Let’s make longer tables

With this message, I aim to preserve and foster the ability to imagine, both a possible and an impossible fair and sustainable present and future. A better present and a better future. I strive to preserve the ability to create narratives to make these futures accessible to everyone. By applying utopian thinking to reinforce critical thinking about food, we can democratize the ability to imagine better futures through cooking, by reflecting on how we eat in the cities, what our food systems are like, and how our relationship with the countryside is. Since we all have a relationship with food, we all eat, almost all of us shop, and some of us, cook. In this way, by reflecting on food sovereignty, we can all participate and democratize utopian thinking and raise awareness on how we live, and we take responsibility for our lives. Preserving some of the ancient recipes and ingredients throughout our history can help us firmly connect our future to the past. We can reshape things, tools, solutions, methodologies, narratives, and so on that were useful in the past and reuse them in the future, adapt them to this possible and impossible better future that we want to imagine. Through food preparation and cooking, not only do we eat and provide solutions to the physical need, but we also promote a better type of relationship through commensality that can help us to create a low tech, low resource consumption knowledge network. Celebrating around a table of food is always a good way to connect with others, and this playful connection with others is also something that we want to preserve. And cooking is a good way to collaborate and promote these types of reflections and thoughts. Sitting around the table we can also reflect on diversity and inclusion, trying to design menus that we all can eat together. And it is also a way to become aware of the rich diversity of our community. Let’s make longer tables. I would also love not only to preserve but even to recover, knowing how to plant seeds and produce our own food. This is my message that I will put in the bottle.

We work in La Plasita with the concept of gastrosophy that we want to define as a type of care theory or around the food and how we eat. And focused on how we eat in the cities because we think that cities are like food deserts. We don’t have direct access to the food or to the food production. And we also think that our food, our current industrial food systems are not healthy, not for us and not for the planet. And we also think that we have to re-imagine or redefine our relation to the countryside, because the countryside is not only the pantry of the cities, but it is also a lot of other things. Good things that we don’t know how to value and we have to try to revalue them again. So we work with what we call poetic research on food and cities, and we try to also raise awareness to our citizens or participants in our actions through art or through artworks on these issues. Our last work that we started before the pandemic in 2019, I think it’s called “El Gran Textil” (The Big Textile). It’s a fabric artwork about participatory fabric artwork that we have been sewing with vet schools and also with other participants in this kind of workshops that we run. And it’s like a textile or fabric cartography of the metropolitan area from Seville, and with an utopian view of how we could eat in the next future or in the present in the city.