By: Allison Norris
With global migration increasing and ongoing, communities in countries that receive migrants and refugees have organized ways to support newcomers. Edda Starck and Raúl Matta see how food and the material structures around food play a role in how newcomers are welcomed. Currently, a postgraduate student in Anthropology and Cultural Musicology, Edda Starck joined the research project FOOD2GATHER during her master’s degree studies with Principal Investigator Raúl Matta, a research fellow at Georg-August-University Göttingen. Presented at the Food Matters & Materialities: Critical Understandings of Food Cultures conference, their paper “Social Integration Through the Kitchen: Cooking and Eating with Others in Germany”, explores two initiatives taking place in Germany.
A RefuEat cart and cyclist. Credits: E. Starck and R. Matta.
Operating since 2016, REFUEAT employs refugees and migrants to run mobile food stalls, converted from a cleverly designed bike-drawn trailer that folds out to a functioning kitchen to prepare and sell Arabic street food. An international organization founded in Germany in 2014, Über den Tellerrand brings together people from different backgrounds to forge community through food. Their portable version of Über den Tellerrand, Kitchen on the Run, uses a shipping container as the infrastructure to host community events. Starck and Matta investigate the materiality of objects associated with food services in Germany to see how they operate as assemblages of food, people, and matter. The researchers worked with the concept of “conviviality” to explore how these three operate and facilitate community-building among migrants, refugees, and local populations. After the conference, I had a chance to speak with them about these initiatives, thinking through human and non-human relationships and where their research might go next.
The RefuEat cart unpacked and open for business. Credits: E. Starck and R. Matta.
Allison Norris: What drew your attention to the projects REFUEAT and Über den Tellerrand?
Raúl Matta: The project began looking for funding at the end of 2017 and was created with five other European universities. It is about food and social integration in public spaces in Europe. One of the requirements was to work closely with civil society associations. We looked for initiatives that put food at the center of work with migrants and refugees as a means to gather people to create bridges between encounters. I searched for initiatives in Germany and found REFUEAT through an associate. The founder had already experienced working with research projects and other social initiatives, so he was very keen to participate. Über den Tellerrand was recruited later through a colleague in Berlin. Edda joined the project as a research assistant when we were about to start research in 2019.
Edda Starck: I’m interested in social activism in general. I find it interesting to combine the topics of food and immigration. I was starting my masters at the university, so it was an exciting opportunity to join such a big project, get insight, and participate in the research.
The food storage capacity of the RefuEat cart. Credits: E. Starck and R. Matta.
AN: Can you talk a little bit about what Über den Tellerrand means? And how it informs the research overall?
ES: Über den Tellerrand is a German proverb. It means to broaden your horizon and literally “look beyond the edge of your own plate”. It’s a fitting name for the organization because they are trying to bring communities together and facilitate encounters with food as a medium.
AN: “Conviviality” is, as you say, a notion central to your discussion. Could you explain this term or give an example of how conviviality works in the context of your research and the activities you are observing?
ES: Conviviality comes from the Latin words “living together”. In our research, this has been a really important notion because we work with organizations that try to facilitate social integration. It is important that integration doesn’t mean or doesn’t only mean assimilation. Rather there are possibilities for different communities to live together, as they see fit. The organizations that we work with are trying to facilitate that in different ways. Über den Tellerrand has community cooking events, where they invite migrants and refugees to give cooking classes, and anyone can attend. People come together in the kitchens and make a meal together. That’s an interesting dynamic because it puts refugees in the position of teachers in a way that acknowledges and validates their knowledge. It also makes the spaces created by migrants within their new homes more familiar and accessible to local communities. In that sense, food becomes a medium through which different communities can come together without necessarily already having much in common.
RM: We see conviviality as a humble and non-hierarchical perspective of social life and socializing. Our work reflects on breaking this dichotomy between host and newcomer. The conviviality perspective facilitates focus on collaboration by people from different backgrounds, but also material culture. For instance, the food bikes and kitchen container play a quasi-human role in the sense that they are considered as partners in this project. In the case of Über den Tellerrand, the founders told us that they consider the containers as one partner, so they care for it. [For REFUEAT], the bicycles allow refugees to explore the city in ways they probably would not be able to by themselves in other contexts. This can be seen as a collaboration and also to improve their life. This is what conviviality is about—enhancing the capacities of all the actors, human and non-human.
The Über den Tellerand kitchen and dining area. Credits: Über den Tellerran.
AN: Raúl, I think you’re hinting at how human and non-human actors both have agency here. Is there anything to add about how humans and non-humans can act together?
ES: Migrants face many hurdles in Germany—a lot of these are bureaucratic and social. It’s interesting to see how people recruit material objects and artifacts as they develop technologies in order to circumvent these [hurdles]. One of the reasons the food bikes are so ingenious and important is because most driving licenses from the Middle East, which is where a lot of migrants have come from originally, are not acknowledged in Germany. The food bikes permit migrants to set up these food stalls across the city, which wouldn’t otherwise be possible. This is what makes objects so essential in these projects.
RM: Definitely. That’s conviviality. It helps to de-institutionalize what is already established and imposes barriers that make life more difficult for people. It’s something that creates a path to do things differently.
AN: REFUEATS, Über den Tellerrand, and what they bring forward in terms of conviviality all sound pretty hopeful. With world migration projected to continue increasing, what can countries that receive migrants learn from your research? What do you want people to take away from this research?
ES: Hopefully, people can be inspired by the work of these initiatives, think outside the box and be creative with the ways in which they build their social projects. These are quite small-scale projects; it’s difficult to transfer them to a national approach. Food as a medium is something people can keep working with—it’s proven to be quite successful. There’s a lot of racism and xenophobia that has revolved around food and specifically against migrants in Germany and other places in the world.
RM: For instance, our colleagues in Norway and Belgium are using food as a medium to teach the young kids, children of refugees, the Norwegian language, and the French language by making cookbooks. They cook together; they prepare the recipes—this is also a way to play with the material culture, in this case, food. People can be inspired using food.
The portable container that holds the Über den Tellerand kitchen and dining area. Credits: Über den Tellerrand.
AN: Where will this research go next?
ES: What will definitely continue to interest me are the notions of conviviality and more than human agency. These concepts will stay relevant for me.
RM: I’m developing the concept of convivial foodscapes to use the broad concept of conviviality, which is informed in many different ways. For instance, feminist theories, theories of Indigenous knowledge. I’m trying to build a broader concept of community—the idea is to enhance life for relationships between humans, plants, animals, and also the relationship we have with matter. It’s a bit philosophical; it’s the ember in every project.
Many thanks to Edda Starck and Raúl Matta for sharing their work and time. For more information about the projects discussed, visit https://refueat.de/ and https://ueberdentellerrand.org/.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.