Community Archives — The Common Table

still from the documentary The Edible Indian by Cass Gardiner showing a Native American family sharing a meal in a forest

The Good Life

10. July 2025
20 minute read

First Nations filmmaker and curator Cass Gardiner talks to The Common Table about stewardship, reciprocity, the bittersweet aspect of "home", and how she uses food to open a window for non-Native people into her world and community.

Gastronativism: Us & Them

1. February 2025
12 minute read

Food Studies professor Fabio Parasecoli on gastronativism, the "ideological use of food in politics to advance ideas about who belongs to a community". A conversation about "us", "them", food, politics, and systemic thinking.

Essentially Local Slippurinn

4. September 2024
8 minute read

Chef Gísli Matt’s restaurant Slippurinn is on a tiny Icelandic island buffeted by trade winds in the middle of the Atlantic. We discussed decolonising island cuisine and whether “local fine dining” is an oxymoron or an answer.

Food Thinking

28. May 2024
10 minute read

Design thinking is no longer fit for purpose. How can design be practised more relationally and inclusively, mindful of complexity and inequality? Through food thinking and asking better questions, says Sophie Lovell, co-founder of The Common Table.

Decolonising Hazelnuts

11. May 2024
9 minute read

The founders of a tiny Anatolian and Berlin hazelnut business share how they are challenging one of the most powerful food monopolies with fair-labour, biodiversity, creating incentives and leading locally by example.

Microbial Sovereignty and Panchal Dairy

15. February 2024
8 minute read

Trevor Warmedahl reports on the marginalised Rabari community in Gujarat, India and how a dairy there is working to help return value to their pastoral ways through cheesemaking.

Diet Degrowth

30. September 2023
11 minute read

Sean Roy Parker is part of a movement seeking new connections between food, consumption and digestion. Here he proposes a new "diet degrowth" discourse.

With Reverence

24. July 2023
7 minute read

"When we eat certain foods, understand where they come from and all the nuances that make them what they are, we become active participants in their survival." An essay by food writer Nicholas Gill.

Lyutenitsa Queens

23. July 2023
18 minute read

An urban-rural conversation about growing and preserving, heritage pink tomatoes, food festivals, UNESCO and good neighbourliness in Bulgaria.