"The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind stuff. Human food is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats.” Ludwig Feuerbach, 1850. As professionals who engage in research with communities on similar paths, we are hungry to add our expertise and experience, but wonder if today´s university welcomes magical thinking, shamanism as wicked ways, and builds on our relationships with “nature”, each other, communities and social and experiential learning? We consider the projects that are already transforming teaching realities with 'wicked' methods and those still in the making of becoming wicked. To do so, we welcome direct contact, natural experiences, and playfulness to activate all senses in order to feel fully alive. Feeding the wickedness to live better is an invitation to promote closeness and establish interconnectedness. By recalibrating our learning and teaching methods, we can reclaim identity and get to the story behind things. Our work travels from the garden classrooms of the Life Lab in Santa Cruz, California to, university gardens in the UK and community gardens in Canada, as well as a food sovereignty stop on the Azores Islands (Hernández, 2016). We suggest promoting short-chain ceremonies that allow us to rebuild awareness, create multiple paradigms, and promote collective magic. Think about the French term 'terroir' to understand this. It includes notions of 'authenticity', 'tradition', 'place' which are directly connected to cultural values and forms of preparing food. Participation in community gardens strengthens communal ties by creating a sense of identity in a collective space and reflects an active community interested in surpassing current socio-economic challenges (Hubay & Powell 2000). So we think of the importance of feeding our bodies as well as our minds with multidisciplinary understandings of the world around us. We think about fostering collective problem solving and cooperation, as well as awareness and interdependence, to not only gain knowledge about the physical world, but also meaningful tools to become active and responsible actors (Louv, 2005) in the construction of healthy, empowered and sovereign communities (Agarwal, 2014) capable of choosing their basic right to access food. Together, we will explore our experiences of hands-on community 'activism', outdoor learning, gardens as classrooms, food security and how we are beginning to know wickedness.

Agarwal, B. (2014). Food sovereignty, food security and democratic choice: critical contradictions, difficult conciliations, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6), 1247-1268. Hernández, P. A. (2016). Discussing food sovereignty ‐ The case of the autonomous region of the Azores in Portugal. Unpublished masters thesis, University of Siegen. Hubay, S. & Powell, J. (2000). You Can’t Start a Revolution on an Empty Stomach: Food Security and Community Mobilization in Peterborough. In Inspiring Change: Healthy Cities and Community in Ontario, pp.124-135, 216-219. Ontario Healthy Community Coalition. Louv, R. (2005) Last child in the woods: saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books.