🌿🕊🍵 Food Culture, Community Systems, and Change — Mindfully 🍵🕊🌿

I operate at the intersection of food culture, community food hubs, and governance, providing strategic and systems analysis to inform ethical, people-centred food systems and accountable practice.

This perspective is grounded in deep, embedded experience within a community food cooperative and hub, supporting values-based systems that connect regenerative farms with communities across peri-urban London. The role has required navigating not only operations and delivery, but also decision-making, power, care, and responsibility within community settings.

I bring strengths in programme and project design, systems analysis, governance-aware strategy, and community-centred operations, with a particular focus on ethics, accountability, and lived experience. My approach is intentionally reflective and inquiry-led, attentive to how food systems practice shapes research and policy, wellbeing, health, and access to nutritious, culturally-appropriate food—particularly for the most marginalised members of our societies.

With a deep respect for culinary knowledge, food heritage, and context-led practice, I focus on surfacing the cultural and ethical dimensions of food systems that are often overlooked in policy and programme design. I am especially interested in how community food hubs function as social infrastructure, shaping access, care, joy and connection.

I am drawn to roles at the intersection of:
✨ Food culture and community food systems
✨ Governance, ethics, and public-interest analysis
✨ Social design, health and wellbeing outcomes of community food provisioning initiatives
✨ Ethical food supply chains and access
✨ Anchored, trauma-aware, and community-led practice

Affectionately known as the “Queen of the Road,” I enjoy working across regions and contexts—from the Midlands to London and beyond—bringing together analysis, strategy, and grounded engagement.

If your organisation is seeking food systems expertise grounded in analysis, ethical judgment, and community-literate governance, I would welcome a conversation about roles with responsibility for shaping and leading food initiatives that connect food, farming, and people back to the land, align sourcing and supply-chain decisions with values, and translate governance frameworks into measurable, real-world outcomes.

Towards a Visceral Agroecology: Unveiling the Soma-Cultural Community Kitchen

A Four-Year Participatory Action Study of the Granville Community Kitchen, South Kilburn, London (2022–2025)

This thesis presents a four-year participatory action research study embedded within the Granville Community Kitchen (GCK) in South Kilburn, London. Working as a scholar-practitioner in an insider–outsider role, I examine how food practices, somatic experience, cultural memory, and communal labour converge in what I develop as the concept of the soma-cultural kitchen, grounded specifically in GCK. Through this work, the thesis introduces and elaborates visceral agroecology, a field that brings embodied, affective, and sensory dimensions of community food systems into dialogue with their ecological and socio-political conditions.

Drawing on 17 semi-structured interviews and 12 asynchronous WhatsApp-based narrative interactions, and long-term participant observation during weekly community meals—the study traces how participants negotiate trauma, displacement, resilience, and belonging through food. GCK emerges as a site where historical wounds, cultural continuities, and new solidarities are enacted and transformed.

The research is epistemologically situated in pre-Christian Indigenous cosmologies of the British and Irish Isles. Within this framework, Samhain is mobilised as a temporal and epistemic metaphor—a liminal moment when boundaries between seen and unseen, past and present, self and community are understood to thin—revealing the somatic, affective, and relational dimensions of community food life. By developing the soma-cultural kitchen through GCK, the thesis demonstrates how visceral agroecology integrates healing, trauma-awareness, and restorative practice alongside ecological and social concerns, offering a novel lens for research, policy, and practice in superdiverse urban food initiatives.

• Food Systems • Food Justice • Epistemic Justice • Participatory Action Research • Embodied Inquiry • Transformational Change •  Community Resilience • Transformational Change • Ethical Leadership • Cultural Heritage • Scholar-Practitioner Framework

Permaculture for Community Resilience in the Nepal Himalaya