PATTERN GREENS explores the ways that people around the world cook with leafy green vegetables, in categories of dishes conceived as “patterns,” soups, for instance, or egg dishes, or stews. In the vast sweep of human cooking, these categories are understood as fluid and overlapping, intercultural and generative. One aim of Pattern Greens is to begin to document the global treasure-trove of approaches, and to facilitate this happening in many voices, and in different media, across written, digital, and live, co-created event platforms.
Since prehistoric times, through all eras and places, greens are part of our common history and human legacy, our “Food Commons,” a potent and expansive idea. Food Commons can conceptually contain the right to food, our relationships with plants, regional styles and cuisine , as well as contemporary social change activism that seeks to decommodify food and relocalise growing, marketing, sharing and eating. Greens and the ways they are cooked and eaten belong to all of us, as our heritage, culturally, cross-culturally, and collectively.
Wild as “weeds”, perennially as vegetables, tree leaves, and seaweeds, seasonally in commercial horticulture and community gardening, greens are also sustainable and nutritious foods, available to us in a world in which food security is increasingly jeopardised by climate instability and precarious economies. Understanding our relationship to leafy vegetables, and all the possibilities, sharing our cultures and the embodied emotional values of taste, imagining delicious creative eating, together, in community–this is the vision of Pattern Greens as offering sustainable, resilient, future-oriented foodways. Ours is a mix and match approach.
