Food is an excellent catalyst for acquaintance and cultural exchange. Eat & Meet uses food to foster relationships and warm hearts, presenting refugees as an indispensable part of modernity. The project turns renovated city buses into food trucks where refugees can cook and sell food from their culinary tradition, with proceeds going to the workers as well as integration projects.
A weekly recipe offered to customers is a pretext to evoke the culture, heritage and history of refugees. A ‘social space’ at the rear of the bus acts as meeting place, with the bus becoming a vehicle for branding, a landmark in the city that moves and connects people despite distances.
The jury remarked: “This multidimensional plan taps in on the age-old natural law that eating a stranger’s food is the first form of intercultural trust. The concept has great potential for scaling, and it also offers lots of opportunities.”