Soup is a Community Arts / Diversity Studies Studio
As part of the new ENGAGE at CCA initiative, which combines project-based learning with community engagement, this course works in collaboration with La Cocina, a not-for-profit incubator program that cultivates food entrepreneurs as they formalize and grow their businesses. Located in the culturally diverse Mission neighborhood, La Cocina focuses primarily on working with women from culturally diverse and immigrant communities. Key to this partnership, students will be working with five women from La Cocina’s Food Entrepreneur program to make a soup that has special significance to them. The goal of the course is for students to not only help in the preparation of soup during each cooking session, but also to engage in a dialogue with the guest to gain a better understanding of the dynamic histories (personal and collective), social and cultural events and traumas that are often contained within a particular recipe. It is important to note that this course is not solely about how to prepare soup but rather uses soup as a fulcrum for the collection of testimonies from these women and to gain a clearer, more intimate understanding of their communities.
Alzalina talks about the influence of folklore on her culinary upbringing from Melissa Martin on Vimeo.
Azalina talks about her first memory of this tribal soup and how it changes from person to person, occasion to occasion. from Melissa Martin on Vimeo.