As such, it revisits aspects of the trade, aid and plunder of the planet which underpins how most commonplace foods are distributed in the present day. Some turbulence is to be expected, but if you can stay with the ride and breathe through the experience, there will be all the more of a story to share when you eventually disembark.

The 90-minute immersion, followed by a review in the form of self and shared reflection, helps us to participatively explore our right to have an affirming, organic relationship with ‘the womb of the Earth’ (soil). It also assists us to gain an understanding of its primary, nurturing relationship with all the forms that are created through its ‘labour’.

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

Our starting point, therefore, is the way of the indigenous. We do not discriminate using binaries: there is no living earth and dead earth, all is one in a continuous orgasm of transformation. We affirm that Life is a gift which extends to all that the Earth has created. If this is not your starting point, sit back and embark on this journey of learning and inner-sight. As you wear a blindfold throughout the immersive experience, you will be guided by the person you travel with each day: you -your own inner being, and we will be your assistants as you travel in time and across space to discover where it is you really begin.

There is no single story, because there is no single system. This experience is simply one of the major food narratives that the world has known

Over histories of human eating, what enters the definition of being food, as in ‘what one places in one’s mouth and eats’ (swallows and digests) has changed.

If there is truth in the idea that we all started off foraging for and trapping the food we ate, sometimes hunting, often gleaning from what nature had to offer, then maybe we have come full circle. Modern entomophagy (the eating of insects) and gleaning networks (anti-food waste action) prove the case. However, there are many cultures in the world which have always recognised the importance of harvesting a wide variety of foods from the Earth. For example the fried termites of West Africa, or the witchetty grubs of Australasia and the returning to already harvested fields to find foods that provide calories after the first harvest, by so many women farmers and gatherers across the earth.

Corporate marketing departments and charismatic chefs now define what food is and how to use it. More and more the tentacles of knowledge gatherers reach further and further into those exoticised cultures to grab ‘new’ recipes, ‘discover’ new food types whilst erasing the knowledge and autonomy who have lived with these knowledges for centuries. Epistemicide.

Food, however, also thrives within cultural narratives of people who have stewarded parts of the earth and those who have been dispossessed of their relationships with earth, because our memories have long tendrils which reach back into past lineages of meaning that we do not, so often, explore.

The Food Journey^© began because we, at Community Centred Knowledge felt strongly that so much of the mainstream work around food – even when it points to sovereignty, security and systems, in the forms of workshops, presentations, panels and discussions – were limited as instruments of systemic change. This is especially the case for those who experience multiple deprivations, oppressions and who are often considered ‘hard-to-reach’. 

The experience is based upon years of research, which continues, because life is always changing and the corporate systems that food circulations have, and are currently based upon does not stand still. We feel that advocacy and practice for sound and life affirming systemic change has to be deeply structural: restorative, reparative and transformative.

We also note that food, after all, is sensory, and we make sense of our environments and relationships through sensory stimuli: using eyes, ears, noses, mouths, skin and memories in different ways and combinations. We also use our imaginations and we inherit from our communities’ and families’ particular cultural codes of interpreting and making meaning…(Please subscribe to read more).