The Maaleipä Challenge
IHME Helsinki 2024Campaign - Helsinki, September 2024
The Maaleipä Challenge invites all home bakers, bakeries, restaurants, schools, and communities in Finland to create bread recipes that combine the well-being of land, water and people’s guts. The best recipes will be awarded at the Maaleipä ceremony at Kellohalli in Helsinki on 21 September 2024.
About this Report
We are looking for bread recipes that improve the future of the soil
The Maaleipä Challenge invites all home bakers, bakeries, restaurants, schools, and communities in Finland to create bread recipes that combine the well-being of land, water and people’s guts. The best recipes will be awarded at the Maaleipä ceremony at Kellohalli in Helsinki on 21 September 2024.
WHY?
The health of the soil and the health of us humans are one. Monoculture farming impoverishes the ground and spoils our waters, and nutritionally poor food harms our digestive systems. Yet, we can also be a source for change!
HOW?
By making bread out of nutritionally rich ingredients that have been grown in a way that nurtures both people and land. Stick your hands in the dough, let your creativity rise, and submit your Maaleipä recipe to the contest by 1 September 2024!
Maa = Finnish for soil, dirt, earth, surface of Earth, ground, country, land
Leipä = Finnish for bread
A group of researchers and experts have been involved in planning the Maaleipä Challenge. In the following videos, they describe from their perspectives how the health of soil, water, climate, and gut are inseparable.
Here’s how to make a Maaleipä:
Experiment with a variety of ingredients
Bake with diverse and nutritious ingredients: ancient cereal varieties, nutrient-rich plants, seeds, nuts, and wild herbs. You can find a list of suggestions below, but do use your own creativity, too!
Choose ingredients that care for the soil
Favour ecologically and locally grown ingredients that have been produced by farming methods that nurture the soil, such as regenerative farming. Find out what’s on offer in your immediate surroundings and what ingredients could grow there in the future.
Create a diverse bread culture
Give a fresh look to old classics, draw inspiration from different regions or invent something completely new! We hope to receive a large variety of different kinds and shapes of bread, bringing out the diversity of the bread cultures – and bread bakers – found in Finland.
The Maaleipä Challenge is a nationwide challenge contest and work of art realised by the London-based artist duo Cooking Sections and the contemporary art commissioning agency IHME Helsinki. The challenge promotes the collective wellbeing of soil, waters, and people.
Cooking Sections
Cooking Sections is a London-based artistic practice that examines the systems that organise the world through food. Their CLIMAVORE project asks how to eat as humans change climates. As new human-made “seasons” blur the lines between spring, summer, autumn and winter, and annual monsoons; periods of polluted seas, soil exhaustion or fertiliser runoff are instead increasingly shaping our foodscapes. Addressing the intensive, extractive practices that lead to them, CLIMAVORE imagines new platforms that can nourish new horizons.
Find out more about the campaign - https://www.maaleipa.fi/en/
Find out more about the Helsinki weather station here.
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IHME Helsinki
Finland