How Community Cooking Project – Peng Patties – is Engaging Young People with Ital Cooking Again

How Community Cooking Project – Peng Patties – is Engaging Young People with Ital Cooking Again

Written by Amarion Scarlett-Reid | TBC Young Champion

Peng Patties are a dynamic cooking project co-created by secondary school-aged young people, primarily from Hackney and Haringey in London. Their mission is “to engage youth in the art of cooking with a focus on vegan and healthy recipes”.

Adopting Ital cooking styles this art goes beyond the plate to “foster a sense of purpose and encourage a gradual shift towards plant-based eating for both personal and planetary health.” I spoke with Zahira and Ekowa from Peng Patties to understand how they’re rooting Caribbean food, culture and history in their community’s young people.

Why patties?

“Ital is life - it’s living, so we don’t want any dead food, no meats. We try to bring more life to the food, once you’re dealing with life it promotes life” Ekowa told me. Patties are a staple of Caribbean food derived from Cornish pastry in England; the explosive tastes that are associated with patties come from the additions of spice by Indian indentured servants and enslaved Africans who developed a lot of the foods known in the Caribbean today. Although typically patties are meat or vegetable-filled, at Peng patties they’re vegan as ital consumption teaches that repetitive consumption of meat isn’t easily digestible.

“Patties were something easy for the children to start off with and enjoyable, once you created your patty and cooked it, it was real rewarding, to know that most of the children there are Caribbean and they can create their own Jamaican Patty, that was a good start,” Ekowa said “then we moved onto to preparing other foods that the children liked. They wanted to cook foods so we asked them what they wanted to try out and cook and then we turned them into healthier plant-based versions.” 

The patty became an obvious choice Zahira said, as they are such a “beloved, versatile and culturally significant dish. They serve as an excellent gateway for introducing young people to vegan cooking while appealing to a broad audience.” This opened a massive avenue for Peng Patties who only expanded the help of the children to not only designate the name Peng Patties but the logo as well. For the Caribbean side of Patties, we have the Jamaican patty we all recognise, one of the first expansions beyond this reflects the American side of patties which meant the children’s idea transformed patties into burger sets that were also rolled out, and the ideas kept “rolling and rolling”.

Nurturing young people

Offering weekly cooking sessions, “young people gather to prepare a variety of dishes.” These sessions are held locally utilising community kitchens and spaces “conducive to collaborative cooking and learning”. Before Peng Patties there was a “noticeable lack of engaging, productive after-school activities for young people”, this has been in line with years of austerity in inner-city areas across the country which have negatively impacted young people’s mental health, as well as entrenched social inequality further. Zahira spoke on the need for an initiative that provided both “practical life skills and positive community engagement, particularly in the realm of healthy, sustainable eating.” Peng Patties centring of the children in the different aspects of business also nurtures tools of “entrepreneurship” Ekowa said. They’re “all entrepreneurs, all of their minds put together working as a team- it creates magic”

Peng Patties intervenes early in secondary school-aged children’s lives as “this is a pivotal time for personal development.” It’s at this time that fostering senses of “responsibility, creativity, and community spirit is most urgent.

The vision and beyond

The vision of Peng Patties was years in the making, at first it was “to simply teach cooking skills and promote healthy eating” Zahira said, this was formed from a love for cooking Ekowa found “growing up in a big household of four siblings” where he was the eldest. “It came to a time where sometimes I’d come back from school, and I'd have to cook for the family. Mum was probably at work, Dad was at work, so I’d just start cooking” A lot of his recipes were given to him by his mother and Grandmother who cooked often.

This vision changed over the years to envelope broader goals that instil entrepreneurial skills, “promote teamwork, and address environmental issues through dietary changes.” The impact on individuals is paramount with young participants gaining “valuable cooking and business skills, a sense of achievement and improved self-esteem” Zahira said. This builds the community as it collectively benefits from “a more engaged youth, a better understanding of veganism, and an increased appreciation for diverse culinary traditions.” In a space that promotes all these notions of togetherness a “real community, homely, and family feeling” is engrained into each action in Peng Patties’ circuit.

Ital veganism in personal Black history

For Zahira the ital aspect of cooking “is rooted in natural, clean eating” that aligns with goals to promote plant-based diets. “Growing up vegetarian, then moving onto ital plant-based food” was a major influence for Ekowa, this grounding is part of a broader appreciation for food’s role in cultural expression and community building. Ekowa mentioned the influences that fast food has on young people, the intake of food not committed to health and sustainability needs to be acknowledged: “if they’re more in touch with themselves and the food they eat- even to recognise how it digests in their stomach and how they feel after, it will create that more oneness.”

“Having children of my own and educating them about food and trying to feed them the right things- that was a start as well, them recognising the foods that they’re eating, and giving them a better relationship with food and more understanding. It’s not just eating food to be full, it’s eating food to promote life- so that is a big inspiration watching them grow.”

The message 

The primary message Peng Patties promotes is that “healthy, sustainable eating can be delicious and accessible.” Through the incorporation of rich cultural ties that come from ital eating and history they “aim to show that anyone, especially young people can make a positive impact on their health and environment through mindful food choices. Peng Patties had profoundly changed Zahira and her father Ekowa’s lives, with a major reward being able to witness “the growth and development” of the young people in their community, who are enriched with a sense of being as well as cultural literacy in understanding the magnitude of Black history that came before them and their place in this context.

Information Sources: https://www.bma.org.uk/media/2060/cutting-away-at-our-childrens-futures-austerity-child-health-guuk-2016.pdf