Kitchens are part of our everyday life. Our relationship with food is largely influenced by the tools in our modern kitchens. We rely on refrigerators to keep our vegetables fresh, or exhaust vents to keep the air clean. But are they ecologically regenerative? What other tools are possible? As part of the series “making tools for tomorrow” co-hosted by Kevin Lai and Pia Canales, in this workshop we will have a critical look at our modern kitchen and discuss how we can relearn techniques such as fermentation, sun-dried method, salt-brining. We will get our hands dirty (or salty!) making syrups, pickle cucumbers and much more with rescue food from the Afrikaandermarkt or whatever you may have at home. We will use the concept “convivial re-tooling” to guide us through the workshop. This is a skill-share session, at the end of which we hope the participants will acquire new skills from your peers and begin to appreciate a convivial way of life.

This workshop will be conducted primarily in English (supplemented with Dutch) for all language proficiencies. No matter if you are a home-chef, a food activist, a designer, a gardener, or with no experience in fermentation at all, if you are interested in knowing more, everyone is welcome!

🎯 Fermenting Futures – a workshop on food preservation
📆 31 May, 2025. 14.00-15.00
📍 1F Expo, Verhalenhuis Belvédère, Rotterdam
🌐 https://verhalenhuisrotterdam.nl/za-31-mei-drakenbootfestival-lunch-verhalen-muziek-workshops/

*Participation is free, but registration is necessary to avoid food waste. Please email Kevin Lai at s.f.lai@uu.nl to register.
**Please bring your own glass jar to take away finished pickles.

More on the MAKING TOOLS FOR TOMORROW workshop series

As part of the Horizon Europe project “CONVIVIUM: New European Bauhaus Solutions in Food, Living Heritage, and Conviviality”, this workshop series interrogates the kitchen as a spatial ensemble of standardized parts embedded in urban technological systems, identifying tools beyond gadgetry but also culinary knowledge and emplaced experience, ultimately imagining a convivial assemblage of a regenerative kitchen practice. Aligned with the ethos of CONVIVIUM, this series prioritizes an interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration cultivating the cultural perspectives in the European Green Deal through leveraging the material, semiotic, and symbolic power of food. This workshop series underscores the importance of “making” in reclaiming our agency in dominant food systems, that is, through twitching the “tools” we reshape the social relations they mediate, vis-à-vis the history-long query of an ideal “tomorrow” in modern European societies that nonetheless still motivates the politics of the present.