Knowledge is Life, Life is Freedom and Freedom is Power

The Food Journey

We will be taken on a journey which symbolises the context in which we began to tear asunder a nurturing interdependency with Mother Earth. We began to mine our own umbilicus, to produce, as we did so, the beginnings of corporate exploitation of the Earth's resources. Beginning with its people.


But, what is FOOD anyway?  Do we eat to live or live to eat? Your response to that might depend upon where in the world you are sitting, squatting, lying or standing to have your next meal. 

Are you even sure of your next meal? Are you responsible for its processing and preparation or is it going to be brought to you?

How are you even going to take in your food: is it in your mouth, cooked or raw? Is it on your skin, through your pores, the real thing or a manufactured fake? How did it get to you, in your basket, sack or shopping trolley? Perhaps it was you who had to go out and fetch it? 

A vision, a dream or an unfolding nightmare, the story of food excites the imagination of everyone who eats.


COLONISED FOODWAYS

Participating in this workshop will connect you to different ways of looking at how the unique, historical routes of Britain link it to its present day impact on culture, tastes, health, community, economics and oppression. 

Do you define your experience with food in the world or has the world defined it for you? How does this relationship impact upon marginalised peoples? We will learn that, through food, we have all been colonised! 

 Come prepared to be fully immersed in sound, tastes, touch and smell and to enter into the further dimension of time as we take ourselves back to one of the most critical journeys that the food we eat has undergone and we begin to understand the nature of global Food Systems. 


 So what is ‘native’ to a region?

‘It is already almost impossible to assemble meaningful information on the origin and evolution of certain crops as the evidence dims and fades away with each passing year’.

Jack R. Harlan, 1975

 ‘Since the dawn of agriculture, seeds and crops have followed farmers and been exchanged between them over short and long distances. They have spread until they have met their environmental limits or were ousted by rival crops (Fowler and Mooney, 1990:38). Dispersal over long distances followed traders and explorers over land and sea. There was always an interest in new crops. Sumerians sent collectors to Asia Minor around 2500 B.C. in search of vines, figs and roses, and Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt sent an expedition to East Africa to collect incense trees in 1482 B.C. (Fowler 1994:4).These are only some few of many examples of wide distribution of crops in ancient time.’

 Regine Andersen, 2001