Food Stories: Fostering Cross-Cultural Dialogue through Food

Food Stories partners academic expertise with a young social enterprise Stories On Our Plate (SOOP) to foster cross-cultural understanding through cooking, eating food, and sharing stories of culinary heritage and cultural identity. This will be done via a series of creative knowledge exchange, public engagement and active dissemination activities - cooking workshops, a SOOP cookbook, and café-style cookbook launch seminars. It follows on from Consuming Authenticities (CA), which investigated how narratives about history, origins and traditions invested four particular food and drinks with problematic ideas of authenticity and explored notions of culinary heritage and its relationship to cultural identity. Key outputs from CA included: a recipe book aimed at a popular audience that included personal culinary narratives about foods and drinks from Mexico, Brazil, Cyprus and the UK; a participants' workshop that invited consumers and producers of the foods and drinks to share their experiences; and a recipe book launch event in which participants shared their food and its stories. Emerging from these activities and their impact assessment was a strong message that telling stories about culturally salient food and culinary heritages, as well as sharing that food, could help foster cross-cultural dialogue and understandings of diversity and commonality. Food, and food stories, became the vehicles for translating the histories and cultures of different parts of the world to one another. It further encouraged reflection among participants to value their own culinary heritage as part of their identity.
This reflection and self-valorisation is particularly relevant in the context of diasporas and migrant groups, and is particularly prescient in the current political climate, which has seen a rise in anti-migrant and refugee rhetoric and increasingly entrenched divisions across the United Kingdom, particularly in cities such as Bradford and Coventry and across specific London boroughs, such as Dagenham & Redbridge, Waltham Forest, and Barking. Food Stories focuses its public engagement activities on these locations as they appear to be multi-cultural, cosmopolitan and diverse, and are built on migration and migrant communities, but their diversity divides as much as unites. There is hence an urgent social need to promote cross-cultural understanding in such divided communities. As CA established, learning about food traditions, exchanging historical and personal narratives about food and culinary heritage, is a particularly effective means of achieving such intercultural dialogue and understanding.
The project partner, SOOP, was founded with the aim of creating spaces, through the sharing of food and food stories, through which negative perceptions of migrants and refugees could be challenged and dialogue fostered. Through a series of supper clubs, culinary training programmes and public engagement seminars, SOOP has worked in London to empower migrant groups by facilitating the sharing of culinary heritages. Their experiences echo the findings of CA, in respect that food can be a mechanism for enhancing cross-cultural understanding. Partnering with SOOP to transfer the knowledge gained from CA, then, strengthens the original project's impact by:
- applying its findings to reach new audiences through a series of collaborative public engagement activities
- using the knowledge gained from publishing a recipe book to practically support the publication and active dissemination of a SOOP cookbook
- facilitating dialogue on culinary heritage, food and migration with community leaders, migrant and refugee groups, food writers and the food industry, local Government officials and activists
- building capacity among community leaders and activists by providing them with the tools to use food and culinary heritage as a mechanism for challenging prejudice and encouraging cross-cultural dialogue within their own communities.

Food Stories (FS) centres on three pathways to impact: knowledge exchange, public engagement, and active dissemination. Multiple layers of knowledge exchange activities build capacity among a number of different audiences and continue the sharing of learning beyond the lifetime of the project. The first is the exchange of knowledge emerging from Consuming Authenticities (CA) and SOOP. Practically, knowledge about effective ways to reach such audiences, event organisation, and cookbook compilation will also be exchanged. There is further knowledge exchange between project members and communities of interest, such as migrant groups and food activists, and the project's activities are designed to inspire and enable such stakeholders to use food to foster cross-cultural dialogue, thereby extending the impact of both FS and CA beyond their life-spans and initial audiences. Finally, there will be the cross-cultural knowledge exchange between the different community groups and individuals that FS brings together through the cookery workshops, cookbook and launch seminars.
The activities of FS are focused on informal public engagement and the project brings together hard-to-reach groups and individuals to improve cross-cultural understandings and relationships through food. Engagement with these audiences will further provide the project team with feedback that they, especially the SOOP members, can incorporate into activities outside of the project, thereby further widening the circle of knowledge transferral and extending networks.
FS will also engage in practices of active dissemination by accompanying the cookbook with seminars that include a panel discussion, Q & A sessions and informal dialogue. By inviting the book's contributors to actively tell the story of their food and culinary heritage, the key messages can be brought to life and shared. Similarly, the cookery workshops will experientially disseminate knowledges. In building the capacity of community leaders and activists to initiate their own similar activities and sharing the cookbooks of both FS and CA with them, the story-telling can continue, thereby reaching a wider audience beyond the confines of both projects. Finally, by inviting readers to post their food stories online, the cookbook encourages a two-way information flow that can be used to provoke dialogue, encourage reflection and stimulate comment.
Impact will be captured through a variety of mechanisms that are built into the project plan. All events will have feedback forms, which will capture qualitative data on the participants' views on migrant groups and their food, and the extent this has changed. Supporting this will be a sample of qualitative exit interviews that assess changing attitudes. The cookbook launch seminars further give the opportunity to conduct follow-up interviews that will assess how the knowledge from the workshops has been used. There will also be a series of follow-up telephone interviews with community leaders and activists participating in the second part of the workshops to record the extent they have initiated their own food stories activities. Any follow-up invitations given to the project team to be involved or speak at such events will also be logged, as will any participant referrals. Through these mechanisms, the wider networks through which knowledge is being exchanged can be traced, as well as the impact of the FS on wider audiences. The impact of the cookbook will be measured after the life-span of the project by capturing the extent that individuals and groups post their own food stories online, logging requests for (additional) copies and conducting follow-up interviews with a sample of those who received it to assess the ways it is being used.