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
If you prefer to print any content as single PDFs, you can just click
WE(ED)S is a «Sidewalk-to-Table» project on edible weeds – public actions that include cooking demonstrations, tasting, free distribution of weeds & recipes.
Weeds have been given a bad reputation but they are a spectacular movable feast. By weeds I am not referring to pot, but the regular herbaceous plants that grow everywhere, where no one planted them. Your aunt’s backyard, by the sidewalk, parking lots, park, etc. According to the Oxford English Dictionary weeds are plants that are not valued for their use, or beauty. Plants that grow wild and strong. So wild and strong that they can take over the growth of what some call ‘superior vegetation’ – meaning those you buy at garden stores and supermarkets.
There many weeds that are edible and many of them taste really good! We are rarely informed about this because being able to get stuff for FREE is bad for capitalism. Freedom from capitalism begins when we diminish our reliance on it.
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.