Cooking and food-sharing is such a communal kind of connection. We cook to nourish our loved ones, to introduce ourselves to others through dishes, and to preserve parts of our identity that are important to us.

Led by Luna Issa, this series of six workshops will include shared cooking sessions that explore ideas of connection – to home, to ourselves’, and to each other – through recipe-sharing and food storytelling.

By cooking together in a gentle environment, having conversations around the role of food in connecting to ‘home’, and sharing recipes with each other, we’ll explore how cooking can present ways that the idea of ‘home’ is more than a place.

Open to anyone based in Glasgow with lived and/or intergenerational experience of forced displacement/seeking refugee protection.

No previous experience of cooking is necessary, but it is very welcome. Limited places available.

The Art of Family Life

These Home Cooking workshops are part of the Mental Health Foundation’s arts, oral history and heritage project: the Art of Family Life. Through creativity and oral history, we are exploring and recording the intangible culture of family practices within refugee communities in Glasgow.

Luna Issa

Home Cooking will be led by Luna Issa. Luna is an Iraqi-Scottish arts worker. Her work is centred around a passion for Iraqi and SWANA arts and culture, which spans cooking, curation and production. Luna is invested in community-building, both local and diasporic.