MAY 26, 2025

HTCTWR #4: What is a weed? Encountering edible plants from the sea

When: 07:30 - 10:00

Departure Location: Broedershoek

Max capacity of participants: 8

For our fourth and final session of How to Cook Things While Roaming we will be exploring themes that have emerged from our last session— namely; foraging, edible plants, what is “wild”, what is “native”, what is “sustainable” and how to cook with ingredients you haven’t encountered before.

In HTCTWR #3, Japanese knotweed was brought up as a harmful invasive species in the Netherlands and Europe as a whole. It is seen as particularly problematic due to its resilient nature, and has even ‘devalued’ property throughout the continent because of its hardiness . One way of “staying with the trouble¹” of knotweed has been to carefully forage it and incorporate it into recipes. Researching knotweed made me think about weeds in general, namely “seaweed”- and why seaweed is not included in what we consider seaFOOD?

“Weeds” are technically wild plants that grow rapidly, and though through the economic lens their prolific nature can be ‘problematic’, we can begin to reframe this perspective think about how seaweed can be used solve larger issues of global hunger², due to its surprising natural abundance of micronutrients and minerals. This is especially important to explore as seaweed itself produces more than half of the world’s oxygen and removes millions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year³. And growing, harvesting and cooking with it is a relatively fast simple cultivation process that can forge a different type of connection between humans and the sea.

The most commonly known and eaten seaweed- wakame (a seaweed salad often found on Japanese restaurant menus) however, is problematic because when it is planted it often excludes native algal species- just like other plants, wild seaweed is not a natural monoculture and grows many varieties within a small amount of space, so ‘sustainably oriented’ seaweed recipes will reflect the diversity of the area that it grows in, and include 2-4 algal species.

For this session, we will depart at sunrise to enjoy the experience of foraging seaweed ourselves- we will visit an initiative close by graciously suggested by Hannah van der Schaaf called Wild Wier, that combines seaweed harvesting with broader education regarding the sea, marine life, pollution and ecosystem conservation.

Some instructions from Ellen from Wild Wier:

We will go to the harbor Vluchthaven on Neeltje Jans, departing at 7.30 from Broedershoek.

What to wear: boots or old shoes which can get wet , and warm and windproof clothing as the conditions will most likely be chilly.

Some more interesting resources:

Recipes:

https://www.wildwalks-southwest.co.uk/seaweed-and-pumpkin-seed-crispbreads/ https://www.wildwalks-southwest.co.uk/green-olive-and-seaweed-tapanade/ https://www.wildwalks-southwest.co.uk/fishy-seaweed-vegetarian-dip/

¹ Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

² Here I am using the term global ‘hunger’ from Gimenez’ book How to Feed The World Without Destroying It - meaning not only a lack of food sources but food with a lack of vital nutrients, vitamins and minerals.

³https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/plankton/every-breath-you-take-thankocean#:~:text=That's%20right%E2%

80%94more%20than%20half,In%20other%20words%2C%20they%20photosynthesize._)

Seaweed podcast: Seaweed People by Jess Hamilton

MARCH 20, 2025 

HTCTWR #3: What does it mean to feed a community that roams? What seeds do we travel with, and how do we return home, with pockets full of soil? 

When: 17:30 - 19:30

Location: SPEL rooftop (in the kitchen space)

Max capacity of participants: 12

For our third session of How To Cook Things While Roaming in this springtime period, we will be discussing seeds– from the concept of seed sovereignty to border crossing as “cross contamination”,  while trying Cypriot products and sharing memories around food. 

Upon visiting Cyprus, I was struck by how verdant the island is. Even in winter, edible plants are growing everywhere— this is a place that can feed itself throughout the year. 

Despite the prosperous growing year, Northern Cyprus has a large seed bank that aims to protect and promote endemic plant species grown on the island for centuries. Seed banks are a vital resource to the communities around them, however the practice of “saving seeds” have been practiced since the early Neolithic era. 

Seed sovereignty however, represents our right to enjoy nature and food and save the seeds from produce, and as a form of resistance against corporate control over agriculture (and natural spaces as a whole).  Learning about how our food is grown, from extracting a seed from fruit flesh, to germination, through to maturation of the plant, is what connects us to the food we eat, and more largely, connects us to the natural world around us. 

My grandfather, when he emigrated, brought a handful of pine nuts (which are actually seeds) from Slovakia and planted a tree that became, at the end of his life, a gigantic 15-meter guardian that had provided shade over his house for over 40 years. Now, carrying seeds across borders can be a dangerous act, for various reasons. 

Often, working with seeds doesn’t reap anything that people can actually eat- seed banks function removed from conventional agricultural production, rather they ensure the preservation of as many wild and cultivated plants as possible for posterity. This is built into their history, as the first seed bank was established in St.Petersburg (then Leningrad) where during a 2-year siege, Russian scientists famously chose to starve themselves to death in order to prevent future famines over eating the seeds in the seed bank. 

To some extent, though food is at the center of the process- I want to cast a larger scope on what working with food entails, and shed light onto the process of noticing, saving, sowing,  growing, seasonality, and harvesting. 

To fuel us during our discussion, we’ll have a chance to taste the nuts and seeds native to Cyprus, as well as introduce you to other Cypriot-grown fresh products. 

At the end of the session, we’ll take a walk to our supplier of nuts, seeds and legumes- a century-old shop that is renowned for being one of the best on the island. Hopefully there you can find something to take home with you. On our walk we will have an impromptu edible plant identification session. 

JANUARY 9, 2025

HTCTWR #2

When: 16:00 - 18:30

Location: Wood Workshop & Kitchen at NAC, Nida, Lithuania

Max capacity of participants: 12

For our second workshop in the series of “How to Cook Things While Roaming”, we will return to our various ferments that have been resting during the winter holiday and revisit them in their transformed state in order to incorporate them into our communal dinner. The session will begin with a short reading and discussion on the concept of recipes, how recipes are written, and what is included/excluded in the ‘format’ of a recipe.

Without giving too much away, we will then cook a part of dinner and write a collaborative recipe together. I would ask that participants for this workshop have some experience cooking for themselves and don’t have to be supervised in the basics (how to cut with a sharp knife, kitchen hygiene etc). Participants from our first session are welcome and encouraged to return! Unfortunately due to time restraints the participation is limited to 12 people maximum. 

All equipment is provided, the session will begin right after the General Assembly, beginning our meeting together in the wood workshop. 

DECEMBER 9, 2024

HTCTWR #1

Also featuring Alicja Jurasińska. 

When: 15:30 - 17:30

Location: Small Kitchen, NAC in Nida, Lithuania

Max capacity of participants: 15 

For this first iteration of “How to Cook Things While Roaming”, we will discuss fermentation as a process of transformation— as a metaphorical and material practice. Working within some of the ideas laid out in the journal Fermenting Feminism (2017) we will approach fermentation as a perpetual state of becoming, as an approach to “collaborative survival” (Anna Tsing), with our bodies as sites for knowledge production. 

While we are bound by the hours of the session, we will try to reflect on the “non-time in which things play that were never in time.” (Regel, H. p.74)

Sophia Zbinovsky Braddel will also introduce her own research into the concepts of “quiet sustainability” and “quiet food sovereignty”, terms to describe anti-colonial ‘every-day resistance’ in the Eastern European context as ecologically aware domestic food practices that have occurred and still occur despite post-Soviet influence. 

We will be joined by Alicja Jurasinska, a chef from the borderlands of Poland who has vast knowledge of various fermentation practices, and will guide us in pickling fruits and vegetables “left-over” from the kitchen. These ferments will be left bubbling, until Session #2 where we will work with them again in their transformed state. 

Please bring your laptops or notebooks and writing utensils if you prefer, as we will reflect together also through writing.

In this first workshop we will also discuss how to form and create the rest of our sessions.

HTCTWR 2024 - 2025  

INTRODUCTION 

Fermentation as Transformation: a Long-Scale Intuitive Cooking Project in Two Parts

“Fermenting has taught me so much about time, about death. Fermenting with salt is steady, slow and steady and time stands still…The things I choose to consume, allowing my DNA to meld with its DNA… that changes who I am. Inherently inherited… (creating) a new tradition based off of recipes from other traditions in other spaces and other times, sometimes wondering what conversations we would have if those recipe creators met my recipes.” 

Khan, Z. (2017) Fermenting Feminism [zine] p.48

How to Cook Things While Roaming (HTCTWR) is a four-session series lead by Sophia Zbinovsky Braddel that intends to integrate the metaphysical space of the kitchen as a site for knowledge-production into the DAI program at large. 

The daily menus for each Confluence already serve as a bridge between ‘local’ terroir and the DAI’s roaming nature through the materiality of food, but the course will grapple with questions of how to cook sustainably for a large community and will attempt to drop into each space and place by weaving manual activity with cognition to deal with the state of ‘becoming’ that we find ourselves in- within the program and its community, and in the world around us.  

HTCTWR aims to be as flexible and spontaneous as possible- mirroring the necessary nature in which the kitchen itself operates. Therefore, the sessions do not have to be attended by the same people, but it is preferable that for the first two, some do return.