Sessions

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.

Through a flight or tasting of three distinct 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 and how all of this might inform our relations to farming, elderhood, sacrifice, myth, and food.

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.