The Mindful Kitchen Project Team

Technological University Dublin

The Mindful Kitchen Project Team (staff team): Annette Sweeney (Team Lead), Annette Sweeney (Senior Lecturer in Culinary Arts) and project creator

Building Sustainability from Within

Integrating mindfulness as a pedagogy for sustainability education to support understanding, competence and action, is recommended (Wamsler et al., 2018). The mindful kitchen project is an innovative approach in culinary arts education promoting ‘sustainability from within’ in taught modules.

Modules:

- 2019: The Mindful Kitchen Health and Wellbeing module was the first of its kind globally in culinary education which uses a mindful approach to working and being in the kitchen and heightens chefs’ awareness of self-care within the kitchen.

- Using this module as a foundation, additional modules were co-created by students and lecturer teams:

• During COVID-19, a team of 14, created The Mindful Kitchen: Creativity and Social Gastronomy module to further explore their creativity, embed positive education principles and give back to those in need through food.
• In 2024, a team of 11 co-created a tailored module for embedding an applied food sustainability approach in the curriculum, The Mindful Kitchen: Creative Food Sustainability.

Reference: Wamsler, C., Brossmann, J., Hendersson, H. et al. (2018) Mindfulness in sustainability science, practice, and teaching.  Sustain Science13, 143–162. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-017-0428-2

Top 3 Learnings

1. For us, using mindful pedagogy embeds ‘sustainability from within’, the foundation for sustainability education.
2. We suggest that a sustainability mindset can be developed through mindful creativity and application activities.
3. Our approach promotes student wellbeing while also positively influencing people, planet, and industry partnerships.