Brain Trust Culinary Collection
Brain Trust Culinary Collection is made under the umbrella of the Brain Trust – David Graeber’s Institute Project.
I have been involved for many years in the Open Source Food project, aimed at spreading independent DIY food production and distribution among people, like myself, who don’t have access to significant resources: land or complicated expensive machinery.
Brain Trust dinners will consist of 6 dinners during 2023 with guest chefs, each of whom will publicly prepare a meal using ingredients that will be available outside of industrial agriculture or the big supermarket distribution system.
We will be cooking from foods harvested from the forest, from seaweeds and oysters grown on small farms in rivers and along seashores, from invasive species, mushrooms and micro-algae.
Some of the choices of our cooks may seem strange or even shocking. But the environmental and social changes we face as humanity are equally likely to be radical.
We don’t know how much time we have to prepare for these changes. Some scientists think not much at all. Perhaps only a few years.
The worst that can happen is that the social fabric breaks down. So we decided to concentrate on building as wide a network of solidarity as possible, consisting of micro-communities of mutual aid connected by common ideas about how to prepare for the changing reality.
Join in!
How to participate in the Brain Trust open-source dinners:
1. Register on our zoom meeting registration page.
2. Check out our lists of dinner ingredients and instructions from our chef.
3. Form a community by inviting your friends, family, and strangers to join us, because the goal of our project is to create interested communities of mutual support;
4. Join our zoom dinner and, following instructions from our chef, cook with us
(here’s a proposed list – changes may apply since we are still in the preparation stage).
5. At the end of the cooking/preparation time, during the dinner, everyone will have the opportunity to ask our guest chef practical questions about how to assemble, cook, and produce the food they offer.
We will be able to discuss the specifics of the national kitchen of our participants or get suggestions for the next cooking sessions.
6. Stay with us and continue to spread the word, using our posters with tips on how to produce open-source food, build communities and help each other.
That’s how we win!
Other projects that may appear as a result:
– A video and a printed culinary collection
– A set of cooking posters/cards and souvenirs