If you knew you didn't have much time left to live, what would you want to eat?
Also, if it was your family or a loved one, what would you want them to eat?
This is Manabe, the head of the Monosus Production Department. This may seem a bit sudden, but there are some new developments coming up for next year, so I'm posting about food.
Speaking of my personal activities * , for the past three years I have been working on a food project called Nomadic Kitchen with four chefs who run a small restaurant in Tokyo.
*At Monosus, we encourage employees to have personal projects if they discuss it in advance, as long as it is not the same as their main job. So, we have employees who continue to play in professional bands and tour around the country, and others who run galleries on weekends.
As part of Nomadic Kitchen's activities, earlier this year we held an event for employees together with the team that runs the company cafeteria at a certain foreign-affiliated company.
The company provides meals to its employees every day, not only because employees eat together in the company cafeteria, which generates spontaneous communication and thus innovation, but also because it thinks about the healthy lives of its employees and their families 30 years from now. On the other hand, when meals are provided every day free of charge, I think that at the same time, the food in front of you starts to seem natural.
Recently, we see a lot of TV programs and magazines about food, and it's not uncommon to hear people say, "Eating is really popular these days." However, I don't think that this has led to an increase in the number of people who cook every day. I feel that people are simply satisfied by consuming that information, and food itself is becoming more and more "abstract."
What is the reality of food, the opposite of the abstraction of food? We wanted everyone to feel and think about this, so we chose the theme of this event as "THINK DISH | A day to think too much before eating."
I think too much and eat.
The chefs came up with the idea to invite producers from Aomori (fish), Kanagawa (greengrocers, traditional vegetables), Wakayama (soy sauce), Kagawa (fried koi), and Kagoshima (pork) who they have previously visited as part of Nomadic Kitchen's activities.The event was held in a workshop format, where participants could use all of their senses to touch and talk about the ingredients together with the chefs, and eat while thinking about them.
Mr. Fukudome of Fukudome Small Farm in Kagoshima, with whom we have had a relationship for about three years, brought in a whole 50kg half of a carefully raised saddleback pork, which he then butchered right in front of us with the chef, giving the participants the chance to try their hand at butchering the large fillet.
Participants asked many questions, such as, "It's a female, but is it a male?" and "How old is it?". Seeing the half body of a large female pig that was only 8 months old, one participant said, "I thought that I have to cherish this life."
In addition, the participants had the opportunity to try a variety of other experiences, including how to make stir-fried koi stock, comparing the taste of different soy sauces squeezed from mash, making pizza while listening to stories about traditional vegetables, and learning about unused fish in Aomori and how to fillet them.
Workshop on making soup stock using silver-stirred roe from Setouchi
A fish filleting workshop. Participants were asked to fillet a small horse mackerel. Have you ever actually filleted a fish with your own hands?
What I felt then was that the only way to regain the reality of eating, something that just passes by every day without any realization, is to actually move my body and feel it.
Japan has a lot of wonderful handmade food culture.
Beyond that are not "machines" but "people."
On the other hand, there is a huge amount of food that is mass-produced by machines in factories. If we are not conscious of it, our entire lives will be filled with such food as "commercial products." And when we want to eat or feed others, the food culture of being made by hand may no longer exist.
But I think if everyone just became a little more conscious, it would make a big difference.
Because it's about every day, every meal, and it's about everyone.
What I want to write here is not that food is important, but that it is important to continue to feel and think about the fact that someone's work supports our livelihoods, and that this is connected to everyone, i.e. to society.
A food project in Kamiyama Town that connects small-scale production with small-scale consumption.
As I wrote in the article " Let's become adults who work like they live, " in July of this year I joined a working group that was considering a comprehensive strategy for regional revitalization in Kamiyama Town, and, as I was also working on a food project, I became active in a group that was thinking about "eating" in the local area.
Kamiyama is a mountainous area, which means that its location is unfavorable for agriculture. In addition, the aging population and lack of successors make it difficult to continue farming, leading to an increase in abandoned farmland, which is causing waste. There are also many other issues, such as damage caused by animals such as deer, wild boars, and monkeys. Also, in name only, it is said that local production for local consumption, and I hear that vegetables grown locally are sometimes shipped to local supermarkets via the city due to the flow of large markets.
It's impossible to solve these problems in one go, so we discussed whether we could create a place that would make the connection between "food and society," which is hard to see in everyday life, visible as something that concerns everyone, and where people of all backgrounds and generations could continue to think about it together through eating.
I visited an organic vegetable farm in Kochi together with people from Kamiyama Town Hall.
This working group will disband after its final meeting on Monday, December 14th, and whether this project, which continues to consider "food and society," will actually come to fruition will depend on our actions from now on.
If there are any new developments, we will report them on the Monosasu website.