Kitchens without borders

You will probably know MSF – Medecines Sans Frontieres (doctors without borders) and perhaps you have come across RSF – Reporters Sans Frontieres (reporters without borders). So you might be intrigued – as I was – to discover CSF – Cuisine Sans Frontieres (kitchen without borders).

I first read about this Swiss organisation in the spring edition #20 of the young food-cooking-cooks magazine Effilee. In it the founder of CSF was portrayed: David Höner, cook and film-catering entrepreneur, and the birth of CSF in 2005 was described. Höner and his wife were in Colombia in a civil war situation for some press coverage work. There he observed people fighting for survival, too depressed and scared of one another to leave their houses. So he decided to create places that people could visit, along the lines of a neighbourhood pub, small restaurants with protection for the host. David says it’s not about providing food, it’s about hospitality and conviviality, so really, it’s about community.

CSF projects described on the website are in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Kenya, such as the bakery in the woman’s prison in Quito, Ecuador, and there are some youtube videos about these here. But the best impressions can be garnered on the blog here.

Chew on this a little

“When individuals slip into poverty it is not simply because they have run out of money – it is also because their community has failed.”

T. Dessewfy and F. Hammer (no date) Poverty in Hungary. Critical Choices for Hungary. cited by Prof. emeritus George Kent, University of Hawai’i in his article entitled Community-Based Nutrition Security (Draft 15th Dec. 2012)

A dollar’s worth of hunger

A colleague of mine and I offer a course together on Hunger – he brings in the nutritional-medicine aspects, e.g. hunger metabolism, while I contribute the nutritional-systems aspects, e.g. commodity trade. One of the aspects we covered this week was poverty –  absolute and relative poverty. Poverty thresholds (lines) used by countries around the world can vary very widely by  up to 40 USD. Perhaps you are familiar with the commonly used poverty lines of 2 USD/d (an income below this = poverty) and 1 USD/d (income below = extreme poverty), such as mentioned in the Millenium Development Goals? The income threshold is, of course, meant to cover an entire basket of goods needed for living, including shelter. This is where I like to bring in visuals for that Dollar a Day:  The artist Jonathan Blaustein came up with a project called “The Value of a Dollar”  in which he strips foodstuffs to the value of one USD down to naked commodities.

Wissensdefizite

“Die großen Bedrohungen der Menschheit wie Krieg, Hunger und Umweltzerstörung sind nicht die Folge von Wissensdefiziten, sondern das Ergebnis des Mangels an Moral und gutem Willen.”

Norbert Blüm Freiheit!  Über die Enteignung der Kindheit und die Verstaatlichung der Familie. Eine Streitschrift. In: Die Zeit No 12 vom 15. März 2012, S. 75-76