As Group 6 is in the initial stages of contact with multiple community kitchens we thought we would share our achievements and objectives of the week:

Weekly Achievements

1. We managed to expand our search into Arbutus Ridge and Fairview with Sarah’s help. (Yay!)  Our group has been looking at finding more kitchens in those areas since we could not find enough just in Mt. Pleasant. I guess you could say we haven’t had the most pleasant experience with finding kitchens in Mt. Pleasant.
2. Since we’ve been warming up to each other we’ve been continuously getting better at communication and there’s more involvement from everyone in the group. This has been helpful in splitting up the work and having each others back in our blog.
   

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Weekly Objectives

1. As with last week, we are still planning on contacting more kitchens with the hopes that we will have enough that will respond to us and with to have human contact with us. This has been challenging but, as mentioned in our weekly achievements, we have more hope after adding other areas to our list of possible searches.
2. Some of our group members have already planned on visiting a few kitchens that have graciously allowed us to visit and survey them so this week will be mainly focused around that. If things go right, we will have finished all our surveying by the end of next week.

“I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‘Where’s the self-help section?’ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.”

― George Carlin

In this week’s podcast, we embarked on a journey to Extremadura, Spain to relive Eduardo Sousa’s immortal – ethical foie gras.

This segment of the podcast begins with the vivid depiction of foie gras, fatty goose liver. This French delicacy is obtained by forcibly tube feeding a goose for weeks until it is stuffed and its liver balloons to the size of a small football, a process termed gavage. Gavage is seen as cruel and inhumane, so when Dan Barber, a decorated chef, heard about an alternate way to produce foie gras naturally, he was in disbelief.

Dan travels with a journalist to Spain to meet Eduardo, the man behind the madness, who he finds “crooning” to the geese. In short, Eduardo’s methods are ingenious but painfully simple – he allows the geese to live on his farm believing that they are free. This is the most important point that Eduardo stresses time and time again, if the geese are free they will naturally gorge themselves in preparation for Winter and all Eduardo has to do is to surround them with the delicious food they require. Sounds like common sense, but why haven’t more producers used this method? Because it is extremely risky and not very profitable; Eduardo loses roughly 30% of his geese to predators and other externalities by not building fences or feeding them directly, God’s Tax.

What do foie gras and God’s Tax have to do with Food Systems class projects and The City of Vancouver?

Eduardo’s methods speak to both flexibility and autonomy, he may have developed the idea to pander to the mindless demand for ethical food but most likely it was because the liver tasted better and he didn’t need to cause undue harm to achieve that ideal. In the podcast, Dan and Eduardo have very different approaches to the same situation and the crucial change in scope allowed Dan to broaden his perspective and tackle a previously unsolvable problem.

Currently, we are having trouble reaching the kitchens in our neighborhood. It is not a matter of contact but of connection as most kitchens have been generally unreceptive to our script. It’s clear that something has to change, perhaps we could increase the areas of interest and try harder OR we may need to modify the script. Asset-based community development has the right idea when it comes to providing communities with what they need but identifying those needs can be tricky. It would be reasonable to assume that kitchens may not initially enjoy the idea of “UBC student[s] working on a Food Systems class project in collaboration with the City of Vancouver” coming in and transforming their asset into a community kitchen, a perceived loss of autonomy. Connecting may require a gentler touch and attention to subtleties, the pursuit of harmony over domestication.

Back in Eduardo’s farm, wild geese would “come to stay” which elicited an astute remark from Dan, that in America a hog would never happen upon a factory farm and make that same decision; instead of forcing the goose to eat, Eduardo figures out in what conditions the goose would desire to eat more. Scope change is necessary and continuous, therefore, in the following weeks we will approach this project under different conditions, keeping in mind Gooseman Or the Unexpected Virtue of Autonomy.

Photo from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2014/10/24/review-birdman-tries-too-hard-to-say-too-little/

Upcoming strategies and achievements

1. We contacted around fifteen different community kitchens via phone calls and(or) emails during the last two weeks, most of them did not respond, some of the numbers that were listed were incorrect or not available. We are now planning to figure out on why the phone connections or emails failed (possibly some community kitchens are no longer existing or numbers are incorrectly informed)  and also we are going to brainstorm what we can do to fix the issue of not getting their response.
2. Among these community kitchens, one of them answered and told us they will be giving us a call back. However, we have waited for the call for two days, and are planning to call the agency once more before week ends and if possible (hopefully) we will politely ask them for us to visit for an interview on kitchen’s facilities and how it is used etc.
3. We will make sure that all group members are at the same step of this process (currently searching up more kitchens and giving them calls) and all are able to give quick responses by using Facebook groups/pages/messages. To update our individual work, we are successfully employing Google Doc as a place where we share our opinions and ideas to further the work.
4. We are going to find more kitchens that will be more receptive to visits. We will also expand our search from just Mount Pleasant into Arbutus Ridge and Fairview. So far, we have not been able to set-up meetings with enough kitchens, so first we’re creating a list of additional kitchens in this area, and then we will proceed to contact them with the hope that we can make visits.
5. If phone contact is not possible, we will (in pairs) plan to go visit a selection of community kitchens and determine whether we can ask the agency in question if they have a kitchen on location. If so, we will ask if they are willing to allow us to survey them on the usage of their kitchens facilities.
6. We will attempt to make kitchen visits as soon as possible.  Once these visits are completed, we will come together as a group and share information found through the surveys. We will be prepared to compare different areas in our range to see if there are similar kitchens, organizational structures, classes, volunteer vs. paid worker ratios, etc. in the different neighbourhoods we are now looking at.
7. We will accumulate information about the Arbutus Ridge and Fairview areas, including statistics about who lives in the neighbourhood, age demographics, and average income. In doing so we may be able to understand better our ultimate findings in how the kitchens are set up and currently used in the different areas, because these variables depend on the community’s needs.
8. As a team, we will make sure that every member in our group stays optimistic and is engaged so that every individual makes their own contributions to this Mount Pleasant and Arbutus Ridge Community Kitchen Project.

photo from: www.campedify.com/newsletter-week-5/

As Group 6 prepares to enter the community in search of human contact via the elusive community kitchens, we thought we would share our current Objectives and  Achievements:

WEEKLY OBJECTIVES

1. Create a list of kitchens

We are aiming to put together a sizable list of about 15 kitchens to visit, you know, just in case we get really unlucky. 

2. Contact kitchens

As frightening as it might seem, we will have to start calling up complete strangers. This will likely be a trying ordeal, fraught with rejection and a LOT of waiting, but hopefully it will be as painless as possible and we will be able to meet community members and start checking out kitchens.

3. Visit some kitchens

As soon as we get the word we plan to go in pairs to each kitchen and scout out the area, talk to whomever manages the facility, the staff, and perhaps take some pictures with permission.

Since this is a group project we decided to assess both our internal and external successes.

Our internal successes are our victories within our group – we are communicating effectively, making sure everyone has an important role to play in assignments and allowing creative juices (yum) to flow without any personal judgement. We will continue to fine tune our individual skills and utilize them effectively in a cohesive effort; we want to work well together.

External success is progress with respect to the project, in this case, taking a more detailed approach to our objectives after paying close attention to the feedback we received for our proposal. We have also started to work through the process by calling community kitchens and getting replies.

Reflection

From the podcasts in Session six, we learned a few things about how we can make the community based-project development to be a successful project.  In the story of fish bank by Jensi Sartin, we realized that many people have the idea of “If life doesn’t go well, we just have to accept it.”  However, as Jensi brought out the idea of fish bank and things started to get solved, it actually brought hope to not only a fisherman, but his whole family and the whole community.  Thus, it reflects that most of the community kitchens might not be well used while they are just accepting it because they don’t feel like they have no clue for changes.  One of the opportunities for us is to bring hope to community members who are involved in the project by suggesting what they actually have in their hands to make things better.  This is one of the points that we can tell them while contacting them on the phone in order to encourage them for letting us to visit and therefore invite them to tell us the difficulties they are facing.

Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, an advocate for food security in Zimbabwe and other African countries talks about her relation to food and how it needs to be reassessed. In her speech, Sibanda explains food security is not just “about the food you produce and access in markets and also utilization in developed countries.” but is more about food that is safe and nutritious to our health.  Then she shares her personal experience of gaining weight from living in London. Although food in London is secured in terms of quantity, the quality she had was poor (high in calories and low in nutrients) since she was eating fast food as her go to meal which caused her to gain weight. It is not just in London but also in western countries including Canada; there is the tremendous increase in fast food chains and junk foods that are causing the prevalence of obesity among the Canadian residents. Obesity has now become one of the top health concerns, but this can be modified by changing one’s diet. Elaine, one of our group members also experienced the similar situation of gaining 10 kilograms during her first three months of the stay in Canada. As Elaine is from Hong Kong, she did not have much of junk foods in her options back in her country whereas in Canada there is a greater variety of fast food. With her similar experience with that of Sibanda, Elaine also agrees with Sibanda that adopting the practice of “cultural saving” in the community kitchen will help improve to meet food security. In this way, the community kitchen does not exclude those with different cultural backgrounds and make sure the definition of food security is adequately met to all different ethnicities. Nutrition education and practices can help alleviate the concern, and this can be done at the community kitchens. The community kitchens can not only offer food availability/accessibility for the needs but can also provide nutritious, healthy foods for those who need diet modification. The aim of our community kitchen project based on ABCD approach is to observe the role the kitchens play in the community. For instance, how the community kitchen deals with people coming from different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds and how people are bringing their traditions and values with sharing their ‘real’/cultural foods among one another.  Since the food system is dynamically intertwined with cultures, societies, and ecosystems so forth, it is critical that we all understand and respect that every individual in the kitchen has different values and perspectives of food culture.

For the story of A Pragmatic Idealist by Sisonke Msimang, we learned that it is important to listen to the silence, not only people that actively express opinion because people who stop talking are people that is less confident to deal with their own problems.  Our teammates encountered how missing the voice of silence can make things got worse as one of her friends become left out in the society and finally commit suicide.  Although it is hard to ask people who don’t have courage in the community to speak up, it is also an opportunity for us to see things in different ways if we listen to them.  Our importance in this community based project is to “speak up” for assets that are being omitted as well as cherish the opinions that we got from those members.  As a result, we are hoping to effectively benefit the food system.

On the first day we got matched as a group we came together and articulated our shared interests. Overall something we agreed on is that we were interested in health in some way or another, from a food safety perspective to a focus on health as related to nutrition. Most of our group has interest in working somewhere within the food system, which is one reason why we chose this project in our top three out of the group assignments. When dealing with people’s health, such as in the Pragmatic Idealist podcast, it is imperative that we treat those we are looking to help with respect and to make them feel like a person not just a statistic or a diagnosis. We need to carry lessons from this class both in the readings and podcasts and our in class discussions with us to the workplace. Even if we end up with careers outside of the food system these concepts are imperative when we are looking to help others. In any career we need to see the bigger picture when tackling problems and to go into this problem solving with an open mind.

Sisonke talks about how her viewpoint was changed after a visit with her friend Prudence to a doctor who treats HIV positive patients in Johannesburg. She realized about herself that her viewpoint, although she was looking through a meaningful lens, was lacking a focus on the truly human side of her friend’s situation. That was her moment of significance, and as a group ours, in part, is realising that being able to have a more encompassing idea of the people we are trying to help and their situations will only be beneficial to both them in our understanding of community development but to them from our results from this type of thinking. When we are conducting our interviews we need to be aware of what might not be said. We need to try to have a focus on what is beyond their words in their responses. To be able to see a more human side and by empathizing with those we are interviewing we hope to. This was a reminder of Ernesto Sirolli’s video for session three. The theme of his speech, that helping is more effectively done when we are able to listen and put our focus on what the community and its people actually want and why. Not to go into a project with rigid ideas of what would we think would improve but to tailor any response to the situation that is presented to us. Our kitchens may not have as similar struggles as we think they would. Realising this overarching theme is important because it ties into the idea of the ABCD approach to development, a good reminder not to revert back to a kneejerk reaction of trying to find what is wrong and lacking in a community.

Upcoming objectives and strategies

1. After our visits are made we aim to come together as a group and reflect on what went well in our visits, see what the similarities and differences between the different spaces are. We hope to have all our visits completed by the end of next week, with some started this weekend. If we are unable to see enough kitchens next week then the following week we look to complete all our visits.

2. Another group objective for us would be to familiarize ourselves with the survey questions in order to present ourselves in a professional manner as well as keeping an open mind when contacting and surveying the community kitchens. Reflect on any challenges that were presented to us, such as making contact, scheduling issues or visits where we couldn’t complete our survey.

3. As a group we need to compile the information gathered from each paired visit and compare results. We hope to achieve this by sharing the data collected on a google doc for us all to reference and breaking it down into categories, such as – which the kitchen spaces are accessible, current use and purpose of the kitchen. In doing so we hope to find trends in the kitchens in our neighbourhood.

4. We need to look ahead as to what changes we need to make, what didn’t go as planned and why? Does our overall plan have to change or are we able to make small adjustments to be successful? Have we followed ethical protocol, if not we need to remedy such situations. A strategy to help ensure ethical conduct is to review to TCPS guidelines along with how we’ve been conducting our study so we don’t overlook any departures from what is considered ethical.

5. Although we should go in with realistic expectations and have a pragmatic approach such as Sisonke did. An important objective is to keep empathy in mind just as how Sisonke’s friend, Prudence, reminded her. It is easy to get caught up in collecting data at these community kitchens but because we do not know the status of these kitchens or people that we will be in contact with, we need to be aware of a power dynamic that the interviewee’s may feel. As we are students from a known university working with the city of Vancouver, we want to make sure they are as comfortable as possible.