21/05/2026
On the 7th of May Bex and Bethan went to Calderdale to visit one of the other 7 pilots of the Landed Community Kitchen project that Ecoworks is part of. A project designed to bed agroecology (a set of farming practices and a social movement that aims to create resilient, regenerative food systems that work with nature) into social infrastructure spaces through community kitchens. It’s a move against supermarket surplus donations that give poor quality food, that has been bought from underpaying farmers and believes everyone should have access to chemical free food that respects nature as the norm. It also aims to start conversations around justice, dignity and sovereignty in food and the ‘more than food’ social realm.
We started in Halifax at The Outback. A fantastic project that combined cooking, eating, skills development, and a cooperative beehive where you could go into a shed and view the beehives through a window. It had a nursery next door, which wasn't part of the same project, but they provided some food for the nursery. Volunteers came and worked on the gardens from ethically diverse backgrounds and enjoyed healthy, nutritious meals cooked with the food that was grown there. A well used and much loved oasis in an area which is in the top 10% most deprived in the UK. The project has a straw-bale-built building, with lots of fantastic beds of food and a nature trail walk with points where you could learn more about the seasons and interesting plants growing there.
We started the session in pair work, asking the question: what have we learned through being part of the project, and what actions we are still working on moving forward? For Ecoworks we have reached out to other growers both within the St.Anns allotment with the fantastic Community Harvest Project, building better connections, and outside the allotment site with the agroecological Trinity Farm. We do grow a large amount of our own food to agroecological principles so feel we are well underway to becoming what this movement terms ‘landed’ so this year we have been focusing on the ‘more than food’ thinking how we can better support people with their mental health and finding connection and laughter through music, dancing and poetry. These sessions have been popular, and in the process of sharing a poem or song seems to build confidence and develop a feeling of compassion, safety and respect.
As part of our day in Calderdale we also did a free writing exercise where we just started writing to see where it would take us thinking on the idea, 'we're creating a Landed Community Kitchens community of practice because....' We then took out three points from our notes, which we all wrote on paper and added to the collective pot. These hope to form a food manifesto of the Landed Community Kitchen work. We enjoyed a fabulous Chana Dahl for lunch where I learnt about a new spices blend Kashmiri Basar which gave it a delicious authentic taste.
We then headed over to Hebden Bridge Market Garden. There are three growers, each with their own small business, renting plots and sharing the poly tunnel. We had our last session in their cosy cabin with gorgeous rhubarb cake where we explored what it could mean to take this movement forwards as a collective and next steps.
If you would like to learn more about Landed Community Kitchen or how they fit to the larger building blocks of an Agroecological Urbanism vision head here…
https://www.agroecologicalurbanism.org/building-blocks
