food&beverage&bio hacking activities

FHB at OHM2013

First of all many thanks to all the members of our group and people who took their time, effort, half of their kitchens (or brewing places like Arnd) and yes also cash making the Food Hacking Base (fhb) happened. Here also comes our thanks to the orga who supported us extensively.

The story below covers some of our activities and events, mentioning some names of people involved piece fully forgetting others, please take it as a short overview rather than all including text, so much happen that no one can really tell the whole tail.

The Build up of the base

The build up started early and could not really happen without all the hard work of Thorsten, his car, tool set and later on enormous support of the whole Warpzone hackerspace members which become our lovely neighbours for the event. Together with many other helpers we have build proper working tables for the kitchen, nice and high around 100 cm, shelves and organized it neatly. The ones who are over 150 cm know how much back pain this solution is saving you.

Second on the list was the hexayurt cold room build up which is described more in detail here. Lets say that it was really nice collective effort which resulted in not as “cold” cold room as we hoped for but it definitely helped against the hot Dutch summer sun (no no not daydreaming again …). Also thanks for the 1000 eu from the orga donated to the project.

Next big project was build up of the workshop venue, in this case the roof and support system. That was really fun, many of us had to laugh when seeing the design of the project changing happily during the build up (well what would you expect in Holland with frequent smoking brakes after all) resulting in final structure resembling a bit of “Alice in Wonderland” style but most importantly it worked. It kept us out of the sun and rain, so great!

One of the last projects was the build up of the washing table, which alas we did not managed to connect to the water source and drainage but with some extra human labor we succeeded in keeping our place and equipment clean and it was for many a nice and simple opening to become involved, just stick your hands in the sink half an hour of meditational dish washing and you are as new being! Lars and other folk from Warpozne went bit gaga 3D printing, assembling and successfully testing an ice-cream machine, check their pages for more info!  Well this list I think could summarize what we have build concerning the infrastructure. For the next time we can try to make the cold room colder, workshop venue with floor and washing area with connected to the water source and drainage, that may be for the future improvements. It has to be mentioned that the organic produce shopping from the local farmers, it’s delivery and share which was organized by Tg, Cor-Jan and others was highly appreciated and we hope it will happen again with even more funds dedicated to it and more people involved. It was worth of the effort I think and definitely going well along with our principles of  local, sustainable and organic.

What have we done with such a lovely utilities?

Thanks to a nice gear and infrastructure we have kept ourselves busy and happy, well “round we may say” 🙂 Breakfast around 8 to 9 in the morning, few dishes, the “best” generally for the early birds, meat eaters diet based, larger decent food for the late comers. Lunch was nice collaborative effort, as applies to other dishes vegan options always included, special thanks to Evina on this one, that extends to the dinner and her whole presence too. Dinner was really fun because we have been playing quite a bit with lots of people coming by and helping, often preparing their favorite dishes so you never new what is coming, Evina was especially coordinating these activities. Marcel, Daan and many others were around to play too. Here also thanks to many others like Oto, Bravo, Eric, Erwin, Stuart, Lars, Thorsten etc. who just did what was needed whenever, and also contributed financially which was very appreciated! With every subsequent day we grew bigger and bigger and lets be honest by the end of the camp we have been too big to the opinion of many of people involved from the start. It was great but next time we would like to rather keep smaller around 15-30 people as a core group lets say and help to create or initiate similar projects around the campground so people can enjoy the idea and it’s benefits but the community keeps to some certain lets say “smaller social circle” size. Everyone feels more comfortably about different environment, but smaller nex time seems to us better.

Workshops

As promoted in advance one of our major aims at the camp was to serve as an educational place, equipped to give especially hands on workshops on variety of the food&beverage related subjects. I think we can say that it worked. There were complications, wrong or late timing of the workshops sometimes but at the end majority of the activities happened and quite on the time seeming to please most of the participants. People were coming back, budgets were covered and several workshops were completely overbooked with many people under the line. At the end we have been running sometimes several workshops in the same time with other events too, so again bit overstretched, next time we should make sure that we keep it rather less intensive but well covered and coordinated. If I can mention few workshops which went really well or got big, if not both the mAcfreAk’s traditional “hack our own Sushi workshop” was as at 2011 CCC camp very popular, molecular cooking with Erwin (egeltje) and Ralph Moonen was really big with I think over 30 people below the line and really tasty stuff being created, the “icecream” dessert was just superb! I wish we got better job in announcing the change of the time for Machtelt workshop on the beer brewing because her workshops were really cool and I hope we can host and properly promote them next time whenever that may be (especially that Belgian egg liqueur which was really tasty :-)!) . Evina’s vegan hacking attracted a lots of enthusiasts as on the previous CCC camp, no surprise there, I would say especially the vegan purgers got people intrigued and they were really delicius! If course Christian’s matelade making and Luwah’s mate sodas can not be omitted, both inventions kept plenty of people nice and sharp during the event. I’m personally happy with the steady increased interest of people in probiotics and I hope that they keep their babies (for example kombucha) well and happy and yes increased farting potential when consuming is natural and absolutely fine 🙂 Now that may be enough as a “short recollection” of some of the workshops. Please if I didn’t mentioned your favorite one pleas forgive me, thankfully there was plenty to pick up from.

Events

As is now already a tradition started with Webmind, Francoise and me at CCC congresses, Food Hacking Base cheese randevou or cheese tasting took place again with quite a wide selection of cheeses (well over 20 don’t be fooled by the wiki entries as usually), snacks and yes some lovely wine and Belgium beer. I’m truly sorry not to share the pictures but it was somehow too dark to take a proper ones or people just kept their attention too focused on tasting … Many thanks here to Machtelt, Webmind, Daan, Lurwah and others for their selections! Next time more light and proper labeling should improve the experience even more, lets see what we can do at 30c!

The biggest food hacking based event was a Joined venture of our group, Free Village and Noisy Square. The event was huge we served food to over 200 people I would say and the crowd was happily hanging around quite for a while in a picnic style of atmosphere, great! All covered by donations with a nice surplus, what more can one ask?

Hot Party. Well that was the last night, enjoying the cold room which was hacked to the “hot room”, having partysnacks, lots of drinks, talking and relaxing. Very nice, next time lets do it again, just lets start bit earlier sleepy heads!

Budget

Our goal was to end up after the event with some money in our hand, that worked out. We got over €1000 extra, after reimbursements and various claims we settled happily on €600 as funds for the next events and projects. The total spending for whole event was around €4000. We spend bit over €2000 during the event for fhb related stuff and another €1100 for hexayurt coldroom which was however funded by OHM2013 orga – €1000 budget. We got around  €1300 in donations during the event, over €1200 in crowdsourcing campaing run before the event and over €500 from internal group donations to start with. You c an check on our data here.

The main experience for the next events are:

– more people involved with finances and keeping track of them, especially during the event

– finishing up our reports at the end of the event immediately – at least as much as possible.

Summary

If we can conclude the Food Hacking Base project aimed to serve as a food&beverage hacking hub at the camp, bringing people together, helping to create social links, educating them, all of this and more in a friendly and sharing atmosphere and we succeeded. There were issues and things which we hope to improve next time, taking properly care about our left overs being high on the list. However all in all, lets do this again, definitely!

At the end once more thanks to anyone contributing to the community and special thanks to the Evina, Christian and Lurwah who were on the deck from the beginning helping months in advance to make this all happen.

Thanks you!

So see you at 30c3 in Hamburg or another event!

Sincerely,

Food Hacking Base

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