Welcome to the
Food Beyond the Plate Movement
A meaningful initiative that invites you to explore and redefine your relationship with food, wider nature, and each other.
By joining us, you will become part of a dynamic and fun movement that aims to shift perceptions and practices surrounding food, land and vitality in Kenya.
Together we can reconnect with our food, we can learn to see food as alive and as nourishment. We can step towards life, step towards equality, step towards our collective vitality!
“The most important task of this moment is to generate a base of people who are eager to practice perceiving the complexity and interdependency in every aspect of our lives”
— Nora Bateson, Bateson Institute
Food Beyond the Plate Mission
Our mission is to foster a regenerative Kenyan food system in service of all life.
We do this through a holistic approach that focuses on the inner drivers of behavior, reconnecting community members with themselves, with each other, and wider nature.
Why Should You Join?
1. Be Part of a Community of Practice & Learning
Connect with like-minded individuals and organizations who are passionate about shaping a conscious food system. Share knowledge, support one another, and collaborate on initiatives that promote ecological and human health.
2. Engage & Parnter on Unique, Impactful Events
Experience events that showcase conscious approaches and practices across the food system. These gatherings, organized by active members, will inspire and encourage sustainable and regenerative practices.
3. Access to Exclusive Resources
Enjoy membership benefits such as access to a specialized directory of producers and farmers committed to regenerative practices as outlined in our Food Beyond the Plate Manifesto.
Your Call to Action
Join us in this paradigm shift! Together, we can improve the quality of food produced and consumed within our Kenyan community. Let's move beyond simply viewing food as a commodity and recognize its vital role in connecting ecological health with human well-being.
Are you ready to make a difference? Join the Food Beyond the Plate Movement today and be part of a regenerative future for all.
Background
At the Living Food Campus, we believe that the future is generated day by day, word by word, conversation by conversation, and action by action. Small acts matter. The way we think matters. We make the world through how we interpret it, through the stories we tell ourselves and our belief systems. Partial, shiny and exclusive solutions are not the generative answer.
When we look to nature for the answer we see fractals; these never ending complex patterns that repeat themselves in an ongoing feedback loop. These are images of interconnected nonlinear living systems, of chaos. So nature teaches us to approach our systems work with this same fractal intelligence. An intelligence that appreciates the ever-changing dynamic relationships of the systems we are part of. Interventions that gently guide, inspire and enable us towards making better decisions about how we interact with food are important. This is how nature works; nature fixes itself bit by bit. Again, the small acts and our mindsets matter.
When we get involved with producing or processing food that we’re going to eat ourselves we are forced to pay attention. We become more present, more intimately connected to both the physical act of creating and also to the conducive conditions that are required for the magic to unfurl.
It is easy to ignore the wider living system that surrounds us. If they don’t seem directly relevant to our day to day they don’t always register in our consciousness. But the thing is, soil matters, insects matter, microbes matter. Not as separate entities but as elements that interact with one and other, respond to one and other and shape one and other in service of life. In service of our collective future. And that's exactly what we as humans do too. What if we became better aware of this?
Historically we know that food has the potential to be our medicine. Yet evidence shows that the food we are consuming today often lacks vitality. There are many reasons for this. The way in which food is produced and the lifelessness of the soil within which food is grown. The genetic integrity of seeds. The distance food has traveled. The way food is processed and the additives that are put into food. Yet it doesn’t have to be like this.
If we proactively regenerate soils and eat a biodiverse range of crops from those same soils we can improve the health of the planet and our own health in parallel. And all the while, ensure the social justice of those most closely entangled with the food system. That is what this movement is all about - food as a way to sense the inherent interconnections that exist between human and land. As Michael Chrichton said, “Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world”.
We need a different way of thinking and being if we are to truly transform food systems and our relationship to them.
"Good food is food that makes your community stronger, that makes the environment more biodiverse and more resilient, it makes you healthier; and you have the right to access this good food.
Food is not a commodity. Food is life. Food is pleasure. Food is how we express our love for one and another. Food is how we define our culture, it is how we define who we are. So food has to be understood as part of this bigger context of meaning.
It is about how we create our relationship with each other, and it is about our relationship with the environment itself and it is about our relationship with future generations and it connects us to our past”
- Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur
