Village Table ends a successful season

Despite brisk winds and ominous clouds hanging over North Philadelphia Thursday afternoon, members of Amber Art and Design, a Philadelphia art collective, hurried around the mosaic-tiled plaza known as Meditation Park, hanging strings of lights and driving tiki torches into the ground.

It was closing night of the Village Table: a series of four-course communal meals that are part social experiment, part art project, and part community-health intervention.

The monthly pop-up feasts on the 2500 block of North Alder Street for anywhere from 50 to 100 guests were conceived by Amber Art and Design as part of a residency at the Village of Arts and Humanities. You can't buy your way into these meals: Diners must contribute volunteer hours or a family recipe.

"Sharing a personal family recipe is a very intimate experience, and we value that," Amber Art's Keir Johnston said. "We collect recipes as a way of getting a census of the community, what their culinary reality is."

In collecting those recipes, they found that the reality was fairly bleak.

As Amber Art's Ernel Martinez put it: "This community is a food desert. In Philadelphia, there's a 50 percent risk of African American adults to have hypertension. And, in this neighborhood, there's not many options around food."

Over its five-month residency, Amber Art tried to change that, by working with community members to update their family recipes and collaborating with them on the monthly meals.

The group also brought in dietitians from the nonprofit Food Trust, who helped the home cooks make such adjustments as substituting whole grains for processed ones and applesauce for sugar.

The cooks' response, said Food Trust community education coordinator Nyssa Entrekin, "was a lot of surprise - like, 'Oh, I didn't realize I could use less sugar or salt in this recipe and still have it taste this good.' "

Those remixed recipes formed the menu for the monthly Village Table dinners. Thursday night's menu started with roasted pepitas and spiced cider, followed by red-bean and cabbage stew, grilled corn lasagna, and gingerbread cake with roasted apples.

The goal, Johnston said, is to ignite interaction and conversations about healthy eating.

Maurice Williams, a caterer who lives down the block and cooked for the dinners, said it had already changed his approach to cooking - and his outlook on his neighbors. "This can be a really good interconnector of the residents here," he said. "If you eat together, you can open up so many things."

The project is part of SPACES, an artist-residency program at the village. It is funded by the Knight Foundation, ArtPlace America, and the Local Initiatives Support Corp.

There are two other SPACES resident artists. One is King Britt, a music producer and DJ who set up a recording studio and radio station on site and made an album with neighborhood musicians. They are having an album-release event Saturday.

The other is People's Paper Co-op, a papermaking initiative with a social-justice bent that has been running expungement workshops and teaching papermaking to ex-offenders, who turn their shredded records into artworks.

Each group of resident artists was matched with neighborhood activists, artists, and collaborators, and was given a rowhouse on Alder as a temporary home base.

Lillian Dunn, program manager for SPACES, said the block was radically transformed during the artists' stay.

"There's something really amazing about coming onto the street, and maybe there's bike-powered papermaking from the People's Paper Co-op, and then there's music playing from King Britt's place, and then down the street Amber Art is grilling. The block feels exciting," she said.

She expects the projects generated by these residencies to endure in various iterations. The paper co-op will move into a storefront on Germantown Avenue, and the recording studio will continue to be a community resource.

The Village Table will also have a legacy. Amber Art plans to leave behind a business plan, cookbook, and functioning kitchen, with the hope that Williams will take up the mantle.