Internet technology, especially mobile, allows us to monitor our resources like never before - in theory making sharing more possible. Watch this BBC report from the series UpNext and find out about this innovative idea about sharing food.
Self-study activity:
Watch the five-minute video and say whether the statements below are true or false.
The activity is suitable for intermediate students.
1 Cookening.com is a web platform to share food with your neighbours.
2 People hosting a meal must cook the dishes their guests ask for.
3 The man explaining Cookening.com works as an ambassador.
4 The guest pays in advance.
5 Sharing is part of the French character.
6 The reason behind Crunchd was the creator being unable to consume all the food he grew in his garden.
7 In Crunchd your neighbours give you advice.
8 You can make friends through Crunchd.
9 You are not allowed to make money out of Crunchd.
10 The British are reserved.
I just want to show you what we’ll like be eating.
Cooking is meant for sharing. You have to understand what it means to cook. When you are cooking you’re cooking for other people.
Well, cookening is a web platform that allows us to eat with local people when you’re travelling or you’re an ex-pat in a city, and on the other side it allows people to host meals for foreigners at home and get a bit money out of that.
We have a website called cookening.com where we have people that are interested in hosting a meal, so they go in the website, and create a profile where they will explain what kinds of meals are ready to organise, what kind of dishes we are ready to suggest. Our team is reviewing it based on pictures, text, and if needed we call them, always send them an email to be sure it is fine.
I do that because I want foreign people to discover the French culture and the French food. I’m kind of happy and thrilled to be a French ambassador for food and wine, yeah, that’s the idea.
On the other side, you have guests that are usually foreigners. They say yeah, hi, I’m in town, I’m interested in eating with you, are you available this day because I’ve seen on your calendar it’s fine. And when the host says ‘Ok. I’m… let’s go, let’s have this meal together’, then the guest is invited to pay on a platform to confirm the meal.
It must be about the social aspect of it and, you know, to hear about their experiences and also see what a French meal is really like, what people talk about.
I might have tried it but I just don’t know.
In our culture of food we like to share and gather, you know, all the resources. We have to do that now because the resources are going down and, you know, and we have to optimize that.
French people love sharing, especially outside of Paris where there’s this kind of way of living and way of consuming, really old, so and the web and all these platforms are just increasing it.
Crunchd started from growing too much spinach in my back garden when I came back from travelling and I found a lot of friends who were interested in eating local, home-grown food by myself. Unfortunately, we’ve got very tired of having to make spinach ice-cream, so decided to try and find other friends who were growing other vegetables, and we were able to swap my spinach for tomatoes, courgettes, apples, strawberries.
It’s a way of recording exactly what you do in your allotment, on your window sill, at the back of your garden. You can record when you’ve planted a vegetable, what it is you’re growing, you can ask questions to your local community, you can see what people in your local community are growing and eating at the same time.
There’s few people on there up the road who I didn’t know beforehand and we’ve met up since, and had a beer together and discussed our vegetables, which is interesting topic of conversation down the pub.
When we get to harvesting times, for example if you grow too many radishes you are able to trade those radishes with your friends, with your local community through the application, whether it be for money or you could swap your radishes for carrots, courgettes, whatever it is your neighbours are growing as well.
It’s been awful of me and my chili seedlings I’ve got far too many of them. I’ve gone absolutely bananas and over board on them, chilies coming out of my ears. Us Brits are slightly more reserved than the French and a few other nations, but we are definitely out there with them. I think we could produce stuff just like the French and get into the whole sharing aspect of it, yeah, definitely.
With Crunchd once we have shown newcomers what it’s like to grow their own food, to share ideas, to share thoughts, to help one another out we are finding us British losing that reservedness and really, really having a lot of fun with Crunchd.
Key:
1F 2F 3F 4T 5T 6T 7T 8T 9F 10T
