About this project

The Mobile Food Collective is a fleet of mobile structures with a mission to bring people together around food, and inspire a new food culture around growing, cooking, sharing and eating.

The MFC was formed by a shared passion for food. It began with the recognition of the universal quality of food, as a social value beyond mere sustenance: everyone eats, and each culture has its own history around food. Food brings people together.

In pursuit of this traveling cultural center, we hope to facilitate conversations about food—issues of access, education around how to grow your own, food story narratives, seed/recipe exchange, or simply sharing a meal together. We bring people to the table (or, literally, bring our table to the people).

The seed of the collective grew from student work within Archeworks, an alternative design school where students work in multidisciplinary teams with nonprofit partners to create design solutions for social and environmental concerns. We devised the project as a public education campaign to inspire a rethinking of our relationship to food, emphasizing heritage, ownership, exchange, and connection. The MFC is many things: an education/exchange platform for planting, growing and cooking; demonstrations and distribution of seeds, soil, compost, and produce; a space activator within a community event; or the centerpiece of a harvest dinner.

Physically, the MFC is conceived as a fleet of mobile structures. The larger mobile unit houses a harvest table and flexible storage cabinets that double as seats. At a smaller scale, there are bikes and trailers, equipped to carry the modular storage cabinets. The mobility of the project allows this dialogue to be constant and moveable—we can go where we are needed, bringing different things to different audiences, connecting different groups across a city, or around the world.

Funding will go to completing the final steelwork details, fabricating the skin material, and building out our fleet of bikes and trailers. Also, we need support to build our archive of recipes and food story recordings.

In addition, we are honored to be selected to showcase the project at the 2010 Venice Biennale. We want to allocate funds to a series of workshops and other programming events while in Italy, to encourage cultural exchange around the topic of food and learn from the local Italian community.

Join us in inspiring a new food culture, moving more people to grow, cook, share, and eat— together.