by Estefania Simon-Sasyk, Constanza Díaz del Castillo, Mónica Sahmkow, Dharath Hoonchamlong
1. The kitchen as futures factory
Culinary schools are a tangible case of futures factories: they reproduce ways of eating, cooking, and valuing food that shape the material and symbolic orders of the societies they serve. The programs taught in these institutions are typically based on European culinary practices that were globally considered the epitome of excellence. This has led to the marginalization of local knowledges, ingredients, and food cultures. Students are trained to relate good cuisine with these standards and to aspire to a world that is neither their own nor their context.
This paper documents a 2022–2023 collaboration — convened by the Mycelium Gastronomy Network across Venezuela, Thailand, and Spain — to introduce a South-to-South knowledge transfer methodology at LAGA, the culinary school of UCAB-CIAP in Caracas, and to reflect on the impact of such collaboration from a situated point of view. We write from four subject positions: a practitioner-researcher and convenor (Simon-Sasyk), LAGA’s academic counterpart (Sahmkow), a Thai food-systems practitioner, Co-founder of Wasteland, and Co-Leader of the WFF Thailand Chapter (Hoonchamlong), and a designer-educator bridging Ibero-American and European gastronomy (Díaz del Castillo). The paper is a mid-journey reflection, not a finished case study.
2. The Europe-centric model as a used future
The concept of used futures (Inayatullah, 2008) names futures images that have lost their generative potential — futures we enact by habit rather than design, ‘borrowed’ from elsewhere. This case places Europe-centric culinary education as a paradigmatic used future in Latin America. Escoffier’s brigade system, the canon of sauces, and the primacy of technique over territory arrived in the region not as one approach among many but as the standard of professionalism itself.
The colonial power proposed by Quijano (2000) can be understood from a culinary perspective as European knowledge being considered universal, pushing to the background local knowledges of Amazonian, Andean, and Afro-Caribbean ingredients, techniques and traditions. In this context, the used future operates precisely as inner politics — as subjectivity and aspiration (Chimal & Ramos, 2026) — embedded in curricula, rubrics, networks, and students’ expectations. Dislodging it requires what Inayatullah (2008) calls alternative-futures work: articulating different imaginaries of excellence, professionalism, and belonging.
The concept sits within what critical futures scholars have called decolonial futures: the project of dismantling the epistemic and imaginative hold of colonial modernity, and of making other ways of knowing — and therefore other futures — thinkable (Feukeu, 2024; Inayatullah, 2008). Counter-hegemonic cuisine, in this frame, is not primarily a cultural act but a futures act: it refuses the used future embedded in the professional kitchen and enacts a different imaginary of what food excellence, and food education, can mean. The gastronomy classroom becomes a site where the decolonial future is practised, not merely taught.
A growing literature addresses food system transformation and food futures — attending to planetary diets, climate adaptation, and supply chain resilience (FAO, 2017; Willett et al., 2019) — but has rarely engaged with gastronomy education as a futures site in its own right, and still less from a South-to-South or decolonial perspective. This paper positions itself within that gap: not as food systems governance research, but as a contribution to critical futures practice grounded in an embodied, institutional case.
3. A South-to-South alternative: the 5Ps become five HORECA pillars
The collaboration began with a question: what would it look like to anchor gastronomy education in Venezuelan ecological, cultural, and historical realities while remaining legible to global frameworks such as “sustainability”? The decision to pursue a South-to-South rather than a North-South partnership was deliberate. Thailand, similarly peripheral to the Northern culinary canon, has navigated that position differently — institutionalising and exporting its gastronomy on its own terms. Hoonchamlong’s prior role at Bo.lan, one of the first Thai restaurants with a formal ‘Environmental Manager’, offered a concrete institutional referent. The exchange was not model-transfer but an epistemological encounter: two Global South contexts building on a shared structural pressure.
The project translated the UN 2030 Agenda’s 5Ps (People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace & Partnerships) into five contextualised pillars for the HORECA sector: La gastronomía construye país (gastronomy as social and identity-forming practice, with ethical value-chain relationships); Dietas de Salud Planetaria (plant-forward menus, resource stewardship, agroecological sourcing, drawing on the EAT-Lancet Commission [Willett et al., 2019]); Servicio para el equipo (the HORECA worker as intersectional subject; labour conditions and team culture as strategic levers); Diversidad y no-hegemonía (cultural diversity as safeguard of knowledges and flavours, un-centring Eurocentric canons); and Medir el impacto del negocio (sustainability as quantifiable in business terms, resistant to greenwashing). Three transversal competencies — ethics, systems thinking, applied research — cut across all five, mapped to the certificate’s four knowledge clusters so that sustainability became an axis rather than a standalone module.
The collaboration produced three interlocking deliverables between October 2022 and January 2023: curriculum recommendations, a subject-by-subject alignment, and an eight-hour online module on Sustainability in HORECA. The public launch on 30 January 2023 of the course titled La sostenibilidad y la rentabilidad del negocio was headlined by five practitioners from Thailand, Ecuador via England, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile via Spain, anchoring each pillar. The course drew 150+ live attendees and represents an archive of content to support the strategy.
Figure 1. Four knowledge clusters of the LAGA certificate and type of recommendation developed to implement the Sustainability pillars
Figure 2. Sustainability pillars’ impact on the LAGA certificate
4. How the framework landed
Four years on, Sahmkow describes the five pillars as ‘the whole speech of the school’. The framework has been used for teacher onboarding, programme design, events, and catering, keeping the school aligned with its objectives and helping it identify topics and actions that reflect the identity of the country it represents.
The non-hegemony pillar shapes programme design from the first decision. As academic coordinator Lilian El Kareh explains, ‘the criterion is to avoid contents that centre exclusively on classical international referents.’ In the inaugural cohort of the Diplomado de Comunicación Gastronómica, all student research projects focused on local ingredients, products, or restaurants — a structural, not incidental, choice. The goal, as El Kareh describes it, is for every activity to generate data that allows for evaluation of its real impact, moving institutional decision-making away from estimates and toward evidence.
That reflective orientation is built into coordination itself. El Kareh frames a methodological shift: ‘before executing, I ask myself: what story are we telling with this event? What environmental or economic impact are we creating? Why are we offering this particular training now?’ This reflective pause — built into coordination rather than bolted on — is what the school transmits to students: that excellence is not only technical but contextual.
This orientation extends into the classroom. As Pastry Professor María Gabriela Vera (2026) articulates, ‘the recipe is not the final objective but the means for understanding a technical process with global impact. The student stops being an executor and becomes a resource manager, connecting high technique with ecosystem sustainability.’ The contextual awareness is measurable: purchase lists are reviewed for seasonality; total ingredient use is built into class assessment; waste is tracked jointly with the university’s sustainability department.
Student voices make the pedagogical shift legible.. Laura Michelangeli (2026) captures the framework’s logic directly: ‘While other schools focus on techniques and international trends, we are learning to master techniques that originate in Venezuela. I want to be a cook conscious of her environment — where our food comes from, its history, our culture.’ Leonardo Hernández (2026) frames it as labour market positioning: ‘LAGA identifies the ancestral knowledge of communities across the country and brings it to us. Those restaurants that are reviving Venezuelan flavours look for people who share that passion — and I believe that is us.’ Jeyverson Ommy Solórzano (2026) adds a methodological dimension: ‘My competitive advantage is not only that I know how to cook — I can tell the story behind each Venezuelan ingredient. I aspire to be a chef who helps preserve our culture.’
Across these testimonials, a consistent reframing emerges: territorial knowledge as technical competence, and the student as cultural steward rather than technical executor. The framework’s value, in students’ own terms, lies precisely in the competitive advantage that place-based knowledge confers.
That student orientation did not emerge from the outset. When LAGA first launched, Venezuelan gastronomy carried little market recognition; external advertising was deliberately understated. The school focused instead on an internal alignment strategy — exposing enrolled students to local culinary heritage and allowing embodied learning and word-of-mouth to carry the programme’s reputation. This strategy has produced a self-selecting student body arriving already oriented toward the school’s values.
Beyond the classroom, a 2025 event illustrated the pillars in practice. At COME 2025 — LAGA’s first gastronomy congress, held across the UCAB Montalbán campus in October — the Plaza del Estudiante hosted a regional products fair bringing together producers and culinary representatives from Amazonas, the Llanos, Margarita, Sucre, Yaracuy, Mérida, and beyond. When Amazonian spiders were presented, two responses became visible simultaneously: for some students, an encounter with unfamiliar ingredients and practices; for others, personal recognition, connecting what was presented to childhood memories and regional belonging. The event activated La gastronomía construye país and Diversidad y no-hegemonía at once — outward-facing curiosity and inward-facing recognition.
The influence of LAGA’s approach is becoming visible in peer institutions. After the school’s launch, Universidad Metropolitana opened its own culinary school, and Universidad Monte Ávila followed with a gastronomy programme on campus. Sahmkow is careful to credit earlier pioneers — ‘we’re not the absolute [first]’ — but observes that ‘a lot of other schools are using [the pillars]and are emulating the positioning.’ We cannot claim a clean causal line, but the used future of Eurocentric culinary education appears to be losing some of its structuring grip in the Venezuelan field, and a visible alternative is becoming a shared reference point.
5. Gastronomy as an interdisciplinary field
Another transversal axis has emerged through LAGA’s institutional embedding: interdisciplinarity. Being inside a university generates productive epistemic cross-pollination. Collaborations to date include the design school (a workshop on plating and composition), the social science faculty FACES (a gastronomy management degree currently in development), sociology (the COME research table on food systems), and architecture (kitchen equipment design). A biomaterials project — COME-biomateriales — has drawn food systems thinking into material science. Sahmkow describes this traffic as formative for the curriculum designers themselves: ‘sharing constantly with other disciplines helps those of us who design the programmes have a broader vision when creating’ — and, in turn, spreads LAGA’s approach and pillars into adjacent faculties.
The same porosity is visible in Thailand, where an increasing number of people are crossing into hospitality from fashion, activism, creative industries, or family businesses — bringing non-culinary knowledge frameworks into how they teach, perceive food, design spaces, and create experiences. Hoonchamlong illustrates this through his work with Seeds Journey, a youth women-led indigenous collective from the Akha community in Chiang Rai, co-led by Kanlaya Chermue, that uses food as a medium for communicating identity and culture through dining experiences, workshops, and field sessions. The collective maintains a written archive of Akha food culture and seed preservation practices, combining environmental activism with eco-tourism and drawing in families across generations. ‘They have never done any hospitality,’ Hoonchamlong notes, ‘but have connected with chefs to learn from their practices — the way they run dinners.’ The collaboration inverts the usual question: not whether these women are ‘really’ practitioners, but what formal education would need to look like to be useful to them — and to learn from them. This is precisely what the Diversidad y no-hegemonía pillar points toward: not simply expanding who enters the kitchen, but expanding whose knowledge systems the kitchen is organised around.
These examples — from Caracas and Chiang Rai alike — return us to the original design question: what does a sustainability-oriented exit profile for a gastronomy student actually require? Answering it forced LAGA to confront a prior assumption — that the practitioner being trained was already legible, already defined. The classical model offers a clear image: trained in a professional kitchen, credentialed against a recognised canon. The framework dissolved that image. The five practitioners who headlined the 30 January 2023 public launch — from Ecuador, Mexico, Chile, Thailand, and Argentina — had each arrived at high-impact sustainability practice through food systems work, design, activism, and life-design choices. Formal culinary credentials were part of some trajectories and absent from others. What they shared was not a training path but a disposition: treating gastronomy as a field that touches labour, land, culture, and health simultaneously.
The interdisciplinary turn is also measurable. At the Basque Culinary Center, the Master’s in Gastronomic Sciences has across ten cohorts shifted from a predominantly food science and culinary profile toward students from law, communications, anthropology, design, and engineering (see Figure 3). Díaz del Castillo, who moved through BCC first as a student and later as a professor, describes this as situated intelligence taking institutional form: the capacity to move between established canons and lived context, treating that movement as generative. The kitchen, it seems, is opening — not only to the world’s ingredients and cultures, but to the world’s disciplines.
Figure 3. Master’s in Gastronomic Sciences (Basque Culinary Center, Mondragon Unibertsitatea) profile evolution 2016-2026
Note: Bars show each cohort’s composition as a percentage share; students were classified by their foundational discipline. Cohort sizes: 2016–2017, 12; 2017–2018, 18; 2018–2019, 17; 2019–2020, 14; 2020–2021, 19; 2021–2022, 19; 2022–2023, 16; 2023–2024, 20; 2024–2025, 22; 2025–2026, 20. Source: programme admissions records.
This emerging reality — gastronomy as a porous, interdisciplinary field — is itself a prefigurative future, in the sense that Candy and Kornet (2019) call ‘experiential futures’: making an alternative present tangible and inhabitable before it is institutionalised. The LAGA classroom and the Seeds Journey collective are not merely working toward pluriversal food futures — they are, in small and fragile ways, already inhabiting them.
6. Method and limits
We write as practitioners reflecting on shared work, not as researchers studying someone else’s initiative. Our account is partial, shaped by what we needed the collaboration to have achieved. Two methodological constraints are worth naming: coordination across three geographies and two institutions carried translation challenges; and the pillar formulations that proved most generative — Servicio para el equipo and Diversidad y no-hegemonía — emerged only through iteration, not from the initial interpretation of the 5Ps.
The Thai side of the exchange was carried by a single practitioner whose Bo.lan–Wasteland trajectory offered a particular, not a representative, window. Even across the Global South, food system structures and cultural relationships to gastronomy differ significantly, and those differences shape how any framework can be applied.
Three limitations follow from this. First, sustainability is interpreted and enacted very differently across individuals and organisations — there is no single application; for future iterations, a materiality assessment should be incorporated in order to prioritize sustainability actions that are most impactful. Second, the insights informing the framework are experience-based and do not claim compatibility with the majority or scalability across the sector; however, across experiences globally (Nigeria, Peru, Spain, Thailand), crossing the 5Ps as a matrix of analysis of the food system has proven intuitive and easier to grasp than the SDGs framework. Third, the framework was designed for establishments with the structure and resources to track their actions and impact; it is less immediately accessible to those without that capacity. A more inclusive iteration would require co-creation with the actors it seeks to serve.
The South-to-South frame also deserves scrutiny. Thailand and Venezuela share peripheral positions relative to the Northern canon but occupy different positions within the global political economy, and those differences shape what knowledge transfer is genuinely possible. We are wary of romanticising Global South solidarity in ways that paper over real asymmetries.
The tension between the South-to-South frame and the European institutional context is a matter of epistemology and representation. LAGA answers it by bringing to the centre contextual knowledge and practices and their technical and cultural complexity. The shift away from Eurocentric gastronomy education is not being proposed from European institutions outward, but — with rigour and practical grounding — from within the Global South.
7. Kitchens that open to the world
The work of building different futures is slow and requires sustained institutional infrastructure that is hard to maintain. The Europe-centric model persists in student aspirations, professional networks, and global circuits of prestige that still centre Paris, Tokyo, and New York. But four years into a modest collaboration in Caracas, an alternative is visible: institutionalised at LAGA, extended into teaching and events, and beginning to shape peer institutions.
Sahmkow is careful not to overstate what formal education can do. ‘It doesn’t have to be a formal education on gastronomy. Of course it helps — but sometimes it helps to go through that path with other people, and other types of training.’ The future is not necessarily one in which gastronomy university programmes become the only legitimate entry point, but one in which those programmes are permeable enough to incorporate, validate, and learn from knowledge arriving from outside them — from Seeds Journey, from the diaspora, from disciplines that have never called themselves gastronomic.
That permeability is itself a pluriversal proposition: following Escobar (2018) and Feukeu (2024), a futures orientation grounded not in the universalisation of one model of culinary excellence but in the coexistence of many ways of knowing food, feeding people, and building territory. Simon-Sasyk named the image we want to close on during our March 2026 conversation: ‘kitchens that open to the world, and a world that opens to the kitchens’ — gastronomy legible as a social and intellectual field, embedded in a place and in a time, ‘not like a creative exercise of a lone genius.’ Is that the gastronomy education system we are building toward, or only the one we are beginning to imagine?
Affiliation:
Estefania Simon-Sasyk, Constanza Díaz del Castillo, Mónica Sahmkow, Dharath Hoonchamlong
Mycelium Gastronomy Network / UCAB-CIAP (LAGA) / Basque Culinary Center / Independent Scholar
estef@myceliumgastronomy.com / csdiazdelcastillo@bculinary.com / h.dharath@gmail.com / msahmkow@ucab.edu.ve
References
Chimal, A., & Ramos, J. (2026). Reimagining the hemisphere: From imperial narratives to pluriversal futures in Latin America and the Caribbean [Call for contributions]. Journal of Futures Studies Perspectives Symposium, Tamkang University Press.
Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: Futures thinking for transforming. Foresight, 10(1), 4–21. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680810855991
Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.
United Nations. (2015). Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development (A/RES/70/1). United Nations General Assembly.
Willett, W., Rockström, J., Loken, B., Springmann, M., Lang, T., Vermeulen, S., … Murray, C. J. L. (2019). Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. The Lancet, 393(10170), 447–492. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.
FAO. (2017). The Future of Food and Agriculture: Trends and Challenges. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Feukeu, K. E. (2024). A pluriversal definition of Futures Studies: Critical futures studies from margin to centre. In R. Poli (Ed.), Handbook of Futures Studies (pp. 80–97). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Candy, S., & Kornet Weber, K. (2019). Turning foresight inside out: An introduction to ethnographic experiential futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 23(3), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.6531/JFS.201903_23(3).0002
Disclosure: Use of AI
All intellectual content in this article — including the framework design, theoretical framing, arguments, case analysis, and conclusions — originates with the co-authors. Claude (Anthropic, Claude Opus 4.6) was used to organise and render author-provided source material into draft prose. Claude did not generate analysis, arguments, or conclusions independently. The co-authors reviewed, revised, and take full responsibility for all content. This use is disclosed in accordance with JFS policy on AI. Source material provided to Claude included: (1) a framing conversation among the four co-authors on 27 March 2026, including a Gemini-generated transcript; (2) 2022–2023 project documentation (kick-off and recommendations decks, the online-module pitch and structure, the live-session brief, the communications plan, and the internal retrospective); and (3) the module bibliography. Direct quotations from co-authors are drawn from the 27 March 2026 transcript. Key prompts included: ‘help me adapt this draft to what actually was done in the project (all info in the folders)’; ‘this is the framing conversation we had, can you adapt what’s needed based on the call basis?’; and ‘adapt to character limit.’ Full prompt logs and all other source materials are available on request.
A second session (29 April 2026) used Claude to integrate practitioner contributions received after the initial draft: written responses from Lilian El Kareh (Academic Coordinator, LAGA) on the operational application of the five pillars; testimonial responses from students Laura, Ommy, and Leonardo (collected by Mónica Sahmkow via direct inquiry); a faculty account from María Gabriela Vera on pedagogical methodology; and Sahmkow’s notes on interdisciplinarity as a second transversal axis. The prompt for this session was: ‘ integrate Monica’s contribution [pasted quotes and testimonials]as the landing of the theoretical framework.’ Full prompt logs are available on request.
Interviews
Student participants provided written informed consent for the use of their testimonials in this publication.
| Name | Position | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Laura Michelangeli | Student, Culinary Certification, LAGA | 20 April 2026 |
| Jeyverson Ommy Solórzano | Student, Culinary Certification, LAGA | 20 April 2026 |
| Leonardo Hernández | Student, Culinary Certification, LAGA | 20 April 2026 |
| Lilian El Kareh | Academic Coordinator, LAGA | 20 April 2026 |
| María Gabriela Vera | Professor, LAGA | 21 April 2026 |
| On June 24, two earthquakes struck Venezuela — 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude, La Guaira and Caracas. Our colleague Mónica Sahmkow and LAGA are on the ground: cooking and organizing.
Food is the first social fabric to function again after a disaster. If you can contribute: Fe y Alegría — Zelle: donaciones@feyalegria.edu.ve Dividendo Voluntario para la Comunidad — Zelle: administracion@dividendovoluntario.org Jesuitas en Venezuela — Zelle: donate@unidosenlamision.org · Memo: Emergencia 2026 Outside the US: I Love Venezuela Foundation (gofundme.com/f/emergency-relief-for-venezuela-earthquake-victims) · Hogar Bambi by card (hogarbambi.org/donar-ahora) · Fundana (gofundme.com/f/fundana-emergencia-venezuela) |
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