Xiaohongshu
Patricia de la Osa, MSc student in Prosperity, People and Planet, takes us behind-the-scenes of her research partnership, running food workshops with the charity, Eat Club.
Patricia shares how support from the Community Research Initiative's Impact Fund, the only Students' Union fund in the country dedicated to student-led community engaged research, deepened the impact of her community partnership in unexpected ways.
Sustainability is often discussed through renewable energy, electric vehicles or recycling schemes. All are necessary. But they fail to acknowledge a deeper structural problem: how is everyday life itself organised? Our homes, cities, jobs and relationships increasingly run on speed, convenience and consumption. We order food when we are busy, meet friends in places where we are expected to spend, and plan our leisure around things we can book or buy. If these are the structures through which daily life happens, how easy is it really to live in communion with each other and the planet?
My research began by looking for what I call “windows of prosperity”: small spaces within everyday life where different values already become possible. Places where prosperity might mean having time, caring for one another, knowing where our food comes from, participating rather than consuming, and simply enjoying being together. I found one such window in a familiar, everyday ritual: cooking and gathering around a shared table.
What interested me was not only what happened at the table, but everything around it.
In the Basque Country, I studied txokos: collectively owned spaces where groups regularly meet to cook, eat and spend time together. What interested me was not only what happened at the table, but everything around it.
Someone sourced the ingredients, someone started cooking, another laid the table. Knowledge travelled through watching and doing. The meal was collectively created rather than purchased.
The Students’ Union Community Research Initiative made it possible to take that empirical research one step further: to translate what I was learning into a real-life, socially designed experiment with a local community. Rather than researching transitions abstractly, I wanted to explore what happens when change is approached as something plural and place-based: shaped and sustained by the communities who inhabit the place. That could only happen through partnership.
Rather than researching transitions abstractly, I wanted to explore what happens when change is approached as something plural and place-based: shaped and sustained by the communities who inhabit the place. That could only happen through partnership.
Working with Eat Club, an East London charity already using food to empower young people, meant the experiment was shaped not only by research questions but by local knowledge, existing community relationships and practical experience. Together, we co-designed four communal cooking gatherings in Hackney, involving Eat Club’s team in everything from menus and ingredients to hosting, facilitation and the gradual transfer of responsibility to participants.
This was one of the most valuable aspects of the initiative: instead of treating the community as a site from which to extract data, the project became an opportunity to create an experience that belonged to the people taking part.
And that is where the research became tangible. At first, a room full of people and chopping boards could feel slightly chaotic. But cooking gave everyone something to do before they necessarily knew what to say. Soon people were asking each other for help, improvising with ingredients, exchanging techniques and taking responsibility without waiting to be assigned a role. Participants began learning how to cook not simply with one another, but for one another.
Even mistakes became collective knowledge. Too many leftovers one week meant better quantities the next. A dish that did not quite work became a conversation about what to try differently. And then there was the time after eating. Plates emptied, but people stayed.
Conversations continued, until we suddenly realised how late it had become. That lingering sobremesa became one of my favourite parts of the experiment: a reminder that food can create a reason to gather, but the relationships that grow around it may become the more important outcome.
The project has left me less interested in whether the txoko can be replicated than in what can be learned from it: shared responsibility, participation, ritualisation, care and collective ownership. I hope those principles can support Eat Club’s future work while offering other community organisations, researchers and practitioners practical inspiration for place-based food initiatives.
Perhaps that was my greatest lesson: transitions are not only policies to design or futures to imagine. Sometimes, they need to be cooked, shared and practised together.
Being supported by the Community Research Initiative allowed an idea from my dissertation to become something people could actually inhabit. Perhaps that was my greatest lesson: transitions are not only policies to design or futures to imagine. Sometimes, they need to be cooked, shared and practised together.
Photos by Robyn Leonard and Karma Jamtsho.
About the Community Research Initiative
We are a part of the Students' Union Social Impact Team. We bring people together across the student-community divide to explore the possibility of creating socially impactful research with and for the community. From discovering new ways of working to co-creating research with local communities, we are here to walk with students through their community research journey.