Share. Eat. Learn. Act.
Sharing stories about food and society; explaining and inspiring actions to support and improve food system
The Food and Society Workshop began in 2009 as a collaborative work that has gleaned clips from community and scholarly food storytelling, to put these in conversation with themes of the broader food and agriculture movement, especially as shared in our work with the StoryMobile, a solar-bike-powered story sharing project of the Saint Paul Almanac. It invites participants on tours of food and agriculture sites, especially around the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul in Minnesota, home to a thriving community of emerging farmers and sustainable food and food justice advocates, and also to some of the largest agri-food corporations in the world.
The Food and Society Workshop’s Eating Together podcast has been built to share food and agriculture stories that explore what has often been left out of pop culture approaches to food — both in the “feeding the world” narratives that have been used to support large-scale monocultural commodity agriculture and also some of the slogany foodieism that has a tendency to villainize farmers and food producers. The Eating Together podcast is a chance to listen in on these tours, along with conversations, interviews, and talks that explore the parts of food and agriculture conversations that are often left out or suppressed! We ask people what else we need to understand to help support a food system that brings us the food we want to eat and the food systems that we want to work in, and we build platforms for grassroots conversations around challenging food topics that many people shy away from in order to avoid conflict.
We ask people:
- What food knowledge would you want to share with others?
- And how could you invite others to understand why it’s worth knowing particular things about food?
- Why should someone else pay attention to what you think is important about food?
The Food and Society Workshop’s Food Field Guides project is an exploratory set of user-developed field guides where we share tools to tell stories we think are important about food—particularly about what we think makes food good—and to support continued collaborative action to make food good. Recognizing that there are many ways to value what is good in food, we have built in-person and online project spaces where we work together to build tools to explore food stories and relationships — and the Eating Together podcast lets you listen in on highlights of these conversations, field guides, and tools!