Em, Jane, Sophie, and Zartasha from the Education Committee this year have been hard at work collecting the diverse stories and artworks from youth across the City of Toronto to compile this year’s publication.
About Volume 3
In the Fall 2020, the TYFPC put out a call for artwork from youth (30 and under) that explores food justice, food access, family, ancestry, migration, familial recipes, and community. This included all forms of print media including: photography, paintings, collage, poetry, flash fiction, short essays, recipes, and more – anything and everything that calls us to laugh, mourn, learn, question, and/or celebrate our respective and collective roots and the worlds that bloom from them.
We then held a virtual arts night in late January to encourage youth in our community to come together, talk openly about food justice, and express their creativity. To learn more about the event and see some of the talented creations click here.
In the end, our call for artists received 40 submissions from youth as young as 6 years old!
About this year’s theme ‘Seeding Justice, Deepening Our Roots’
Our theme for this year’s volume of Mélange is ‘Seeding Justice, Deepening Our Roots.’ A seed is a representation of an entity that contains innate knowledge with all the information within its very DNA. It knows its needs, and sprouts in its own due time and natural course. Given the right environment, it is able to grow, establish firm roots and its cultivation and growth becomes a source of benefit to the ecosystem as a whole. We wanted youth to explore and engage with our theme both to express themselves and provide our readers a better understanding of the ways in which food, culture and art are connected to food sovereignty, food justice, food culture, foodways, culinary practices and food accessibility and insecurity, capturing the views and insights of youth.
About the journal
The Mélange Creative Arts Journal is intended to provide an opportunity for youth to meet at the intersections of our food system; exploring food, culture and their personal histories through a variety of visual and print media
Interested in contributing? Make sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay in the loop about our next round of submissions for Volume 4 of Mélange and Volume 5 of The Gathering: Youth Food Journal.
A big thank you to this year’s contributing artists and writers!
To learn more about them and their stories, make sure to read Volume 3 of Mélange.
| Alessandra Pozzuoli | Lauren Marchese | Norwin Anne |
| Andrea Josic | Lloyd Cousins | Octavia Andrade-Dixon |
| Catherine Le | Lorena Pimental | Olivia Ames |
| Debora Aguillon | Mahjabeen Kabir | Raiza Dela Peña |
| Desiree Anne Ramos Gabriel | Matt Yellow Horn | Rachel Le |
| Efes Cheung | Maxine Lee Ewaschuk | Reem Al-Wakeal |
| Frederick Martyn | Megan Giffen | Samantha Luchetta |
| Gloria Park | Mehdia Hassan | Sarah Touman |
| Hannah Backman | Nataly Tchamichian | Shelby Gibson |
| Jenny Tran | Noah Khan | Snack Witch (aka Joni Cheung) |
| Joscelyn Sevier | Maya Gonzales-Fuentes | Zara Rahman |
| Kyra Bingham | Meegan Lim |
A Big Thank You to Our Sponsors
Thank you to Carrot Cache, TakingITGlobal, the Government of Canada, and Canada Service Corps for generously supporting this project!
