Food Studio / losæter

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.

« 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.

“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.