Creating/Establishing/Nourishing your roots
Founder Sarah Bentley shares her journey to creating the community cookery school Made in Hackney. And Anna and Chloe give you a little sneak peak at next year’s seasons!
For this month’s free issue of the Sourced newsletter Sarah Bentley, founder of Made in Hackney, shares her journey to creating the community cookery school. The first monthly fee for new paid subscribers in Water season will be donated to the organisation that provides cookery lessons, food and community building through food in the London Borough of Hackney where Sourced is based. If you sign up for the paid subscription between now and July 31, our first monthly fee will go towards Made in Hackney too! The rest of your subscription pays the research we commission from contributors.
We always approach Sourced with the understanding that we operate within a globalised food and drink system but our immediate interactions with those systems are local. While the roots of Made in Hackney are settled London, the city itself wouldn’t be what it is without the influence of the United Kingdom’s imperial pursuits and overseas migration to the UK from all over the globe including the nation’s former colonies. We love that Made in Hackney embrace the people who call Hackney home to help nourish (water) the roots they have settled in the community.
Finding your roots
Sarah Bentley, Founder of Community Cookery School Made In Hackney
When asked what inspired me to start community cookery school and charity Made In Hackney, I usually speak to the organisations mission of tackling health inequalities, the climate crisis and community cohesion through joyful, culturally diverse plant-centred events.
But repeating the organisational line although heartfelt, is pretty impersonal. If I dig deeper, my journey to founding Made In Hackney was an unlikely collision of a career as a reggae dancehall music journalist and my Mum being a Home Economics teacher.
I grew up in Grantham, Lincolnshire. A then mono-cultural, boozy, rural market town famous for Margaret Thatcher, physicists Isaac Newton and a notorious nightclub fight where someone bit their assailants ear off. A huge chicken factory dominated the suburbs and fields of cabbages, sugar beet and ‘tates (potatoes) flanked us on all sides.
The dominate food culture was British greasy spoon style cafes and gristly carvery pub lunches. A handful of migrant families opened eateries – Grantham Kebabs, Mr Pangs Chinese restaurant and The Bombay Brasserie. These were the pioneers of the towns global food offerings and depending on whether we were celebrating a family birthday or later in my teens falling out the local nightspot at 2am, we gratefully frequented them all.
My parents adore food – cooking it, growing it, eating it – our lives revolved around our stomachs.
Much to her Dad’s disapproval, my Mum was the first in her working class family to go to college. She and my Grandmother would hide her books in the oven or washing dolly when they heard Dad come home after a day driving steam engines. “Lassie’s don’t need to go to school,” he’d thunder. Studying science was out of the question. But eventually, after friends persuaded him, he ‘allowed his girl’ to go to college to study Home Economics
Mum was dedicated to cooking our family meals – bubble and squeak, toad in the hole, sweetcorn fritters, fish pies, pancakes, roast dinners, prawn cocktails, vegetable pies, trifles, Mickey Mouse meringues for birthday parties – classics she’d perfected as a Home Economics teacher. As a child she would push me round the supermarket in a trolley delighting me with tales of where all the ingredients came from. In our home kitchen I had important tasks like halving the grapes for a fruit salad before a big family gathering (Mum’s laden buffet tables were the stuff of legends) or de-stoning the damsons during a chutney making session. More fun still was making hedgehog bread – snipping the dough into spikes and using cloves as eyes.
As a teenager I wasn’t interested in cooking, especially my Mums. It was too domesticated and pedestrian. What ungrateful turds we can be in our youth. My youthful desires for a buzz of cultures, new experiences and excitement led me to London and an early career in music journalism.
London was everything Grantham wasn’t. I found myself amidst a cacophony of different communities, cultures and cuisines and was constantly out meeting people in food markets like Hackney’s Ridley Rd or at all-night raves and parties.
Having not been exposed to it in Lincolnshire – I was drawn to London’s underground music scenes. Drum ‘n’ Bass, UK Garage, UK Hip Hop, later on Dubstep and Grime – bass heavy music that to me, was the quintessential soundtrack of city. I read music journalist Lloyd Bradley’s Bass Culture book and became obsessed by reggae.
At 20 I convinced the editor of Adrenalin magazine to send me to Kingston, Jamaica to write an intentionally vague travel piece titled ‘Kingston - birthplace of reggae’. I understood little patois and back then even less about Caribbean culture. But with youthful enthusiasm(arrogance) on my side and a list of contacts supplied by Lloyd Bradley himself – I deemed myself good to go. This trip changed my life and became the foundation for what would eventually lead me to build a community cookery school.
Although I’d gone there to write about music (and returned many times to do just that over the coming years) it was the food that truly changed my life.
One day into the trip a lady from the Jamaican Tourist Board, on hearing I was vegetarian, recommended a visit to Livity Café. At this point in my life my culinary roots were dormant and student meals consisted of pea and ketchup sandwiches, flavoured packet rice or anything with Uncle Ben’s sweet and sour sauce dumped on top.
Livity Café was run by a group of Rastafarian ital chefs and all-around beautiful souls who remain dear friends to this day. Ital food is a cuisine featuring the (usually) all vegan, salt-free Caribbean ingredients innovated and eaten by many Rastafarians. My new friends described it as, “Ital and vital. It gives you vitality. Life and energy. Livity, you know.” I didn’t really know, but I nodded earnestly.
The plate of food I ate that day spoke to me on a cellular level. My body said yes, yes, yes to it in a 1000 different ways. Showcasing the food to the international guests we got a scoop of everything – calaloo rice, pumpkin fritters, baked plantain, coco-bean stew, jerk tofu, pepper slaw and a sugar-free, oatmeal, cashew and Irish Moss containing smoothie hilariously known as a Front End Lifter. Jamaican’s are fun like that.
For two weeks we fuelled ourselves with nothing but ital food from a variety of phenomenal Rasta-run eateries ranging from push-cart vendors to vans and restaurants. We ate pumpkin rice, pea stew with spinners, chow chow vegetable run down, rice and beans with seasoned soya chunks, roasted breadfruit, ackee stuffed spelt flour dumplings - and more.
To me, this food was heaven sent – and my body seemed to agree. By the end of the trip my long-standing IBS symptoms had cleared up and after a full moon, midnight trip to St Thomas’s sacred mineral bath (google it – it’s magical) – my irregular period kicked in the next day and remained bang on a 28-day cycle until I conceived my first child 10 years later. I left that trip knowing I needed to eat this food at home. I needed to go vegan. And I needed to learn to cook.
Gone were the ketchup sandwiches and in came a shiny new spice rack. I attempted to recreate the dishes I’d eaten in Jamaica. Kind elders at the market with the time to spend with a curious young white girl buying armfuls of plantain kindly shared their wisdom. I sabotaged a lot of beautiful produce in the learning but eventually my blunt knife and pan with a wobbly handle produced some OK tasting food.
Much to my flatmates amusement when I got home the kitchen became a hive of activity. I knew I’d made progress when Dean, my flatmate who’d grown up in Kingston and moved to London aged 19 said. “You cook dis Sarah? It alright you know still.”
From here it was a rapid escalation into becoming my mother’s daughter. Cooking daily exploring different cuisines. Delighting in nourishing my flatmates and friends. Hosting parties where I’d feed 70 people with nothing but plants (quite radical for the late nineties) for less than £40.
What was magic about these gatherings was not just the bringing together of people which I loved, but the opportunity to win over hearts, minds and stomachs with the vegan food that had boosted my health and could do the same for so many others. I sensed evangelising about my new way of eating wasn’t going to work (who wants to be lectured at – especially about food) – but if the dishes alone could do the talking, then people would start to explore it for themselves.
Fast forward a decade to 2012 and it’s this same philosophy of gathering people, sharing community knowledge, making joyful events and letting the food do the talking that inspired the opening of Made In Hackney. Going on another decade to 2021 and it still does – although the community - not me - have shaped the increasingly diverse class themes, support services and events that the cookery school offers and has had the privilege of providing for over 20,000 people. Crucial to the project, is that Made in Hackney reflects the needs and wants of the community it is a part of.
Made In Hackney was founded to tackle health inequalities, the climate crisis and bring communities together, but crucially it is a community-driven project. My journey to it’s beginning was influenced by my mother’s career, the travels and people met as a music journalist and an openness to share the knowledge others shared with me. We are a constantly evolving project focused on giving our community access to experience health, support and creativity through food.
Live in Hackney and your household needs support with nutritious meals? Our community meal service has got you and will provide each person with 6 free culturally varied meals a week delivered to your doorstep. Anxious about food and cooking and don’t feel ready to join a cookery class? Our one-on-one telephone cooking and health coaching service will work through your needs in weekly sessions for six weeks. Want to learn to make plant-based West African cuisine? Thai Cuisine? Mexican Cuisine? Gujarati Cuisine? Ethiopian Cuisine? French Cuisine? Our community cookery teachers will share everything they know and give space for you to share your skills and knowledge.
To find out more about Made In Hackney, to volunteer donate or sign up for a class (face to face and online) visit www.madeinhackney.org
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We Asked The MIH Family, What Does Being Rooted In The Community Meal To You?
Kaysha, MIH Volunteer: “Being rooted in a community means a lot because, for me, I want to have an identity, a place in society and be able to understand myself. This is only possible when you have positive role models to look up to that have been a part of similar experiences and have grown as a person as a result. It’s something only a strong rooted community is able to nurture and grow, to be able to identify with similar perspectives that maybe an older, wiser, experienced person will have more knowledge about. It means that I can be identified as part of something good in the world and have a positive place so that I can help others in need.”
Mark, MIH Cookery Teacher: “Being rooted in the community means being led by the community, the cooking school being part of the community and the community being part of the cookery school. Everything is for and inspired by parts of the community. When delivering classes I feel like these are my people, my friends, my neighbours – and I have a skill or knowledge I can share with them and they have knowledge and skills they can share with me. I’ve learnt so much about both cooking and life from people in Made In Hackney cooking classes. The classes with all deaf participants stand out for me. I learnt so much about friendship and how to ‘talk’ to people.”
Melissa Saint Hill, MIH Trustee & Cookery Teacher: “Being rooted in a community means actually knowing what’s happening on the ground and being immersed in the infrastructure of the people. You are aware of things of concern and may need addressing and act as a pillar of support in whichever capacity is possible. The essence of being rooted in a community is being genuinely caring, and having true passion and time for the people of the community to ensure they feel seen and heard. This manifests in my MIH work via some of the recipes I’ve developed for specific partner programmes. We know type 2 diabetes is an issue so taking the time to design healthy, appealing beneficial meals to teach people via cookery classes is so important. I care about the health and wellbeing of people in our community and get satisfaction knowing they are being empowered with useful, actionable information.
Dr Nitu, MIH Ambassador & Cookery Teacher: “To me being rooted in community means being wholeheartedly a part of it. To be able to talk and engage with each and every person however different they may be from me in their race, culture or lifestyle. I adore the uniqueness of each human being and never tire of hearing the personal stories of their lives. I learn so much from people, whether they are children or elders, and I try to reflect and incorporate some of their wisdom into my life. The MIH community aligns with all my personal values of empathy, service and compassion.”
What have we been up to this month:
Anna & Chloe did some research for Sir Kensington’s Integrity Report
Petrol is not a personality: a manifesto for (bio)diversity, by Anna Sulan Masing
Why the organic movement fails the people who made it possible, by Chloe-Rose Crabtree
New on SOURCED today!
The Cockles of my Heart: a modern history, by Chelsea Carter
What’s in store for next year?
This year we realised that three months was too little to focus on an ingredient - we were just getting into the topic, when it was time to wrap it up! Therefore next year we will only be looking at three ingredients, and they are:
Alcohol / Rot / Rice