown, hunted, fished, foraged, gleaned, bartered, found, gifted, or stolen. At the start of each dinner every participant is invited to explain the story of her/his/its ingredients.
EATING IN PUBLIC (EIP) was founded in 2003 in Hawai’i by Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma to nudge a little space outside of the State and capitalist systems. Following the path of pirates and nomads, hunters and gathers, diggers and levelers, we gather at people’s homes, plant free food gardens on private and public land, set up free stores and other autonomous systems of exchange, generally without permission. We do not exploit anyone’s labor nor offer any tax-deductions. We are, in all the word’s various definitions, free.