Rawan
January 2020
Meet Rawan, whose story with Food Stash started back in 2018 when she began volunteering with the Rescued Food Box Program on a weekly basis. What started as a side passion project soon became a job and before she knew it, Rawan was coordinating the Rescued Food Box program on a full-time basis. An industrial designer by trade, we sat down with Rawan to capture her story before she embarks on a new adventure in January 2020 in pursuit of her dream career in the design world!
Photo: Amy Romer
Q: Tell us about what you were up to before you found out about Food Stash?
A: Before Food Stash, I was a student studying industrial design at Emily Carr, trying to figure out who I was as a creative and what I want to do within this field. It took some time, but I soon realized that I had no interest in mass production and designing more “stuff”. I saw the two sides of industrial design like a fork in the road: an experimental and innovative side and a consumer side. I was never interested in the latter, it bored me. I was always really interested in the innovative side because of the gray zone of possibilities that I could explore and immerse myself in.
In her 4th year of studies at Emily Carr, Rawan began working on her final 8-month long grad project. She started thinking of projects outside the norm and against the status quo (or as she puts it, “not really following the rules”). She started exploring food and the food industry itself before landing on her curiosity with peoples’ relationship to food.
“Everyone has a very intimate and different relationship to food. It engages people and gets them to come together. It provides nourishment, physically and mentally.”
She began to conduct experiments centered around this concept. She recalls the first part of her project where she brought in 5 ingredients that she thought best represented herself (cinnamon, olives, dough, and a couple other things) and made a recipe using all of these ingredients. She then interviewed 25 people one-on-one and as they described their own relationship with food, they snacked on that same recipe that described her relationship with food (confused yet?). When all 25 interviews were done, she took the ingredients each person used to describe their respective relationship to food and made 5 new recipes, which she then displayed on a clean table in the studio.
“Everyone in the studio came up to the table, with no plates or cutlery, and at first they were hesitant - they didn’t want to ruin the display. Finally one person tried some and suddenly everyone was laughing and chatting around the table while eating the food.”
Rawan began to think about the disconnect many people have to food, in a time where we, as a society, are cooking less and eating out more. That’s when she started to wonder about food accessibility and what critical questions we could ask ourselves and our friends to initiate meaningful conversations about food:
“As a result, I went dumpster diving. I was hanging out of dumpsters, grabbing tomatoes, getting my hands dirty, literally. One time I was in one behind a juicery and it was stuffed with pulp. I couldn’t get over why pulp, such a nutritious and high in fibre commodity, was being thrown out?”
So she started collecting byproducts (from pulp, almond and pumpkin seed milk, to spent grain from breweries) and created recipes to give them a second life. It wasn’t until she casted silicone moulds to put these recipes into that she finally answered her hypothesis:
“The moulds created this weird and organic-looking shape to people, so it was familiar enough to approach it, but unfamiliar enough to ask all the questions I wanted them to ask: where does this come from, what is it made out of? People finally started engaging with food in a different way and asking those questions I wanted them to ask.”
In her final months at Emily Carr, one of Rawan’s professors asked her if she had ever heard of Food Stash. After a phone call and a meeting with David, Food Stash’s Founder, Rawan was hooked. She began showing up every Sunday to sort through all the food.
“There was something about Food Stash that intrigued me. In the education realm, everything is theoretical, hypothetical, it’s not really real. Food Stash was in the real world. It wasn’t just a theory. Looking back, that was probably it. That was probably why I kept showing up. Eventually they asked if I would be willing to manage Sundays moving forward. I immediately said yes. Sundays always made my week.”
Q: What is your favourite memory since being apart of Food Stash?
A: It felt so much like community. You meet a lot of new people. Some come just once or twice, some come for a couple months and then go off on their own journeys, some are always there. It’s always different, I really like that. Okay but if I had to choose, my favourite memories would have to be:
1. Stomping on the compost. Sometimes we have so much compost and not enough black bins. Back in the day, I can remember getting in the bin and jumping up and down to pack it in before having it picked up by the animal sanctuary.
2. When we made Food Stash the musical. There was just a few of us that Sunday so we knew it would be a longer day. We started singing and it turned into actual lyrics, you know, singing about potatoes, peeling off stickers from the produce for the pigs. No one else around understood what we were doing but it was a lot of fun, coming up with those songs.
Q: What’s your favourite food?
A: Arab home cooked food definitely holds a soft spot in my heart. I’m also very picky about hummus. Dessert hummus infuriates me.
Q: We are dying to know, what’s next for Rawan?
A: I’m not 100% sure, but I know what my goals are, and now I need to figure out the steps I have to take to reach those goals. I want to be an interdisciplinary designer and artist and I really like project-based work that takes into account the environment and surrounding community. Honestly, I’m nervous because I’m taking a risk to focus fully on my practice, but I’m also excited with not knowing what’s going to happen next! My Dad thinks this is a good position to be in, because being nervous means you care and being excited means you’re hopeful.
Endless thanks to you, Rawan, for your dedication and contribution to Food Stash over the years. You will be so missed! We wish you all the best on your next adventure!
Written by: Julia Hunter
If you are interested in working with Rawan on an upcoming design project, please reach out to her via email at rawan.marwan.hassan@gmail.com.