Can Cook/ Takeaways

Published: April 2010

ISBN: 978-0-9564649-0-3

Project type: words, books

Print run: 1,000

With some of the country’s most impoverished neighbourhoods on its doorstep, Can Cook is aiming to end food poverty in the process.

Originally operating as a community café, Can Cook founder Robbie Davison soon realised that there was a glut of people living in South Liverpool without basic food preparation skills, relying on cheap processed food and takeaways for sustenance.

Can Cook evolved from café to educator. It started by teaching parents basic cooking skills then eventually moved on to teaching school kids too. Before long it realised that this positive action was a drop in the ocean, and shifted focus on becoming a food supplier, changing people’s attitudes to food, one meal at a time.

Can Cook produced the book Can Cook, Will Cook!, the first project we worked together on, with us acting in a publishing consultancy capacity. After that came book two; Healthier, which combined good eating with holistic care tips, exercise plans, meditation and wellbeing content.

For its third book, Can Cook Studio approached to us to help compile and create the official Can Cook cookbook; Takeaways, a recipe book to teach even the most amateur of cooks how to make fresh healthy alternatives to takeaway classics.

Can Cook enlisted the talents of Tony Evans and Richard Simon, creating healthy alternatives to popular takeaway meals, which Environmental Health tested for sugar content, salt levels etc.

Where we came in was in tying it all together. We summed up the aims and mission of Can Cook, and introduced each section of the book with a little cultural and gastro background on each of the cuisines detailed (a chapter on Indian, on Mexican, on Italian and so on).

Finally, we finished the book by detailing Can Cook’s partners, exploring the sense of community that drives the project, and the reasons why the book was made in the first place.

Working with Robbie and the team was a joy, and is a relationship that we still have to this day.