From left to right: Arden, Zane and Fatom
Hi everyone, we are Seasoning Stories! Our project seeks to explore how food connects to various elements of civic engagement in Regent Park. The recently launched Regent Park Cafe, which allows residents to sell their food on the first floor of Daniels Spectrum, shows how food can inspire cultural and communal exchange. We hope to promote this further by creating a cookbook that centers residents' cultural and familial stories. We also seek to highlight how the preservation of ethnic grocery stores is essential to food security by improving affordable access to ingredients unavailable in large supermarkets.
The Team
Our team is made up of two University of Toronto students and one Regent Park resident. Our previous name had been Cook to Book, but it didn't feel like it captured our mission.
Our new name– Seasoning Stories– demonstrates that we care as much about the stories behind specific dishes as the recipes themselves.
Fatom is a resident of Regent Park who came to Canada in 2005 from Yemen. She lives with her husband and two daughters, and she makes resin and laser art that she sells at local markets.
Zane is a U of T student who is a lifelong Torontonian and Urban Studies student, who is interested in the history of neighborhood change.
Arden moved to Toronto to study Urban Studies at U of T. She is interested in how to incorporate equitable place-making into urban planning practices.
Our first (official) work session
Over reading week our team met to start thinking about our project and get to know each other better! We introduced ourselves with a story about our personal connection and relationship with food, and found out that cooking makes each of us feel connected to our families.
We met again on Thursday, February 29th. The goal for our first official session was to create some benchmarks and deadlines for ourselves. We would like to have 10 recipes in our story-cookbook. Each page will highlight someone’s dish and a paragraph telling their story, complimented by a photo of their food and, if they consent, a photo of them. In order to do this we will meet with three people a week between now and March 25th to collect their recipes and stories. We also spent this session finding contacts and reaching out to people to schedule a meeting. We hope to invite some class members to be in the book! Maybe Ines will budge and share one of her coveted recipes with us…fingers crossed!
This session helped us to gather our ideas and get a more thorough vision for our story-cookbook. It was also helpful to spend the time together and organize our schedules to find times where we are available to work on our project and meet residents outside of class time. We learned that Zane is really excited about photography! He wants to use this opportunity to start taking photos again and practice his skills. We also learned that Fatom would like to share a recipe and a story for the cookbook. Finally, we learned that Arden is passionate about connecting recipes to issues of food security and the challenges faced by local ethnic groceries. One way that FOCUS staff can support our story-cookbook is with the design of our final product. We would love help from people who are more experienced with graphic design as we put our recipes and stories together into one finished product.
Scheduling was a challenging part of this session. There aren’t very many times outside of class where our schedules align, but we are willing and able to learn how to divide work amongst ourselves and balance working individually and as a team. We are curious if we can use class time to meet with residents to collect recipes and stories? For example, can we schedule with residents’ to meet at Daniel’s Spectrum during class time and, if necessary, leave Daniel’s Spectrum to meet people where it is most convenient for them?
We all agree that it would be ideal for the cookbook to be printed, though this may be challenging due to budget constraints. With the proliferation of digital media, there is something valuable about the materiality of physical media, and it would be really nice to hand out the cookbook to our contributors.
So far, the experience working together has been full of good ideas and meaningful conversation, with a good balance of logistical organization. With a plan in place, our attention now turns to finding residents willing to share recipes and stories!
The Seasoning Stories team members are Fatom, Zane, and Arden