Not wasting. Moving towards more simple food, towards consuming our own food. Giving greater value to food produced locally and to the relationship with those that produce it. Giving more value to food, at the moment of eating, valuing the act of eating, and at the moment of buying. Encouraging people to ask themselves: What am I buying? Why I am buying this? What for? Even if people carry on buying things which aren’t the best for them, they should ask themselves: why am I buying this? What benefits will it give me and what benefits will be created if I buy this? – Apniuq
Jueves de Comida Consciente
Once a week la Casa de los Ningunos opens its doors for the Jueves de Comida Consciente (Conscious Food Thursday), where the community comes together to prepare a locally-sourced, natural, vegetarian lunch for around 70 people. The Conscious Food program was the house’s first major project and continues to be the central axis of its activities.
It all started back in 2012, when the youth activist collective Reacción Climática hosted a series of film nights at la Casa de los Ningunos, focusing on issues relating to food: GMOs; pollution; human rights violations; resource privatization; animal exploitation. Only a few people came to watch the films, and on the last night they asked themselves: what can we do to reach more people with this information? And at that moment the idea of a Conscious Food Festival was born.
Firstly it was shocking to see the impact of meat on the environment and how humans exploit animals. But we realised that it wasn’t just about vegetarian food but something bigger: about GM foods, pollution, human rights violations, resource privatisation – for example water to make Coca Cola – and that’s why it’s really about conscious food. – Apniuq
Key Ingredients for Engagement
A few weeks later, the first Conscious Food Festival took place in La Paz (this year will see the third) and attracted over 300 people. While other activities about climate change and environmental issues could only ever bring together a handful of people, this was able to draw hundreds. And what was the key? As Apniuq notes: “It’s the issue of food, because all of us eat. You can use food as a tool to spread ideas. Eating is a basic need of the human being.”
For him it has been a personal process, as a result of his activism on a range of social and environmental issues:
It’s about the lack of respect of one group of human beings towards others, and the lack of respect of human beings towards Mother Earth. So, when I became conscious of this and started looking for ways to improve respect, I came to the issue of food. The principal activity which in different ways has a range of consequences, from pollution to justice issues, distribution.
For Yumey, it is also an issue of health and the power of choice:
I’m surrounded by people who cure with food. If I want to have a peaceful old age, I’ve got to look after myself now. Not wait until an illness warns me. And yes, there’s a change, even your mentality changes. Your way of behaving, wherever you’re from, changes. No-one forces you to eat. Who forces you to eat a piece of food? No-one. No-one opens your mouth and says “eat”.
What’s different about Comida Consciente?
What is happening at the Casa de los Ningunos reflects a global phenomenon. The #EatClean trend has been high profile in the US lately, and on a global level the consumption of organic and more natural, healthier food is on the rise among certain social sectors. However, these tendencies have largely been driven by health concerns, with initiatives like #eatclean very much focusing on the benefits for the individual, with less emphasis on the collective good.
The novel element of Comida Consciente is its focus on integrating awareness of the externalities of food production – environmental, social and economic impacts – with the internal impacts of food consumption on health and spiritual wellbeing. Equally, Comida Consciente is not about preaching a specific dogma (vegetarianism, veganism, etc.) but rather promoting an approach based on awareness of where food comes from and encouraging individuals to take responsibility for their decisions.
How the project grew
For la Casa de los Ningunos, the process started by holding weekly lunches and inviting their friends. These friends then began to invite their friends and so on, and the Comida Consciente Thursdays began to grow. To begin with, the target audience was their own peers, people who work in offices and needed somewhere to go for lunch. But as the Thursdays have grown, so has the diversity, and it’s now common to see whole families turn up.
The campaign has also grown beyond just the weekly lunches. The Casa de los Ningunos runs a catering service, offering conscious food for events. Through this initiative, it has reached NGOs, UN organizations and even embassies, helping them to become more coherent with their discourse on climate change.
Something that we have criticised a lot is when in workshops on climate change the snack was a meat pasty and Coca Cola. Our proposal is balanced, nutritious food, with all the elements of conscious food: resistance to environmental degradation, to climate change, fair trade.
La Casa has also been invited to run workshops in rural areas as a result of an employee of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization attending the Thursday lunches, as well as in periurban neighborhoods in La Paz. Their ethos for these workshops in less privileged contexts is to simply go and share the information they have with others, with an open mind to be able to learn from the participants too.
It’s not a question of going to teach, but rather to share some information that I have, and I’m also going to receive. It’s an exchange of knowledge. It’s going to talk to people, not to give a workshop, not to stand at the front and give a talk but to talk with people. I think this, what do you think? I’ve learnt a lot from listening to them.
The workshops in rural areas focus on practical sessions using local ingredients in new ways – especially quinoa, which has been losing ground to fried chicken and rice in many places across Bolivia, despite being one of the most nutritious grains on the planet. They have held workshops in Oruro with mothers, school committee members and even school directors, and as a direct result those schools have now planned their school lunches largely according to the principles of Comida Consciente.
So why is Comida Consciente so powerful?
It’s the point where I believe I can generate most change. It’s about my daily decisions, each day when deciding what to eat, I vote for one system or another. I vote for Coca Cola, and for the bosses of Coca Cola to take decisions about the world, or I vote for a fruit to make myself a juice, and I decide to vote for Bolivian production, for the people who produce near my city. – Apniuq
The idea of the campaign is to spread this way of thinking amongst those who come to eat each week.
We talk about this on Thursdays: thank you for helping with the campaign. People feel like activists, they want to help, and from there they get involved. With food you can go as far as to transform people’s thoughts. First you can, through conscious food, generate a critical stance about our way of living and seeing development, then from there you can move onto a process of empowerment, of taking a stance about this information, and then onto action, that people do it for themselves.
Going back to the roots
The Casa also realises that it’s not just about how we consume food but also about completing the circle by taking back power over producing our own food, and hence has its own vegetable garden and holds weekly community work sessions called Manos a la Tierra (Hands to the Earth). Yumey leads this activity, and for her it is a powerful way to create a deep awareness of where our food really comes from:
I started doing this (working with the land) without much prior understanding, and when you do this work, only then do you value producers, people in the countryside, who live from this. We pay so little for something that takes so much work. You move the earth, you’re exposed to the sun, your head aches, you can’t work any more. For me, working with the land is a way of healing, to raise people’s awareness. They understand much better where food comes from. Even the simple act of putting your hands on the earth, touching the bugs, that the soil gets into your nails, the discomfort, is really important. To start with you’re a bit mistrusting and you don’t want to get dirty. But then you sit down because it’s more comfortable, you put your hands in, and you want to improve what you can have, and learn, about compost, how to cut things, each little job. The value of patience, there’s a whole aspect of care behind it.
Expanding the vision
And how is this going beyond their local circles? While many environmental activists might dream of being given a genuine voice in government policy-making processes, the Comida Consciente team has led workshops with the staff of the La Paz city government and has been invited by the Ministry of Health to contribute to the national health policy.
The Casa by no means lacks ambition. Their long term vision is for Comida Consciente to become a national phenomenon. So far, Conscious Food Thursdays have been replicated at differing scales in the Bolivian cities of Cochabamba, Oruro, Santa Cruz and Tarija, so it may well only be a question of time for their vision to materialise.
Our long term objective is to achieve a day of Comida Consciente at city level, then across all Bolivia. – Apniuq