Youth exchange on food, traditions and sustainability
How can we keep our traditional dishes while caring for the planet? Young people from five countries cooked, compared and remade their recipes in a more sustainable way.
Why
Food is culture: our traditional dishes tell where we come from. Yet many of them rely on ingredients with a high environmental impact, and people who want to eat more sustainably often turn to other countries’ cuisines instead of adapting their own. After the first Back and Forth in 2023, this second edition explored the same question with a new group.
What happened
- Cooking 101 and traditional dinners: pairs of national teams cooked their traditional dishes for everyone.
- Our “food print”: what makes a meal high- or low-carbon, explored through games, a herbs game and a world café on food and health, habits, consumption and food footprint.
- Recipe 2.0: each team remade its traditional dishes in a more sustainable version, with local and seasonal ingredients, less meat and smaller portions.
- Cooking outdoors on a rocket stove built from tin cans.
- What can I do? What can we do? Personal and group actions for change.
- A treasure hunt in Passignano sul Trasimeno, an open space and a final Carbon 0 Gala.
Results
- A cookbook with traditional recipes and their sustainable “2.0” versions, and a toolkit with the rocket-stove instructions and the ideas from the world café, both free to download.
- Average overall score: 7.9 out of 10 (32 responses).
“I found out so much about what I can do to make a change. I know so much about food and sustainable options now. But I also learned a lot about other cultures and countries, and how to connect with strangers.” (a Back and Forth participant)
“The world café, because I heard a lot of different opinions and I liked sharing them and discussing them together.” (a Back and Forth participant, on what they found most interesting)
