Cooking to embrace an ethos of social responsibility

The Irish Food Writers’ Guild visited The Model, Sligo last week to present a cheque to Sligo Global Kitchen, the winners of the 2018 IFWG Community Food Award which is sponsored by Slow Food Ireland. The IFWG Community Food Award highlights an organisation or individual working with food that has embraced an ethos of social responsibility to an exemplary level. Sligo Global Kitchen began in 2014 as a simple idea conceived by the team at The Model in Sligo: that people living locally in direct provision might appreciate the use of the arts centre’s industrial kitchen to cook and eat together, given that residents cannot cook their own food in direct provision. Artist Anna Spearman approached Cameroonian Mabel Chah to liaise with other residents in direct provision. With funding from the Community Foundation of Ireland and Communities Integration Fund, they reached out to other groups of refugees, collaborating with the Syrian community in Ballaghaderreen for a meal celebrating Syrian, Zimbabwean and Nigerian cuisine. Over 400 people of at least 18 different nationalities attended that meal, 75 of them Syrian,