Last week, from 12-20th October, 30 young participants from five different countries joined our Youth Exchange under the title "AI & Appetite: A Culinary Journey". Here, participants from Croatia, Germany, Romania, Tunisia, and Türkiye gathered to learn more about food and cooking traditions from different countries and to explore how AI can be used as a tool to combine and recreate different cultures and traditions in new creative and innovative ways.
The Youth Exchange was held in the beautiful place of Fethiye, located in the West of Türkiye and with a unique combination of mountains, forrests, and sea. The project consisted of a 9-day programme with daily morning and afternoon sessions where participants in groups dived into important topics such as food waste management, food security, and food inequality, followed by workshops in which participants further explored these topics while co-producing content for a digital E-cookbook.
Get a sneak peak of the E-cookbook here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1sdkHGHpfH3_8bFwBRP1ZjPusbKvK52T2
On Friday the 17th October, the Culinary Journey moved location to the Egebil School located in Fethiye to participate in the Erasmus+ Day Event, organised by System and Generation in collaboration with the school and Fethiye Municipality. Here, Turkish students joined a day together with the Erasmus+ Youth Exchange participants to celebrate the art of cooking. The day began with a welcome speach by the high school principal, Mr. Ercan Başbal, followed by an information session about Erasmus+ Days, the ESC program, and the Culinary Journey, delivered by the coordinating project team of System and Generation. The session ended with a Kahoot Quiz about Erasmus+ related subjects. Then participants were divided into five mixed teams. First, to prepare one culturally mixed AI-generated recipe, then to cook this brand new recipe in a cooking competition with all teams against each other. A jury, consisting of the high school principal, Mr. Ercan Başbal, the Director of Project Finance at Fethiye Belediyesi, Mr. Yunus Emre Asan, and the Erasmus+ Day Coordinator from System and Generation, Ms. Ida Elsborg, tasted the five dishes and gave each team points for taste, look, and creativitiy. Afterwards, the winning team (group 1) was announced by the jury.
Then, participants made critical reflections on the use of AI to create recipes and photographs of food through the AI & Food workshop. Here, a member of each group was invited to the stage to share their experiences with cooking AI-generated recipes and creating AI-generated food photos. Finally, the day ended with a huge group photo and video taken with drone in the school yard. It was indeed a memorable day for these young people who learned how effectful a tool cooking can be to share and develop culture together with other people.
During the Youth Exchange, participants also joined clean-up activities organised by local organisations in Fethiye, exploring the negative consequences of not paying attention to sustainable waste management. They made use of intergenerational interviews to cook traditional dishes from their home countries and to create the content of the E-Cookbook while practicing their creative writing skills. They gained more cultural knowledge and understanding during five different cultural nights, and made presentations about Food Inequality, Food Waste Management, and AI vs. Reality.
All in all, it was a true culinary journey that took place in Fethiye. We are grateful for this project to have become a reality, enabling many youngsters with different cultural backgrounds to connect through food.
