Food Culture Explorers
This is one of two 12-hour courses I developed and taught at Wayfinding Academy in Portland, Oregon.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Connect with ancient wisdom and your own intuition to eat, cook, and live well. Discover the unchartered territory of your local food system through cooking challenges, guests speakers, and maybe even a field trip.
You’ll learn how to find beauty in food and share it with others through a medium of your choice (writing, photography, video, drawing, and more). You’ll leave with motivation and tools to integrate good food into your everyday life.
CLASS CONTENT
Class 1: Food & Connection: Why Cook? We look at home-cooking and industrial cooking and ask: Why cook at all? What is the value? What does it mean in terms of being human?
Class 2: American Wisdom: What are we currently passing down in the U.S.? Potluck! Everyone brings a dish passed down to them through family or friends and we ask: What is American food culture? What shapes it?
Class 3: Kitchen Barrier Breakdown: Intuitive Cooking & Eating Hands-on cooking! We create a meal based on the 6-7 tastes, and share tips for integrating shopping and cooking into life.
Class 4: Our Food System: Taking Pride in our Place Field Trip! We gather at a local cafe to taste cheese with an expert and ask: What does a resilient food system look like? Students share their final project, in which they used a medium of their choice (writing, photography, video, drawing, podcast) to capture a piece of wisdom they determined to be important to pass down to future generations.
MY ROLE
Teaching, curriculum development, and event planning.
“Gina is incredibly creative and very original in her approach. I like the way she conveys information.”
“I felt welcomed and not judged. She was great about being accepting and accommodating of people’s different views on the world and didn’t push an agenda, which I was initially worried about.”
“Her depth of research, her preparation, and her raw passion [were] eloquently expressed and beautifully demonstrated.”