Collaborative Kitchen started as an empowering project to share food knowledge with inhabitants and facilitate accessibility to healthy food in the neighbourhood of Griffeuille in the city of Arles (France).
Griffeuille is a working class neighborhood located in the eastern part of Arles where French and immigrant communities live together. Unemployment is one of the most pressing issues in this neighborhood leading to poverty and lack of food accessibility.
Lucia Babina initiated this project during her residence at Atelier LUMA (2017-2018) and collaborated with the botanist Benedicte Hossenlopp, the local non-profits Solid’Arles and Petit à Petit: Coopérer pour Vivre Ensemble. The project is an exploratory investigation using food-related knowledge and edible resources. Engaging local experts from this Arlesian neighborhood, the project tests several ideas around food waste, food cycles, local gardening, food accessibility, and shared kitchens.
Lucia Babina and Benedicte Hossenlopp created a series of foraging and cooking workshops discovering local wild plants, co-creating new zero-waste recipes considering local food resources, and taking care of the natural and urban environment. The workshops led to the creation of two dinner events where local wild plants were creatively used as ingredients for the LUMA Days Event in 2017 and 2018. More than 100 guests were invited to each dinner. The success of these workshops and events have been the motivation to develop an ecological, collective, and collaborative kitchen in the neighborhood of Griffeuille.
This kitchen – Dans la Cuisine Griffeuille – is now a cooperative of local inhabitants and organizations producing healthy and affordable food, facilitating accessible cooking workshops, and organizing professional cooking education with the goal of producing zero-waste food.