Join Kristina Georgiou and I as we weave a discussion around food and community, food waste, sovereignty, feminine leadership, following and allowing. Kristina’s journey from London based projects to festival trading has led her to radical conceptualisations of both business and community. Her current choices may surprise you! Well worth a listen.
Kristina can be most easily found on instagram:
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https://jewelofpeace.com/training/
Hannah Jewel · Food and Community with Kristina Georgiou
‘Hello, I’m Hannah Jewel, and this is Building for Peace with Hannah Jewel, a podcast focusing on sovereignty in food and health care, based in Sussex. Today we have with us Kristina, a dear friend of mine who hails from Cyprus, grew up in London and has a passion for food. Kristina, how did you get into food? What’s the moment that it became important to you and what’s the journey of it becoming a central focus?
Kristina: Well, coming from a Greek Cypriot background, food has always been the focus. The family focus getting together and celebrating. There was always food, you know, “Are you hungry?” As soon as you come in through the door. So that kind of sharing and that moment together has always been important for me. Back in 2014, I was working at Redmond Community Centre in Hackney, East London, and I was working on this project called Well London, which was about working across the borough of Hackney and looking at how we could bring different elements like well-being, movement, food growing in London and we had this idea to start a food waste kitchen. Because there was lots of different things and people happening around and back then, there wasn’t as many projects like that and you would really see the food waste, observe the food waste coming out of grocers of supermarkets, people skip diving and, and all of this stuff and there wasn’t as much framework. We connected with a local wholesalers and their amazing fresh and fruity food and they were in the heart of north west Hackney, and they served all different kinds of community. When we approached them, they were just like, come around the back kind of thing, and we’d go around the back and there’d be cages of fruit and veg perfectly fine, you know, slightly bruised, slightly wonky, some on the edges.
But we would go with our bike trailer and cycle back to the community centre and we would lay it all out on the kitchen tables and invite community local people to come. And we would talk about the food, talk about food waste and come from a plant based perspective, you know, what would you create with this? How would you make this without, say, butter or what could we use instead of this? So we would kind of play and experiment, and by the end of the session you would just have a spread of food that you wouldn’t even imagine you could put on a menu and just so eclectic and so cultural. As that went on and we got to learn about more the people’s needs across the estate because the community centre is on a big estate, people would come from all backgrounds, you know, and suffering from kind of very common diseases like obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, suffering with aches and pains. Simple things include more water in our diet or what we could eat with our food, you know, making broths, making soups, making stews, getting more sort of nourishment in there. We kind of developed this lovely wellbeing program and it went on for about four years in the community centre there. By the end, the kids that had been in the capoeira class next door on that night, they would slowly start to come in at the end of their session and help serve.
They would try every week. They would try something else different and then we eventually managed to get them in the kitchen a bit more helping out. And it was really beautiful. It was a real hub for us and for the local residents. And oh, there’s so much that you could do there. You know, there was the garden, you could forage and you were only limited by your time, really. Because there’s only so much time and things you can do on one project in one evening. Then it just spiralled from that. I never thought I was going to cook or run a cooking business. It just organically flowed. There was a local group working with special needs people and they wanted to put on an equinox event and they said, “Oh, could you do some cooking with us and for us?” And, that was our first event as such. Then somebody, a friend of ours. “Oh, can you cover me at this event?” Okay, we’ll try it. And then it just kind of spiralled and rolled on and took us out of London, really, and out of the food waste side and more into looking at local growers and local producers and organic food.’…listen to the full cast for more!