These students want you to cook with the locals

It’s not about eating. It’s not even about cooking. It’s about learning and socializing. Students from University of Copenhagen (UCPH) and School of Design (KADK) created Cook With a Local to bring unique experiences and connect people all over the world through cooking.

Cook With a Local matches home cooks and professional chefs with those who are interested in learning, and having a good time while they are doing it. The platform already has a large following, with 500+ likes on their Facebook page.

”It’s not just for tourists, it can also be for locals, who want to have someone to eat with, or if you have just moved to another city, you can go and meet people in your area and eat with them or host a class to have people at your place. There’s so many aspects in how you can use it,” says Cook With a Local developer Peter Poulsen.

Social aspect is key

It all started out as a research project between UCPH’s Department of Anthropology and KADK’s Institute of Cultural Analysis when Inger Gislesen and Christopher Pilgrim got invited for a dinner by an Arabic grocery store owner.

”One day we were still doing fieldwork and we went to this small vegetable store and we started talking to this Arabic owner in his fifties and he suddenly was like ‘I’m gonna cook for you and I’m gonna teach you how to make my secret recipe’, so he took us back in his store in this really, really, really small dirty kitchen and started getting people to get stuff from the store and started cooking,” tells Inger.

She also points out that cooking together creates a whole different kind of experience for people unlike just coming for dinner or serving a table because it creates a different bond and there’s more equality when you do something together.

”That’s the ice-breaker because if you go to someone’s place and just sit down and eat, there’s no conversation, but when you start making food and there’s no conversation you start chopping carrots or peeling potatoes and then you go back to the conversation. So when you actually end up at the table ready to eat, the conversation’s always going,” adds Christopher.

From home cooks to professional chefs

The hosts are free to set their own price for a cooking class. The minimum charge is USD 5 = DKK 30. For now the price range is from USD 8 = DKK 48 to USD 3650 = DKK 21,900 and the website offers classes all over the globe – Barbados, Italy, Germany, India, USA, Dubai, and many others.

The website is also friendly for various food preferences and indicates whether a meal is suitable for vegetarians, vegans, and people with different allergies and religious diets.

Anyone can sign up to host a cooking class – from home cooks to professional chefs. If you wish to host a class, you have to sign up with your PayPal account. If you wish to book a class, you can just sign up.

Here is the Cook With a Local website.

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