It's a date at Lola Dieven, Amsterdam
On November 19th, masharu studios organised an Edible Earth dinner named It’s a date at Lola Lieven, in partnership with the venue as part of their Buurt Dinners series. The evening explored edible earth as a nutritional, cultural, and political practice.
The three-course menu was carefully curated by masharu studios and prepared collaboratively with the Waste to Success Foundation, alongside Hannah Murphy, Nika Brzezicka, and Ruby McHale. Waste to Success utilizes food as a unifying force, transforming surplus ingredients into opportunities for more creative and fair eating.
Each course featured a different edible earth sample alongside fruit and vegetables rescued by Waste to Success. Starting off with a Surinamese Pemba inside a date dusted with St. Gerlach Sacred Earth from the Netherlands, acknowledging the complicated colonial traces of the soils consumed here.
Lin Visser, a visual anthropologist and co-founder of The Waste to Success Foundation, contributed as a community builder at Lola Lieven. Their practice centers on learning, sharing, and co-creating, shaping an engaged environment that fostered a lovely sense of community at the dinner. Guests shared their thoughts and stories and were able to raise questions around earth consumption.
As guests shared their earthy meal, Jennifer Plein, dietitian and lifestyle coach, provided insights into the nutritional aspects and risks of consuming earth alongside cultural histories of earth eating. A particular focus of the talk was the Surinamese Pemba served at the dinner, reflecting on how our connection to what we consume shapes both our bodies and the earth.
The evening also included a film screening that contextualised the surinamese pemba in masharu’s research practice, documenting the fieldwork and interviews conducted in Suriname, focusing on its cultural and spiritual significance locally, creating a stark contrast to the regulations in the Netherlands. The film also documented an earth trade, trading pemba for samples of Russian and Ukrainian soil.
The evening’s programme, along with the menu, offered an embodied and sensory reflection on our relationships with the land. Through tasting, exchanging information and sharing stories, the evening created space for communal learning, aligning with masharu’s mission of reframing attitudes towards earth consumption. The stories and taste impressions of earth samples were then incorporated into the Museum of Edible Soil Archive, contributing to a collection of over 600 entries, making the Museum of the Earth a perpetually expanding work.
Menu design: Nika Brzezicka
More information: Lola Lieven , The Waste to Success Foundation and https://jenniferplein-dietist.nl/
