Food Justice & Women Health workshops with TENT
During the summer of 2023, HarvestCare & Public Food participated in an art project created by TENT Rotterdam, ‘Sustaining Small Acts.’ The project explores how human actions affect the physical environment around us and how we can maintain our living within planetary boundaries.
Exploring the connection between food and justice
What ends up on our plates is a great representation of the inequality within our economic system. If your daily budget is 10 €, you will think twice about whether you want to choose frozen pizza for 2 € or a salad box for 6 €.
We created a food system that is really good at creating abandoned cheap calories, produced with methods that compromise ecological costs. But we have forgotten that human bodies are not just machines in need of cheap energy sources. Our bodies are complex ecosystems that require food that nurtures our cells, tissues, and organs. Food that allows our body not just to function but thrive.
During the workshop, we explored what we can do as consumers, citizens, and eaters to support ecological restoration and human regeneration and bring a justice perspective to our food choices.
Women's empowerment through food
Women have been consistently underrepresented in medical research, with biological between the sexes being regarded as irrelevant. The time came to change the narrative and make our cities, workforces, and society as a whole accommodating to the needs of >50% of the population.
The first step in this transformation journey is to understand our cycles, how they affect our lives, and how we can influence them with our everyday lifestyle choices, such as food, movement, workflows, and social arrangements.
During the event, participants (women and men) learn about different hormones that are dominant throughout the month, how they affect women’s predisposition, how we can support our hormonal health throughout the month, and how to align our projects to our inner clock. In the second part of the event we cooked a hormonal menu, with four different dishes - one per each of the menstrual phase:
Fresh vegetable sprint roles for follicular phase (inner spring)
Broccoli salad with ‘vegan bacon’ from coconut for ovulation phase (inner summer)
Morrocan chickpeas stew for luteal phase (inner autumn)
Black Bean Brownie for menstruation (inner winter)
Kitchen gives us the perfect environment to explore new ideas to change the narrative.