Cananis Fermento- Creating a food preservation café as a practice to reinterpret food waste & learn about food systems
Co-Founder
What: a personal project initiated in collaboration with
Will VanTwuijver.
Year: 2016
Place: Helsinki, Finland.
BACKGROUND
Food waste is a big contributor to climate change, in fact, it represents 8% of global man-made CO2 emissions and 20 to 30% of the food produced is lost. On top of this, in cities, the links to our food system are lost, people no longer cook, let alone know where the food we consume comes from (or how the plant or animal looks like). Some of our parents and grandparents used to preserve foods, they were familiar with different techniques, different seasonal practices or used to grow some of the foods consumed, but my generation hardly knows how to cook.
These facts and my desire to learn how to make everything myself led me to learn how to ferment, jar my food and seek alternative ways of food preservation.
PROJECT
In 2016 I started my studies at Aalto University and one of my first classes was a “personal project” where we had creative freedom to do whatever we wanted, the only limitation was to follow a process in order to create a report and present it. I wanted to train myself to give fermentation workshops, and as I started the process I met another student who was doing canning workshops as a way to engage people and create a community. We joined forces and started experimenting with different preservation techniques.
The thought of food waste was always on our minds, and soon after we met the people behind Waste2Taste (an initiative using food waste from supermarkets as raw materials in a restaurant and other processes such as beer making), and started collaborating with the leftover vegetables.
Cananis Fermento became a decentralised, collaborative preservation cafe where we met once a month to experiment. Every time we invited whoever wanted to come, first to my house, but the idea soon took over and we were too many. We sought new places to work, which led us to a shared kitchen and eventually to the kitchen of Loop restaurant where we held monthly fermentation and food preservation gatherings (before the pandemic).
This is a picture of me enjoying the emerging process of fermenting otherwise-waste food in community
LEARNINGS
The project is ongoing and over the years I have learned many things, but most importantly to let go of my idea and allow other people to take over. Initially, I was very passionate about teaching what I knew, but over time I was exhausting myself by leading the group and realized that people were there for the experience and I was not enjoying it myself. We had to make a lot of modifications to the structure of our work so that we could all enjoy, share and get to take something home. On top of it, I have gained enough information on how to host workshops and I have moved on to host some workshops and start a project where I teach people how to ferment. This, unfortunately, came to a stop during the pandemic but hopefully will continue in the future.
I am always open for conversations about fermentation, feel free to reach out to me for project ideas, suggestions, questions or anything that comes to mind when you read about cananis fermento. I would love to continue building community through fermentation.