Aim of this project was to provide space for young people to come together and learn together about food and cooking, think critically about their own eating habits and gain/improve knowledge, skills and attitudes which can help them to improve their health and overall quality of life. Objectives: - To learn more about food in general: types of food, groups, nutrients, dieting types, food safety and institutions taking care of it etc. - To reflect on own eating habits in order to identify missing and to balance and improve diet - To raise the awareness about how food actually influence one’s health and overall wellbeing and to learn about different health conditions and disorders which are closely related to food and eating habits - To understand global food system and how climate changes affect it - To reflect on gender and food related stereotypes and prejudices - To raise the awareness of the local community and make people think about what they eat with the emphasis on problem of microplastics (World food safety day) - To break the myth of cooking as a “rocket science” by cooking and preparing food with the support of experts and chefs With this project we addressed 3 main needs that were identified: 1. To learn about food and food related topics which we will be able to implement in everyday life in order to improve the quality of our diet and to raise the overall quality of our lives (theoretical dimension) Young people today mostly have no clue about the nutrition, nutritional value of the food, types of the food, main food groups etc. This information can affect quality of nutrition in a big range and it is especially important for people with certain health conditions (eg. diabetes as it was explained by one of the participants living with diabetes type 1). While we are aware of these things and we implement them daily, our food intake, ratio of certain types of the food depending on what we want to achieve can change. Also, knowing which type of food is good for what (eg. simple carbs for fast gain of energy or vitamins and minerals for certain conditions) can change our lives much. By getting all of the insights, including also information about bio food, food supplements, super food and all the other things can change ones life and health a lot and many participants said that all this was enlightening moment for them and that in the future they will pay more attention to them. 2. To learn cooking “hacks” which can help us to eat healthier in the future (practical dimension) For safety reasons (hygienic and covid related) we couldn’t use hotel’s kitchen as it was planned to have real practical experience. However, participants did exchange their favourite healthy receipts and a lot of discussion was going around the simple things we can do in everyday life, which do not require a lot of energy, time or money, that can improve quality of our lives. As a practical part of the project, which can easily be implemented in daily life of each participants, we made a smoothie making workshop where each of the teams had to prepare a smoothie of different colour and name it. We made it in the form of competition to make it even more interested and participants loved it. 3. To learn about food habits and meals of other countries (intercultural dimension) Since food is one of the main characteristics of every culture and country, talking about national foods took big part of the program and was mentioned almost every day. This was specially the case during the intercultural evening. Throughout the project each country presented their typical food, explained eating habits of their people. IT was very interesting to learn different things, find similarities among the countries but also differences and discover something completely new. With this project we also wanted to explore history of the food to understand how the thing were working in the past but also to try to predict and discuss where new technologies and development will take us in the future and how our food and meals will look like. We explored institutions that take care of the safety and quality of the food. Interesting part of the project and an important topic was to explore on stereotypes that are going around the food. We concluded that most of the cultures and countries involved still have this strongly present stereotypes that women’s place is in the kitchen while men do not belong there. On the other side and very contradictory is the fact that most of the great and famous chefs are actually men, not women. With this project we also wanted to raise the awareness about relevance of healthy diet of the local community. We did that by organizing workshop together with the students of the Ashabı Kehf Mesleki ve Teknik Anadolu Lisesi from Tarsus.