Creating a new recipe for mindful and sustainable kitchens

A team of six students and three lecturers from the TU Dublin Tallaght campus has co-created a new applied food sustainability module that enables a deeper understanding of how to build a sustainable kitchen and manage waste and uses a mindful approach to engage student chef creativity in developing a sustainability mindset.

The Mindful Kitchen: Creative Food Sustainability has its roots in the award-winning mindful kitchen health and wellbeing for chefs module which has been embedded into all year one full-time culinary arts programmes in the Tallaght campus of TU Dublin since 2019.

“This is meant to be a creative art, but all the research shows that you need time and space to be creative,” explains Annette Sweeney, senior lecturer in culinary arts at TU Dublin. “Both of those things are often in short supply in a professional kitchen, but mindfulness helps.”

The mindful kitchen health and wellbeing module is the first of its kind anywhere in the world in culinary arts education and comprises two key elements – using a mindful approach to working and being in the kitchen and heightening chefs’ awareness of self-care within the kitchen.

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The key to delivery is the creation of a mindful space within the mind of the student and in the kitchen. This is done using mindful tools including Qigong, a blend of physical exercise and breathing techniques, and yoga exercises and playing music with nature sounds. Having created a mindful space, students are presented with practical mindful challenges to boost creativity in areas such as food sourcing, preparation, cooking, service, and food waste.

This promotes creativity and sustainability from within, Sweeney points out. “If you are more mindful of yourself you will be more mindful of food, the environment, and sustainability. You become more aware of how nature can benefit what you are doing and how that can inspire your work. We do a little bit of foraging with the students as well. We also have things like tea rituals where the students mindfully make and drink a cup of tea for themselves from the foraged ingredients. We play nature sounds and soft music and that’s very much in contrast to a professional kitchen with its deadlines. That’s where creative ideas come up and students are surprised when they experience their creative ability in this way. These are the kind of tools we give them. Delivering them in the kitchen is very important. Applied learning means you can do it in a professional kitchen as well.”

Chef mental health is a growing concern in the catering industry and research has shown that burnout is directly related to the high stress environment of a professional kitchen. The self-care element of the module equips students with the knowledge and healthy habits required to confidently deal with modern kitchen culture and effect positive change.

“It looks at kitchen culture, what’s acceptable and unacceptable and different types of leaders,” Sweeney notes.

Pre-designed kitchen scenarios are dramatised, debated, discussed, solutions proposed and debated. The scenarios are examined for fairness, equality and justice. This takes the students out of their comfort zone and is a fun interactive way to explore best practice.

“Students can find the whole idea of mindfulness and self-care quite foreign initially,” she adds. “But they are now doing it in secondary schools and that helps.”

The success of that module, which is the first of its kind anywhere in the world, led directly to the N-TUTORR fellowship project. “We wanted to build on the learnings from the first module and create one that would inspire mindful creativity and a sustainability mindset in culinary arts students,” she explains.

The first step for the project team was to engage with best practice in the industry. “Applied learning is key and we have always been influenced by the industry. We built the module from the outside in. We went out to the industry to look at best practice in sustainability. We visited Doug McMaster who is a leader in the space in his Silo restaurant in London. It is a zero-waste restaurant with no bin in the kitchen.”

But sustainability won’t matter much if the food doesn’t come up to scratch. “The food was stunning; we were blown away by it.”

The team also linked in with Isle of Man based Pippa Lovell who forages for ingredients and uses invasive species in her dishes to support the island’s biodiversity. They also explored low carbon foods with the help of food data specialist company Nutritics.

“We had a masterclass with JP McMahon in Galway,” Sweeney adds. “He is the director of the Food on the Edge international symposium which is a patron of our mindful kitchen project. Two-star Michelin chef Jordan Bailey spoke to us about fermentation and Tom Hunt, an eco-chef from London, spoke about zero-waste cooking.”

Masterclasses delivered by these industry leaders covered a range of topics including applied food sustainability, wild and foraged food, root to fruit, zero-waste cooking, and fermentation.

By combining the advice from industry with the learnings from the course, the team co-created a four-hour practical module comprising sessions on professional kitchen practice for sustainability; the mindful kitchen; and creativity for sustainability.

“It’s all about inspiring people to go from being an egocentric chef to an eco-centric chef,” says Sweeney. “We want to take what we have learned from the industry into the mindful creativity piece. We want students to look at their own sustainability, to look at food as art from a nature point of view and apply that to the ingredients they use. We want to inspire a creative approach to sustainable dish design with a zero-waste mindset. The professional practice element looks at how we can be more sustainable in what we do in the kitchen.”

The co-creation process was central to the success of the project. “It’s about empowering students to become design partners,” says Sweeney. “That’s very powerful in education. The students gave their own time as did the lecturers. It was a great experience for us to work with them. When you are engaged in co-creation you have to park your ego at the door. It’s about how to relate to the students. We are all in this together and every opinion valued. If someone has an idea, test it and pilot it. You have to approach it with the mindset that everything we do, we do as a team. We worked on the project for two hours a week, every week and it was a very positive experience. I would highly recommend co-creation to any lecturer.”

The next phase for the project will see the new module piloted across both the Grangegorman and Tallaght campuses for year one students in the coming academic year. “We want to embed the fact that they can be creative into the students’ mindset. There isn’t always time to allow creativity to happen in culinary arts education and this module will help. We also want to inspire some innovation in food sustainability. That aligns with the ethos at TU Dublin where we embed people, planet and partnership into all of our modules. Health and wellbeing are also addressed. The students are the best salespeople for this. They really were on board and very enthusiastic about it from the beginning. Personally, I am very excited by the outcome from the project and looking forward to getting the new module up and running.”