CSA Supper Club: Reclaiming Ancestral Cooking – Beyond the Recipe

About this event

Explore the origins stories of CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture)as we unpack and taste test the foods inside. Join us in the garden and around the table to explore what it truly means to reclaim ancestral cooking by looking beyond traditional recipes and focusing on the principles that guided our ancestors’ relationship with food. Participants will examine how observation, adaptability, seasonality, resourcefulness, and intention shaped the way people cooked across cultures, and how these same principles can be applied in modern kitchens. Through discussion and reflection, the workshop encourages participants to rethink cooking as a meaningful practice that connects us to our bodies, our communities, and the changing world around us. Your Facilitator: Journei Bimwala is a clinical herbalist, foraging practitioner, nutrition health coach, and educator dedicated to helping people build meaningful relationships with the natural world through food and plants. Drawing from her experience in foraging, herbal medicine, and community education, she teaches participants how to reconnect with the landscapes they inhabit by making what is unknown known and what is known accessible. Her work weaves together traditional ecological knowledge, modern nutritional understanding, and cultural wisdom to inspire people to see food not only as nourishment, but as a pathway to health, connection, and stewardship. Cooking, sharing, and storytelling through the harvest of the season. History, place, and imagination are all deeply rooted in what and how we grow and eat. Each Friday evening, this supper club gathers around ingredients of the week–produce grown in the garden and food from our local CSA. A CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is rooted in the idea that community members share in the risks and rewards of farming. By committing to a season’s harvest, we support farmers through the lands’ and our current food system’s uncertainties and in return, receive food that is grown in integrity and largely outside of the current extractive and exploitive, harmful food systems. Together, we’ll gather to deepen our relationships with the sources of our food and our empathy for the people’s whose hands that food has passed through. Through collaborative cooking, recipe-sharing, and conversations around the table, we explore the cultural, ecological, and personal dimensions of food. Drawing inspiration from our kitchen’s stories, cookbooks, and the week’s harvest, we’ll discover how the simple act of preparing and sharing a meal can connect us more deeply to land-workers, food-workers, and to the land theirself. This is a free drop-in program. Come to every class or come to one or two that you are available for. Workshops are rain or shine. Accessibility: Our kitchen/classroom space is wheelchair accessible. With prior planning, we can add a few small mats onto the pebbled ground of greenhouse to make a small wheel-chair accessible path. Our learning garden has grass paths, and the entrance is through a gate with a small, raised entrance. Our tables can be lowered/raised, and we have several backless benches or stools. Our kitchen is in regular use, and while we try to cook without peanuts, much of our cookware is shared and we cannot guarantee a nut-free environment. We have a first aid kit, and the closest AED is in another building several yards away. Drinking water is made available in refillable pitchers. When inside the greenhouse and kitchen we will open our double-doors and windows to vent the space and encourage masking and social distancing when in more closed-in spaces. Our closest bathrooms are a building away, about a one-minute walk. A gender neutral bathroom is also available, and this is accessible by key which you can request from staff. We are not a scent-free zone, and because herbalism classes take place here, cannot guarantee that the site will be clear of any essential oil smells. If you have needs not addressed here, please reach out to Mallory Craig at mcraig@thehort.org.