If you care about food and how it is grown, about the soil and people who help to restore it – the path leads you to Foodscape Pages!
Foodscape Pages is a community-driven platform for publications and gatherings that inspire meaningful conversations and new perspectives around the ecology and culture of food. Through the lens and medium of food, we hold space for personal stories of lived experiences and for direct connections with practitioners on the ground.
As more and more people in Singapore and neighbouring countries are getting interested in gardening, growing their own edibles, and learning more about our food systems, they look for knowledge and a community of experience. However, a lot of information available online is not always applicable to our context; sometimes it’s the climate condition (a lot of information is from places with temperate climate), and sometimes it’s the socio-cultural and political circumstance in which one can begin to grow some of our own edibles. Foodscape Pages came about to bring up the voices of practitioners who have the experience and skills on the ground, but may not always be active in sharing their stories online. The intention is the sharing of local and bioregional knowledge, and to connect people interested to dive deeper into the conversations around food and our food systems.
What seeds we are planting
Foodscape Pages dreams to connect people who are interested in the ecology and culture of food in our bioregion, as well as to nurture more eco-literacy of regular folks, especially urbanites who are not connected with our food sources, to become more aware of our relationships with food, and how that affects the well-being of the individual, the community, the society and the planet. It is our hope to cultivate and nurture a space for increasing both external awareness of what’s going on out there, and relating it back to how we live our individual lives and make our choices through deepening inner awareness.
Foodscape Pages works towards this dream through bringing together different pieces of knowledge and publishing the theme-based journazine “The Sauce – on food, community and inspirations”. The first issue focused on Soil, highlighting initiatives like the Soil Regeneration Project and Community Composting, and inviting perspectives from practitioners to share their personal stories in Singapore and the region. This publication got distributed with over a hundred hard copies, with selected articles available online for the wider public.The second issue of The Sauce was dedicated to Seeds. As Foodscape Pages intends to be a community-driven platform we held an open call for contributions, invited practitioners to share their views, and organised a 3-part community creative writing workshop to co-create content for this issue. Part of this Sauce included interviews with practitioners from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and The Philippines, creating a space for all to begin thinking about interconnections in our bioregion.
We want to build the capacity of our community and share skills and knowledge freely, so that people can continue to be inspired to learn and grow together, and bring that to more people.
As we work together, we intentionally hold a space of care through regular check-ins and actively practicing kindness, empathy, trust and gratitude through active listening and authentic sharing. One of our priorities is a relationship with members of Foodscape Pages wider community. We are exploring how to use language with care and cultivate supporting ways of being.
How it grows
The initiative was conceived by Vivian, Sixian and Huiying with the Foodscape Collective as a key partner to form an ecosystem around the vision of a fair and circular food system for all. Now it is growing through partnership and relations! Each of the Sauce editions brought us close with other change-makers in the region – with Kontinentalist to create a seed map and share our research around the importance of seeds; with independent developers and designers from ThoughtWorks for creating a new website with better features; with a developper and illustrator receiving partial funding from CreativesAtWork and Blue3Asia for making our work even better; and with many more.We have received contributions from close to 30 contributors, either through writing, sharing their stories, illustrating or contributing their design and developer skills. You can read more about the community of Foodscape Pages on this page.
To date, without any funding except through community crowdsourcing, we have published our first journazine in print, in the process of publishing the second issue on our new online platform, organise in-person gatherings that bring people together to be creative and deepen our knowledge and literacy around our relationships with food. Throughout this time we learnt how to be adaptive and agile during these volatile times of a global pandemic, to find different and creative ways to connect on a human scale and trust that by deepening the influence and impact we can have in even a small number of people, it can create a ripple of impact through these engagements.
One of the good practices we discovered is to have regular check-ins for anchoring the connections on a human level, one that is based on trust, respect, understanding, interdependence and interconnection. This provides resilience especially during challenging times.
It has been amazing to see how people come together to co-create and find ways to be together in challenging times. Community support is one of the key enabling factors that has been keeping this vision of creating and maintaining the continuing growth and work of Foodscape Pages.
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Go to www.foodscapepages.org to discover our materials, meet the community and connect with Foodscape Pages! You can also follow us on Facebook and tell your friends who are curious about growing and eating healthy food and living in connection with nature.
