Lisa: Food was for survival, when I was growing up. Me and my kôkom (grandma), we used to go pick wild onions and radishes and berries on the side of our old house. That was my favorite time. She was the one who showed me how to make bannock. When I was eight years old, I remember her sticking my hands into wet, floury dough and then saying, “Mâkon, mâkon!” And that means “push it hard, press it hard, pound that dough.” (But when I tried to teach my nieces and nephews how to make bannock and I said those words out loud at my mom’s house, oh, my God. My mom had such a flashback and just got really angry with me. Those words weren’t good in her childhood, I guess.) When I lost my grandma, food was for keeping my siblings alive. When I left my mom’s house, it was to please a man, my first husband, that’s why I cooked. And then Zachary came along, and that made cooking fun. I was cooking to keep my boy happy and healthy. I showed him how to make stuff like eggs and noodles, cooked on very low heat. He looked so cute in front of a stove when he was nine years old, so proudly scrambling his own eggs. I also worked in a camp as a cook. Nowadays, it’s very rare that I cook. My roommate is such an awesome cook, and so I’m kind of pampered in that way.

Jill: I incurred a lot of stress as a child, having a parent who was mentally ill, and I think that had a really big negative impact on my health from a young age. I really had to watch what I consumed because it would have a big effect on my body: food allergies or sensitivities or things like that. At the same time, my mum was learning quite a bit about how different kinds of foods affected her mental health. When I lost my mom in university, I turned to growing food as a source of healing. The timeline played out in that sense of really getting involved in nutrition, and then getting involved in the growing aspect of it to help heal myself.

Seb: Up until a few years ago, I just didn’t really think about food. I think I saw my dad cook maybe five meals in my life and my mom, I didn’t get the sense that making food was all that joyful for her either. It felt more like a chore, like something you do to feed yourself, to get out of the way so that you can go do other things. But at the same time, I had a healthy relationship with food in that I ate healthy food naturally. It wasn’t until I started to interact with more people who are into food, growing it and cooking it, that I really started to realize that this is a place I’ve been disconnected most of my life.

Kaz: Learning to garden and to cook from my parents was instilled in me as a fun, valuable thing to do with one’s time. But I’ve come to realize how it’s easy to take food for granted if you’ve got enough of it, you’re eating really good dishes prepared with love, or maybe even eating something out of the garden. Not everyone gets the chance to do that. Over time, I’ve been realizing food is not just something to pound into your mouth to get calories, just to get stuff done. We tend, I think, in the West, to eat very quickly, to eat standing up, to eat huge portions, to eat in front of the TV, to eat alone. We buy the food from wherever we can get it the cheapest: Costco, McDonald’s. Are we supporting the kind of world we want to live in by purchasing food from those kind of systems? And do we even have a choice? Many of us don’t. It’s just really interwoven into everything.

Jill: Food means medicine to me. I really like to eat to nourish my body and support it in the best ways that I can. And it’s also a way for me to connect with the natural world. By growing or harvesting my own food in different ways, it’s an opportunity for me to get more connected. I’ve worked on organic, small-scale vegetable farms, and then, personally, over the last couple of years, I’ve been growing a variety of vegetables, but also more medicinal herbs like yarrow, and Calendula, and mint and other culinary herbs. I like to harvest and dry herbs and make teas or salves or creams.

Kaz: It’s the foundation of everything. It is fuel to get you through your day, but then it also connects us with our past, it connects us with our family, connects us with our geographical, ecological surroundings. Probably one of the ways that we can impact our local ecology and the global ecology the most is what we choose to eat every day: to eat meat, to eat foods that have travelled a long way around the world, to eat foods that require a lot of irrigation to eat, foods that have been grown and picked by migrant labourers who aren’t paid enough. You can say a lot and you can do a lot with your food.

Lisa: Food is life. If I’m not eating, I’m not living. Back in the day, when I was like 32 or 34, all I was doing was drinking around with all kinds of people, from lowlifes to the highest business person you could think of. One homeless guy, while we’re partying at this apartment, was cooking some food there. I was like, “No, I don’t want to eat.” He’s like, “What? I haven’t even seen you eat since we met on whatever day it was last week.” I was like, “I’m not hungry.” He’s like, “You know, if you’re not eating, you’re not living, because you need to eat to live.” And it just made so much sense at that time. And after that, I just ate. Those words always stick in my mind when I’m sick and I’m not feeling well.

Seb: The more I get into food, the more I realize it packages up all the necessary elements of social revolution. Growing food forces you to be in community both with people and with your ecology. It’s something that makes you physically active, gets you outside, brings health, and then the abundance that is created from growing food forces you to have to share. Any time you’re around people with gardens, it’s constantly, “Take this, take that.” Cooking food and sharing it also just breeds this feeling of community. I’ve come to see I’m very reliant on a broken food system. You don’t have to ever meet the farmer or the animals or the plants, or even go to the area where they are from. You often don’t even have to meet the people who prepared the food that you’re putting into your body. If I’m being serious about social revolution, I cannot continue to operate in the same relationship with the food systems around me because they perpetuate a significant amount of problems. I don’t think you can talk about changing systems or society if food isn’t Number 1.

Jill: The meal team is starting off with a budget of $100 to $200 and cooking meals for anyone at Newo who wants access to that. It could look like bringing meals to trainees on roofs as they’re working, to families who need some meal support during the week, to any meetings at Newo. The idea is just to help provide nourishing food, because if Newo is healthy, then we are better able to go out and do good work.

Lisa: We’re working on food prep because we want our team to eat healthy — not necessarily just healthy food, but to make sure we all sit down together and have a meal together, at least once a week if we can, more if we have a chance. Also, if anybody’s sick, or feeling down and they can’t cook, they can just shoot us a message and we’ll cook something for them.

Kaz: We’ve had a few different projects related to food in the time that I’ve been with Newo, mainly bigger-scale food-sovereignty initiatives with communities and school districts. But right now we’re recognizing that there’s a need within our own team for a better relationship with food, better nutrition, better habits around food, helping people to access healthy ingredients and know what to do with them. If we don’t meet these needs within our own team, within our own community, how can we try to respond to that challenge in the world? It’s good to grow from a place of strength at home, and then that can radiate out into the rest of our work.

Seb: At the moment, our society values technological solutions: renewables, energy retrofits. It’s cool, but for me, it’s not revolutionary. It doesn’t inspire me in the same way that food does. There’s also an untapped wealth of food knowledge in the community supporting Newo, and I really think that food could start playing a more central role to our operation.

Jill: I would say everything! Everything from growing it, harvesting it, making creations with it. I love going to restaurants where chefs are really creative and eating it. I love all the cool things that people are doing with food these days, taking it from industrial farming and mono cropping to these small, biodynamic, really creative farms. I love going to health food stores and shopping and seeing all the cool products that are created over time. Everything about it excites me!

Seb: What I would like to see is for Newo to take the profits from our energy-efficiency projects and use them to support food work, whether it’s working to connect with farms and supporting them or starting our own food projects ourselves. I would like to create a community that sees the value of food beyond what the economy sees. There’s lots of young people I know who are trying to get food projects going, but they just feel it’s so hard because it’s not valued in our current monetary system. But the reality is, food work is more central to the change I’m looking to see than anything technological.

Kaz: It can be daunting because food is one of those problems that feels almost too big to solve at a human scale. It’s so tied up in climate change, politics and globalized capitalism. Food is used in a lot of ways to keep people down, to keep countries economically depressed or to keep people socially and economically deprived. When I’m in my more optimistic moods, I think it’s exciting to be able to build a better world around food, rather than just going with the flow of where the world is going. There’s a lot to potentially struggle against, but growing food, cooking good food and sharing it with people is just a really little thing that you can do that’s good for you, and it’s good for the world, too.

Lisa: Seeing all the people eating my good food and saying, “Yuuuuummmm!” The way their eyes smile when they have a mouthful of food, it just makes my heart shine when I see that. It’s really fun to be cooking for the team, and I would like more team members to come and cook with us, or put more orders in so we could make more food. Anything you want, we’ll cook it!

Seb: Raclette. I wouldn’t call it necessarily “soul food,” but it’s definitely a family tradition from my French heritage that I enjoy.

Kaz: I tried a grilled peanut butter and pickle sandwich at a food truck in Calgary, and it was a game changer. It’s everything in one dish: a thick layer of homegrown pickles between layers of peanut-butter-spread bread, grilled and then dipped in honey mustard: it’s crunchy, it’s smooth, it’s sweet, it’s tangy, it’s salty, it’s buttery.