Thanks to the Eat Smart project, 4 groups of young people from Italy, France, Vietnam and China from the 17th to 21st March 2013 participated to the Training Course that took place in Beijing at the office of the Chinese partner CANGO (China Association for NGO Cooperation).
During the days of the TC at the Chinese capital have been carried out engaging and stimulating activities as the presentations of the own culinary traditions by each group (through multimedia projections or short theatrical skits). During the meetings, the participants of each group mixed between them to also speak about the future of the project, what they expected of the local workshops that will take place in each partner country during the summer 2013 and which could be the modalities for carrying out them; they also spoke about the organization of the Food Fair that will be held in Palermo in the month of September 2013.
The participants debated also about how to realized one of the final products of the project that is an online platform in which it will be possible to find the descriptions and the purposes of the project; there will be also a section for the several recipes proposed by the partner groups. One of the issue on which the participants have focused was the need to make the online contents available on worldwide level, especially for the Chinese users, considering the government restrictions on the use of some web sites (such as Facebook or YouTube).
The culinary workshops have been unique experiences that involved Italan and Vietnamese groups on the first “turn” and the Chinese and French on the second one: the participants cooked very typical dishes of their countries that, then, have been tasted during the dinners of the same evenings; a big intercultural group in which the participants helped each other behind the stoves, finding out different tastes, some of them also in common.
During all the meetings, the video makers of each group recorded the most important moments to edit a final video that will be broadcast during the Food Fair in Palermo.
Naturally, the food has been the main character of the 5 days of the project: the responsibles of CANGO conducted the participant groups to the most traditional restaurants of Beijing to offer them a wide variety of dishes including meat, fish, vegetables, tubers and many kinds of pasta and rice present in China; one of the most particular lunches has been at a restaurant that offered typical menu from the Chinese region of Yunnan (one of these particular dishes was a sweet rice served in a pineapple).
The purely culinary moments alternated with cultural visits in the most important and fascinating places of Beijing such as the famous Forbidden City in the heart of the city, the food market of Run De Li in the area of Houhai (where it was possible to find different varieties of meat, fish, eggs, fruit and vegetables, spices and tea), the Great Wall of the area of Badaling and the Heaven Temple.
The EAT SMART project, within the Youth in Action (Action 3.2) programme and funded by the European Commission, aims to raise awareness among young people for a bigger consumption of healthy food, to the rediscovery of the own culinary traditions and to the use of food as a means for an intercultural dialogue. If you would like to be involved in the project, or you need more information about the activities, please write to youth@cesie.org
