Batch Cooking With Friends

The food we eat isn't simply about the nutritional content. Humans evolved through the tribal cooperation where eating together was a key part of social cohesion. In this audio, Charlotte Watts discusses how bringing back community and the shared creation of what nourishes us can also help with the practicalities of feeding ourselves and our families; whether you live alone or with others.

Transcript

Hello,

I'm Charlotte Watts.

Welcome to these podcasts that were first broadcast live in my Facebook group,

Charlotte Watts Calm.

Hope you enjoy them and if you want more,

Please look at my website,

Charlottewattshealth.

Com.

Hello,

Welcome to this session on batch cooking with friends.

So I wanted to do this one because I've been just exploring recently and teaching and writing about how important it is for us humans as people who developed,

Evolved in tribes with cooperation,

With how we survive together,

Very much about being together,

About being not isolated but having the support and the cohesion of the tribe.

And so much of our health and wellness and happiness and functioning both individually and as we do in relation with others is based around that coming together and having healthy social interactions.

And because food is such a basic necessity for us,

Nourishment,

And because it also gives us such pleasure and something that we can talk to each other about in terms of taste,

In terms of the sensory experience,

It's a part of our lives that has the ability to really bring us together as much as it can also highlight how isolated we can be.

So particularly for those people who live alone and eat alone,

Often it can feel that it really highlights when sitting at a table,

For instance,

There's not other people there,

There might even be an empty chair or that when people do go out for meals with each other or go around to people's houses,

It's so enjoyable and it gives such a sense of life and inclusion to be eating with others,

To have that scenario with chatting around the table and enjoying food and enjoying that whole sense of nourishment,

Not just from the food but from the connection with other people.

I get this quite often when I go on retreat because mostly I do live on my own with my daughter sometimes as well,

But she lives half with me and half with her dad,

So sometimes I have that cohesion that might be just her and I and sometimes it's on my own and I like that.

I'm a person who's happy with my own company but I'm really struck when I do eat with others,

Whether that's with the family or retreat scenarios of how enjoyable I find that and how it gives me a deep sense of wellbeing,

Even though it's not something I necessarily seek in my day-to-day life.

So wherever you were coming from,

And that's not just if you live alone but also in terms of our family existence,

We often will cook food,

Eat food in quite isolated ways as well,

So the separation of the kitchen and the lounge or the living room where one person might prepare something,

Other people might eat it and even that separation of not eating at the table together as a family or eating in front of a device or a screen,

Even bringing a screen to a table or eating in front of the TV.

There are many parts of the way that we eat food that separate between that original ancient way we would have of being around a fire,

Being around somewhere where stories would be told,

Where we would come together.

And there's two things here,

So I've got the batch cooking with friends bit,

And the friends there can mean anyone,

I don't just mean,

You know,

It means family,

It means just someone that is familiar to us or even someone not particularly familiar to us but we're inviting in to have that joining over food,

That kind of that breaking of bread.

The batch cooking thing here adds in a different element to that.

So that is that we are quite used to convenience in terms of we will buy often prepared foods or we seek convenience because our lives can be quite full of doing stuff and we tend to spend less time in the kitchen and cooking.

And for many of us,

The preparation of food itself isn't an activity that is given much time.

For some people it's such an important creative part of their lives,

They really need that as others might need gardening or painting or reading or dancing or singing.

But for others,

It's something that has been put over the top in terms of time,

Come down the list in terms of priority.

And then if you add in the fact that if we tend to live in smaller and smaller groups rather than larger ones,

Then the act of cooking for yourself or for smaller amount of people,

This kind of same day in day out,

Can lose its luster,

Can lose its attractiveness.

And also because we're often eating in ways that we might have to eat away from the home,

At work or kind of on the go,

That the convenience of eating out can also,

Yes,

Take us away from that cohesion of eating altogether,

But also can be more,

Feel like it's more effort to do anything than buy out and that might add up in terms of cost.

So there's loads of reasons for starting to do this sense of a batch cooking where you make a lot of food in one time to be able to have that.

It's like making your own convenience food.

So most obvious examples are kind of soups,

Stews,

Curries,

Something that you can make in a larger amount in a big pot or even better in a slow cooker,

Which is A,

Much easier and B,

Breaks food down to make it really digestible,

To not cook heat at food at too high a heat so that it really retains a lot of the nutrients.

It doesn't create any free radicals from,

Or less free radicals from heating things at too high amounts.

So it's really good for the guts lining,

Really good for immunity,

But it also is a very easy way of cooking that you can put stuff in and leave it and come back to it and it creates that beautiful smell overnight or something to come back to at the end of a day.

So if we add this idea of batch cooking in where we can make a lot of food and then you can,

Particularly if you buy those,

If you buy kind of curries and you get them in those little plastic containers,

Putting portions of those into the freezer and having them as something to bring out conveniently just means that you can take something out of the freezer and have it defrosted when you come back from work or you can get it out the night before,

Heat it up into a thermos flask and have it for lunch that day.

So the batch cooking then becomes a way of ensuring you have vegetables,

Having lots of kind of nutritional high quality food so that available for lunch where you might go out and buy,

Just end up buying a kind of sandwich or something more convenient.

But it also means that you spend less money and you feel like you're nourishing yourself and you have a bit more relationship with your food.

So if we add these two things in together,

This eating and cooking with friends,

With family and having this batches of food available,

There's something that a friend of mine talked about a while ago and I thought was just such an amazing idea that getting groups of people together that might be a family but might be inviting friends in from the outside to have a day or half a day or a few hours where you just get together and cook.

And this might be that it's getting children involved where even at home in a kind of family scenario it's very easy to just kind of get on with the cooking of food or some child is doing something else but actually getting children involved in the process whether that's weighing stuff,

Whether that's peeling vegetables,

Chopping vegetables,

Just helping in ways like reading a cookbook.

So many ways to do that that really help children get a relationship with their food,

Where it came from,

The feel of it,

The touch of it,

What happens in the whole process of it getting to the table.

That's really cohesive.

But if you do that with a bunch of friends or family or anyone really then there's that thing of coming together,

Chopping vegetables together,

Just talking in that free way of following a recipe.

It might be that one person is more of the cook and the other people are kind of like,

Okay,

Give me jobs,

What can we do?

Doing that every so often and it might be weekly,

It might be fortnightly,

Monthly,

To create batches of stuff mean that everyone can both be part of the process and can create a lot of food where people take home their own batches,

Put them in the freezer and both have this enjoyable cohesive experience and are creating convenience food for the weeks to come.

So it takes a lot of stress out of the kind of the shopping regularly and really having to plan what we have but it also means that we can shop potentially more sustainably.

We can buy kind of larger amounts of things,

We can go to farm shops,

Farmers markets,

Whatever it takes to not just be going to the supermarket and choosing lots of plastic but that shopping can be part of the process,

Part of the discussion,

Part of the connection with food with groups of people as well.

So there are lots of ways of doing this that add in various elements and add in different discussions about food,

About teaching ourselves,

Teaching children,

The whole of our kind of immediate society,

Where food comes from,

Where that can be most helpful to the environment.

And we can also do it in terms of different kind of cultural experiences,

Exploring different recipes from around the world,

There's some different,

You know,

People who are from different cultures so you have different recipes to bring,

It could be a really interesting way of just exploring tastes of other people's family,

Particularly if people are not in the family of their origin and there's something that they want to bring back in from their childhood or something their mother used to cook or it's a really lovely way of just exploring the whole relationship with food,

The whole relationship with nourishing and the whole relationship with recognising how much we need to be with tribes,

With groups of people,

Have this social engagement and how food and this sensory experience can really bring that together.