Food Studio / losæter
This recipe was developed by Valeryia Stsepantsova with help from her partner Mikael Hoa Nguyen, who currently works as a manager at Åpent Bakeri in Oslo. She is passionately working towards creating a sustainable future by bringing innovative ideas to life in the food industry. Born in Belarus, she also offers consulting by request.
Field notes from the process with us in Food Studio & the Future Library. It has been a long time since I have felt that I could say "we" in Food Studio. There have been many years where I have steered the ship alone, cut costs down to a minimum and only said yes to commissions I knew I could deliver on my own. But last year, when I was invited to take part in the exhibition "New Nordic. Food, Aesthetics and Place" at the National Museum in Oslo and had to dive into the archives for examples from the very first years, I felt that it is when I co-create with others in an interdisciplinary field that what I truly want to communicate finds its expression.
What do we need to create a good environment for collaboration? One of the most essential needs we have is to feel safe, and removing the day to day factors of stress and replacing them with something else, might be a good step. We think right now simply time and space to just be together, to tune into our senses and each other, is what we need. Even in the work universe!
Visitors to the urban agricultural collective Losæter in Oslo are guaranteed to have a special experience. You´ll meet farmers with deep roots to the land working with soilless city dwellers, artists connecting with chefs and children experience food made from freshly picked vegetables. Losæter is where the diversity of ecology and culture come together in the heart of old Oslo.
We believe that we all need to be ambassadors of food empathy if we are going to change the food system and the challenges we are facing today. By Food Empathy we mean the essential understanding of what food is, where it comes from and the journey it has undertaken, the resources spent from sun, soil and grass, how it enriches not just our souls, but how our bodies are made and nourished and how it finally returns to nature when we throw it away or digest it. In short, an understanding of the great wheel of sustenance and how it comes full circle.
WWOOF is a worldwide movement bringing people to a more sustainable way of life. By linking volunteers with organic farmers and growers to promote cultural and educational experiences based on trust and non-monetary exchange, thereby helping to build a sustainable, global community. This summer Linda Bovo and her friend Davide Carminati joined our first season at Vefall Neset farm in Drangedal as Wwoffers.
Denne sommeren var vi så heldige å huse Astrid S på Losæter og servere "jord til bord" pizza for henne og noen veldig heldige utvalgte fans.
« Where you tend a rose my lad, a thistle cannot grow. » Francis Hodgson Burnett. To awaken your imagination, I’ll begin this piece with a brief recount of the story of ‘Mary Mary Quite Contrary’ in Burnett’s 1911 children’s classic The Secret Garden. The protagonist, Mary Lennox, is a sickly, ill-tempered young orphan who is sent to the Yorkshire countryside to live with her estranged uncle, Master Craven, a reclusive hunchback who is paralyzed by grief after the loss of his wife.
One of the most important things we do is connecting people to the soil. This evening Losæter in Oslo, we hosted Afroz Shah who is connecting people to the ocean through his work with the worlds largest beach cleaning project in Mumbai, India.
“Are you ready?” asks the artist, with a sculpture shaped like an animal head over her shoulders. “Yes. Let´s go, then”, replies the baker, carrying a backpack constructed from wood filled with seeds, sourdough bread and some naan. They are followed by four other “carriers of bread”, the artist group, Futurefarmers, and the baker, Emmanuel Rang. They start the walk from Losæter – an urban agricultural site in the middle of Oslo–to the peri-urban farm of Johan Swärd.