Website Learn Section
and Ask Joshna Series

23 posts and 10 episodes
The Learn section on the Communal Lunch Project website was built to support students by sharing cooking skills, shopping and kitchen tips, and recipes from Chef Joshna Maharaj and some of our student Project Assistants. “Ask Joshna” began as a weekly series. On Instagram @communallunch, we encouraged students to ask Chef Joshna their food and cooking questions and she created a video to answer their questions each week. Some of their questions would also become the foundation of subsequent Learn section posts.

Virtual Lunch Hangouts

20 Hangouts
The lunch hangouts were our initial attempt at transitioning our in-person program to a virtual setting. Project Assistants (PAs) hosted regularly scheduled Zoom meetings that students would sign up for. On the day of the event, students would hang out and discuss topics around campus food culture and eat lunch in the company of others if they felt like it. During one well-attended virtual hangout, a Culinary Arts student asked if anyone minded if he cooked while they chatted. As Aasreen Sood, the PA host for this event, described it, “It was a huge success – “everyone was mesmerized!” This was the seed for the next idea: virtual cook-alongs.

Virtual Cook Along Events

5 events
We brought together the structured learning from the Ask Joshna series and the casual get-together vibe of the Virtual Lunch Hangout to create a Virtual Cook-along series. We hosted three cook-alongs that were open to any students, as well as two collaborative cook-alongs, one with Ryerson University students and another with Lakehead University students.

Food and Identity
Workshops

2 events
Chef Bashir Munye is passionate about promoting the diverse food that represents Toronto’s multicultural communities, and he advocates for access to good quality food for everyone. These workshops focused on the experience of migration and finding a sense of belonging in food and cooking. Chef Bashir’s workshop built on his Nomadic Comfort Food projects which examine the intersectionality of Local and Diversity. Each event was centered around a cooking demo in his home kitchen, using ingredients which sparked engaging conversations around food and identity.

Students-Teaching-Students on IG Live

9 events
For this series of events, we collaborated with three Culinary Arts students, Jose Marianne Proulx, Felipe Gombossy, and Rekha Jeyachandran, from George Brown College who co-hosted live cooking demos with the PAs on Instagram Live. They each let their unique interests and experiences guide the types of dishes they created. But they all had in common a general theme: affordable ways to cook with simple ingredients in ways that reduce waste. Each session was a unique opportunity for students to engage in the Instagram Live chat with other students, ask questions, and share knowledge.

Students-in-Residence Cook Along

2 events
This series was our first partnership with college administrations. We worked with the Residence Life teams at Humber College, Seneca College, and George Brown College to launch a virtual cook-along series that recognizes the constraints that students living in residence face when it comes to cooking for themselves.

It was also our first partnership with a local food supplier. 100km Foods is a local food distributor in Toronto connecting restaurants and consumers with some of the freshest, high-quality ingredients Ontario has to offer. They curated food boxes, which were paid for by the college administrations, so students had access to the ingredients they needed for each cook-along. The residence team members who we worked with said that their students loved cooking a meal in the virtual company of others!