The Common Table just turned six years old. Its founders, Orlando and Sophie Lovell, take stock of their platform and renew their pledge to champion voices for change in humankind’s greatest task ahead: transitioning to a global ecosystem of economies that are decent, fair and safe – through food.
We started The Common Table in Berlin in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown, when there was this feeling of time stretching, of deceleration, a sense of community and care. “The great reset”, someone called it – caused by a pandemic-induced loss of life of such shocking proportions that it should have catalysed a massive global shift towards healing the damage humanity has caused in its heedless pursuit of “more”.
Dr Lenore Newman wanted to run the family fishing business, but now she’s a culinary geographer and expert advisor to governments on the impact of climate change on food security and global cuisines. We talk to her about her journey into food.
We spent a lot of that year collecting and reporting on various ways of seeing and approaching food systems from a design-, architecture- and art-perspective. We gave our new sprout of a platform the tagline “food futures and systemic change” in the hope that better days were to come.
Artist filmmaker Jumana Manna’s new film “Foragers” is about the criminalisation of herb-picking culture in Palestine and Israel. An exclusive interview for The Common Table by Sophia Hoffinger.
Six years on, it feels like few lessons have been learned, and what should have been a wake-up call has since brought out the worst, not the best, in human behaviour. Now, there is a sense of having no time at all, or worse: that time is running out. The world is literally burning; the body politic is chronically ill; dysfunctional LLM technology is distorting knowledge interfaces, and a pervasive, algorithmically-enhanced sense of knowing too much is causing mass anxiety and mental exhaustion.
There is so much good to be found emerging from some of the essential system changes that have begun to happen.
Sometimes it is hard to see beyond all the dark news about the decline and fall resulting from a toxically destructive set of interconnected global systems. And yet, and yet, there is so much good to be found emerging from some of the essential system changes that have begun to happen.
An agricultural collective called Arca Tierra supplies 50 city restaurants as well as locals with fresh food by reviving ancestral agriculture practices in the Chinampas wetlands near Mexico City. The Common Table spoke to the farm coordinator Sebastián Herrera, about finding what was lost.
This is why, with The Common Table, we aim to share relational visions and insights to support the collective imagination of better and possible futures. We believe that keeping all of the planet (human and more-than-human) well-nourished and healthy can only happen within a food-first mindset. Therefore, we try to focus on specific and concrete examples of people and practices facilitating the transition to a new food economy, or ecosystem of food economies, that are decent, fair, and safe.
Our goal is to continue to be a source and reference point to fuel imaginations for collectively fairer food futures.
We also try to ask better questions around food & beyond. By asking better questions, we can hope to uncover vital and inspirational stories of empowerment, ingenuity and care for the greater good. If it is true that communities are only able to build what they imagine, then our goal is to continue to be a source and reference point to fuel imaginations for collectively fairer food futures.
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.
Although political and economic systems appear to descend into an increasingly corrupt chaos of the absurd, activism, engagement, resistance and advocacy are on the rise. Individuals, communities and global movements are challenging decayed narratives and writing their own. And since food security is becoming the most pressing issue of our age, we believe it is equally essential to share exemplary policy models or municipal strategies from countries, cities or communities that seem to be on the right track.
Welcome to the extended landscape of the human microbiome. Designer Philipp Kolmann introduces us to the collaborative relationships between bodies, cultures, food and microbes.
It cannot be stressed enough that the future is ancestral in so many ways. For those who know their history, ancient and modern, many of the geopolitical patterns or ecological crises playing out right now seem decidedly familiar. Which means these problems, or something very similar, have already been faced before and communities or species have already found ingenious solutions, workarounds, or adaptations. Such knowledge is the most precious of all resources and needs to be cherished and shared.
The future also belongs to the young, and it is their energy, their convictions, their imaginations and new visions that we shall also continue to celebrate and share at our common, intergenerational table as we seek to document, in our own little way, the most important topic on the planet: food.
Sophie & Orlando Lovell
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