
Short sessions that offer guests a deep cultural, spiritual, and ecological dive into ancestral Oaxacan foodways.
Food of the Gods: Chocolate + Maize Session
Oaxaca’s markets, chocolatiers, and streets are our classrooms as we taste and learn about the mysteries of chocolate and corn not only through Mexican and world history, but through flavours. Via pre-hispanic cacao drinks, local seeds, very rare types of chocolate, and heirloom maize foods we endeavour to learn about Oaxacan chocolate and maize traditions.
Guests are challenged to consider their approach to the vast differences in taste, textures, and context that root Oaxacan and Western chocolate traditions and how all of this might inform our relations to money, death, time, and ceremony. Note: This is not a cacao ceremony.
The Spirits of Agave: Fermentations
Join us for a flight or tasting of three ancient maguey/agave beverages. We endeavour to learn about the mysterious path of maguey, the Goddess Mayahuel, and the moon. Guests are challenged to consider their approach to the vast differences in taste, textures, and context that root Oaxacan and Western traditions. We ask how all of this might inform our relations to farming, elderhood, sacrifice, myth, and food.
Earth, Fire, Food: Oaxacan Pottery, Chocolate and Storytelling
Over the course of a full day we will visit a family of three generations of potters actively engaged in the collective rememberance of their craft.
We will explore the process of turning clay into ceramics, each step being undertaken and taught together, the use of stone in traditional chocolate preparation, and the ceremony behind the work.
Finally, we will be getting our hands dirty learning the living alchemy of earth and fire, listening to master storytellers, and discovering the old relationships between the fire that cooks our pottery that cooks our food.
STUDENT AND PRIVATE GROUP SESSIONS
All of our sessions, whether day trips or deep immersions, are offered for and can be modified to suit the interests of student groups and private groups.
