Hosted within the Utopian Foodscapes curation at BAC ART LAB, researcher Kevin Lai (Utrecht University; Open Kitchen) led a workshop on finding the (im)possibility of “crisis-cooking” in contemporary Dutch and Flemish regions. Examples of past public food provision in the regions were recollected in an interactive recipe recreation exercise. Recipes from wartime cookbooks found in the Centrum Agrarische Geschiedenis (CAG) archive and archival records of the Rijksbureau voor de Voedselvoorziening in Oorlogstijd from the Nationaal Archief in Den Haag were taken as the “event scores” to be followed, edited, or refuted altogether.

Brining along resources from Gary Wilder’s Concrete Utopianism and Social Reproduction Theory, the workshop provided participants an embodied experience that reinvigorates the relevance of foregrounding food provision systems in the growing debates over emergency and security across EU societies. This aligns with the intention of Open Kitchen to communalize food for diverse human and more-than-human life in contemporary European cities. Reflections from this workshop will contribute to the ongoing development of CONVIVIUM’s process-oriented and practice-based “open (garden) kitchen” prototype.