These days, more often than not, I’m missing thoughts to write in this blog. Sure, week by week I’ve scrape together sentences… and there’s usually something glinting in them, something sharp, familiar.

That’s what I’m searching for when I’m writing: the thing that cuts through into other realities, making what I write meaningful beyond, well, me.

But it’s not like it used to be. I used to write on the crest of a burning feeling, an emotion rising. The words would pin the feeling to the ground. I’d question it until it would stop squirming and acquiesce to my interrogations.

The words would plummet out of me, easily finding the glint in the emotions: fear, anxiety, anger, overwhelm, terror. Because I was writing through a business out of control. And who doesn’t know this out of control feeling if you’ve run a business?

But, where’s the fuel for writing gone now? The pressure to relieve emotional imbalance has given way to… something quieter. More felt than explained, more business as usual, and often more… more existentially adrift.

Is this what viability feels like?

The post Is this what viability feels like? appeared first on Wandering Cooks.

And on reflection, perhaps someone else’s worries, too…

What have I just done?
have I fucked it all up? I’ve fucked it all up.
the downward spiral… this is it.
I’ve committed to too much… how will I find the energy?
and will my team?
fuck it’s all going to die. I’ve bet everything and it’s a bum steer. I’ll run out of time. It’ll all fuck up and I’ll run out of time…
my ideas are stupid… I’m actually dumb…or I’m a sucker. Maybe both…
I need to be harsher, kinder, quicker, more patient, less circuitous…
how do I stop this worrying!!??

And then I just do. I stop thinking for just one second. But it’s long enough to remember to step outside, and water the garden.

And then the second eases into a minute, then two, of thinking about other things…

I wonder what I’ll plant next?
oh look, the grapes starting to shoot!
I better mulch that. 
wouldn’t it be beautiful to make a wall full of marigolds?
hmmm… maybe it won’t all die
maybe I haven’t fucked EVERYTHING up
maybe I could do this or this or this and the circuitous nature of all these things, planting, talking, laughing, opening… will lead to more energy… and an upward spiral… and joy…

All I had to do is stop thinking for just one second and remember that I have a happy place.

And worry isn’t in my happy place. The worry isn’t in any place at all.

Where’s your happy place? Stop and find it.

And maybe if you share it here,
it will help someone else find one,
who didn’t have one,
and they’ll lose their worries in the reality of this place, too.

The post All my worries appeared first on Wandering Cooks.

I ordered a whole heap of turmeric, ginger and galangal tubers for our garden. Looking at them now, I’m dubious they’ll ever shoot green and grow. They’re so damn dormant. So unviable-looking.

Turmeric and ginger is meant to show life before its planted: small green mounds pressing out through the skin. But the galangal needs planting straight away. I must dig it into the ground, bed it down before any evidence of growth.

Dark. Disappeared. Feels like closing my eyes and walking away. I can’t focus my nerves on it, can’t even remember where I dug it. Or when.

But why, I can remember that. I planted it because I had faith in the life force of tubers.

Making decisions at Cooks can feel a bit like planting galangal. Sometimes there’s no time to wait for the green to show itself. Digging into business requires faith in the force of us, in our resolve, in our commitment to the reason behind it all.

There are many people in this city playing their parts in changing the way we eat. Our part: to grow a new kind of viability out of the smallest components, one that links the thousands of small efforts together, the food makers, producers, gardeners, crafters, diners and cooks, into a web that connects and supports us all.

And the faith: that regardless of the dark gap between now and when our impact grows, together we will dig in anyway, ground ourselves and grow.

The post Placing our faith in tubers appeared first on Wandering Cooks.

The below statements are all based on actual conversations.

Some (not all), are definitely about us.

Everything’s possible pre-launch, that is, before an idea goes live.

We’ll get hundreds of people to this!

When we get our own place, we’ll be busy every night!

We’ve factored in all the costs – there’s no way we can’t make money!

There’s so much longing in pre-launch. Why? Because ideas are technicolour perfection and you just want to get there already! Bugger the preparation, bugger the nay-sayers…

Even if you let yourself imagine a few downtimes once you’ve launched, they come with a pat on the back and a cup of tea. And they never last long.

And then shit actually gets real. It always does.

Why isn’t anyone engaging with our event? We need hundreds and we’ve only got five rsvps with two weeks to go!!!!

We were super busy at first but this week we’re down 20% and then we had the busiest day and then the quietest day… what the f!&* is going on?! How’s a person s’posed to sleep?!?!

Our tactics worked at Cooks but now they’re not getting traction and we need traction to pay interest and rent and staff and everything’s going to sh%*t!!!

Many people stay in pre-launch forever because they anticipate this post-launch anguish. Maybe they’ve even had it before and never want to feel the same again.

So if you’re leaping for the first time, give yourself a little cuddle.

Cuddle myself? Shit’s hitting the fan and that’s all you can say?

No that’s not all… how ‘bout… welcome to the club! While you’re running circles berating yourself for not listening to the muffled screams echoing across from the other side… make sure to reach out and grab hold of someone… someone still leaping, still running circles, still surviving.

And listen to them!!!

They’ll say,

It’s just the beginning. It’ll get better (and maybe worse), but if you keep focussed and find a more reasonable pace while still working your damn butt off, it’ll start feeling like life… not just disaster.

And then they’ll say,

Now let’s have a cuppa and hatch a plan because it’s a long journey and you’re going to enjoy it a lot more if you do it with friends. Brave ones… like you.

The post Brave ones like you appeared first on Wandering Cooks.

Dear whoever you are,

I’ve never done this before, that is, tried to evoke you. But this opportunity matters to me more than all the others. The Ingredient Challenge. I’m petrified that we’ll put it out there and…. nothing. Nothing will happen. No one will sign up.

There’s no doubt it’s a valuable opportunity. We’ve got the most wonderful list of farmers to source from with over 1000 ingredients between them, and counting. We’ve lined up intelligent, experienced mentors to help engage menus and products with locality and ethics. We’re organising an expansive farm tour that will give real context to the livelihoods we’re hoping to nourish. There’s 4 intensive workshops planned, to challenge and develop ideas, flavours, presentation and goals. Not to mention the $16k of awards we’ll be handing out to the participants who make it through to the last workshop…. and the partnership opportunities with us… and a money back guarantee…

Still… the bluebeard in my mind is warning me into hesitation. He always does when it matters this much. I’m too idealistic he chides. The vision I have that sustains me – of a textured network of small food players weaving our futures together so that the wound our city has created on this country slowly mends closed – he tells me it’s flawed. It’ll extinguish like a flare into darkness.

So here I am. I’m evoking you. Can I explain it any other way? what it will mean for our future if you rise up and let us see you? Let us know we’re not alone, that there’s more who will see this as the perfect opportunity to begin. We made this challenge for you, so please give me a sign you exist.

No pressure but.

The post A Letter to the First appeared first on Wandering Cooks.

What else is there to talk about when the country is on fire?

We knew the country was on fire, before it literally burst into flames.

Back then, we couldn’t always see it, but we could hope it wasn’t.

Now, we see nothing else, and the hope shifts to stalemate, frigid fear, internal screams, despair.

So I turn away, and towards my own business – towards Wandering Cooks – a place where I can make change happen that directly impacts not just our own carbon footprint, but the footprint of the people we support – the food makers and the public, whose interests intersect around food.

Well that’s something that can get me flowing again.

And it’s why, from the beginning of April – after 7 years of dedicated preparation, trial and error, testing and setbacks, there will be no confusion, no having to mask our intent due to not everyone being completely onboard. From April this year every one of the food businesses serving you meals in our warehouse will be on board, flowing with us too.

Flowing with what?!

Flowing with something we can action more strongly than anyone else.

We will snub the supermarkets and their company offspring.

Every ingredient in every meal you eat with us will be jam packed with ingredients from small local regenerative farmers.

Hear me clearly and resolutely: not one meal you eat here will be fuelling climate change, or animal cruelty, or salinisation of our waterways, or deforestation, or cause a decrease in our local food sovereignty.

This means you will be flowing, too. You will know that when you support us and our food makers – from Kiya to Chris to Tanya to Sarah to Anastasia to Fatima – every dish on their menus will be supporting:

• Echo Valley Farms
• Sovereign Foods (Supplier of many)
• Thai Hoa (Supplier of many)
• Neighbourhood Farms
• Walker Farm Foods
• Little Acre Farms
• Falls Farms
• Barambah Organic Dairy Farm
• Loop Growers
• Nimbin Valley Dairy
• Tommerup’s Dairy Farm

The list will grow.

These small, careful, thoughtful, hardworking farmers capture carbon by making living soil. They are caretakers of our future.

This is our response to the crippling pain of inaction. Thousands of beautiful businesses transforming our food culture together.

If you want to get involved, consider joining The Ingredient Challenge if your a food business, or join our Snubbing the Supermarkets Group to hear more about our future farm gate events.

#theingredientchallenge

#snubbingthesupermarkets

The post Our commitment to farmers, food sovereignty and mitigating climate change appeared first on Wandering Cooks.

After an email from a loyal customer of ours, caring enough to write, the following correspondence took place. It might answer questions for more, so we’re publishing it  here (anonymously, except for the glorious Kiya and her injera, who everyone should know about!)

I’m a regular to Wandering Cooks. Like many, I have deep concern over our food system and the future of food. The vision you have for The Ingredient Challenge is admirable.

I’m emailing as i’m wondering about the mechanics of The Ingredient Challenge. Does it require all cooks to have 100% of ingredients to be sourced locally, or is it mainly for the fresh produce, or otherwise?

One of the things I love about Wandering Cooks is the diversity in individuals and ideas that it incubates. You can come to Cooks and chat with an Ethiopian injera extraordinaire, a Persian koresht maker or a lovely yogini who makes plates from heaven (and many others).

I work in social enterprise and one of the things we suffer from is the diversity in people and ideas, often capturing only those from a middle class/ anglo demographic. Many of these ideas are phenomenal and have contributed to significant social/environmental change, but I always wonder what we’ve missed out on. This is something I think Wandering Cooks does really well – incorporating other cultures. It’s always easier with food, given cuisine is central to many cultures.

Ultimately, i’m wondering if a strict ingredient challenge could erode that diversity given that many ethnic cuisines require ingredients that can’t be found locally? ‘Majority of ingredients’ could always be a solution?

Hi dear loyal fan of Wandering Cooks

Thank you so much for taking the time. It’s always lovely to hear from someone who gets us – not just where we want to be (The Ingredient Challenge), but our current strength in diversity, which we, too, hold very dear and hope to build upon.

Your concern about the Ingredient List possibly eroding our foodmakers’ diversity has been discussed a lot internally. I see it as a fundamental challenge: how do we introduce ‘local sourcing’ without losing our immigrant foodmakers (who are more reliant on internationally sourced ingredients) and over-catering to anglo/middle class foodmakers (who already have social capital around local sourcing due to their privilege)?

In the past, we’ve used the ‘majority of’ technique for people’s sourcing. However, it’s let us down, allowing ingredients to creep in through habit and lack of knowledge and skill, rather than real need. We hope the Ingredient List challenges lines drawn strongly in the sand long ago. Like Massimo Bottura achieves when he replaces pine nuts with breadcrumbs in pesto, challenges to heritage can result in so many improvements: to taste, to sustainability, to expressions of belonging for homes both new and old.

In the new Ingredient List method for menu creation, we do intend on having an ‘approved exceptions’ list. Already on this list are spices, and we’ve had some strong arguments made for others. For instance, Kiya had to import her teff flour if she wanted to use it at all, and what’s injera without teff? Not injera. But nevertheless we looked for local alternatives, and she tried them. That’s the kind of exploration that happens if we don’t stay with ‘majority of’. So much missed opportunity for localising occurs through lack of access to knowledge of alternatives.

If the reasons are sound (for Kiya, it was about price and irreplaceability), then these imported ingredients can go on the exceptions list. But like all good lists of dos and don’ts, we hope this list will be challenged over time, as better local alternatives surface. And now Kiya can now source an affordable local teff flour, so it’s off the exceptions list, yay!

I hope that, as we form partnerships with indigenous caretakers in value exchanges that are truly worthwhile for them, even spices could come up for investigation under particular Challenges, allowing our food makers to inflect a very distinctive ‘terroir’ on their diasporic interpretations of heritage.

We actually see the work of maintaining our diversity as THE unique opportunity for us, our city and our immigrant foodmakers – a localisation of their food culture which opens them to new audiences and disrupts the status quo for what kind of business they might end up creating.

Thank you so much for taking the time. I find it very useful to have intelligent, thoughtful people like yourself keeping me honest and clear in my thinking.

All my very best,

Angela

The post ‘Localising not Westernising’ in The Ingredient Challenge appeared first on Wandering Cooks.

Talking with one of my food maker friends a couple weeks ago, I said,

Fear is leading your decisions! Where’s the room for dreaming?

Of course fear was leading her. And I made it sound easy to shove it aside.

Fear of being cornered by mounting costs. Fear that the costs will finally topple and suffocate everything she’s wanted, and everyone she’s brought along with her. It feels like there’s no way out because all she can see are the costs, mounting, and the corner, blocking.

This is 3am fear. And there’s very little room for dreams here.

I thought I didn’t wake up at 3am any more, because things got better. And now I dream of you.

You are our bright future, drawing closer now, made stronger by all the corners we’ve escaped.

We use this strength to carve our future, not the way our fear suggests but the way we intend.

And then, last week, just like that, 3am. The sound of our plans being ripped away from us woke me up.

Am I building insanity? Have I become too bold?

Fear suggests again. I’d forgotten how persuasive it can be.

And so, to all those business owners who’ve been there, wide awake in the middle of the night… defaulting on rents, drowning in BAS debt, desperately attempting to build a ladder out of a place getting more claustrophobic every day… I want to say… I hear you. I hear you and I respect your fear and I wish I could take it away. If I could suspend your disbelief for just one minute… close your eyes. Let me find my hope again so it can guide us out.

Since last week, I scurry between wide awake and dreaming wildly. For all of us. Hope spent in abundance. Good luck, good humour, and just enough frenetic planning to keep us all out of the corner for the moment.

The post I don’t wake up at 3am anymore, because I dream of you. appeared first on Wandering Cooks.

Making a business is like boiling water. Friction is required.

You hope it’s not. You hope that this still water pot, this tepid body will simply – phut! – turn to steam. But without heat, without the frenetic kenetic energy of the burned-up water babies… it won’t. Still water doesn’t steam.

It hurts to try to steam, oh my does it hurt. The tussle, the bump and the broken. But without the friction of business in change, there will never be release.

Imagining life without friction is wishing yourself to the steam state – a time when time itself is crossed out. Where everything has space, where anything can be reached. Water metamorphosed into butterflies. Even for a day.

Trying to see through the next few months, hazy with portending virus-fuelled financial disaster, where maybe the whole of Brisbane goes into lock down, and fear of jobs and elders lost keeps people in their homes ordering from Uber eats, makes those steam-generated butterflies very hard to vision up indeed.

But they are there, waiting, for the friction.

So let’s see if I can locate the right pot and some well applied heat to set them free…

The post Finding our boiling point appeared first on Wandering Cooks.

This may seem odd to some of you who have seen Wandering Cooks kicking some serious arse on a Friday night, but I don’t take easily to making money. It’s taken a lot of money to get where Cooks was 3 weeks ago. About $700k more than its ever returned, and that’s not counting the 5 years I worked for nothing to give it the strength, the late night cuddles and the pep talks to get it to where it stood 3 weeks ago.

And maybe that’s why, when the earning mechanisms were ripped from under us, when we were finally forced to close our doors and pad off to our respective backyards to lick our paws and try to understand how quickly life changes… why it doesn’t actually feel like I’ve lost that much at all.

I feel the beating heart of this place without the money. I see it still growing in the panama berries and the people who are still here around me, working, not for money, but for passion. As one of my favourite people who works for me said ‘Ange, I don’t want to be in a world where Wandering Cooks doesn’t exist’. And so it is. That is why we will be back, because I agree entirely.

The post This new normal appeared first on Wandering Cooks.