Food and Sensuality: a celebration with We Feast
Welcome to our “Redefining Luxury” interview series. Our main aim here is to contemplate the essence of luxury and explore its many forms and definitions. Through open conversations with creators, entrepreneurs, and passionate individuals we talk about the process behind designing luxurious, pleasurable, yet thoughtful creations and their importance in the modern world. In search of joy, marvel, and inspiration.
Next up: the bold and curious Clara & Alina of We Feast.
Clara & Alina host unique and exclusive experiences for seggs and food enthusiasts under the wings of We Feast, which they co-founded together mid-pandemic. Carefully selected bold and curious people are invited to explore themselves through immersive culinary adventures, revisited tantric workshops, and a refined space for intimacy. We connected on Instagram. Our similar thoughts on sensuality and food made us curious about each other and sparked a conversation.
From Goa to Berlin
The ladies behind We Feast both have been through quite a journey in their lifetimes before joining forces.
Alina has an academic background in humanities, arts, and psychology and a master's in cognitive science and philosophy and studied these in the Netherlands, Denmark, and France. In 2019, she quit her PhD to pursue an embodied approach to changing minds and transforming lives. In her practice he works with Tantra and Psychedelics to support individuals, couples and groups, who are ready to show up for themselves and tap into juicy intimacy with simply-being-alive.
Clara did her Masters at a business school in France, has broad experience in financial and investment advice for multiple subjects and individuals, real estate, entrepreneurship, since she’s been part of establishing three companies by her mid twenties. She also has a side project in Berlin called That’s Fucking Art which explores slow sex and art, and the merging of those two worlds, using art as an exploration tool with the active presence of art therapists, psychoanalysts, and artists.
Alina and Clara met in Goa, India at the Tantra Festival, where they clicked over the mutual feeling of connecting to a different idea of tantra than what was being practiced and taught. Alina was living in Berlin at the time, Clara in Paris, but they’ve stayed in touch.
“Clara reached out to me and said ‘I have an idea that I want to talk to you about’. We jumped on a skype call, where Clara proceeded to pitch me my own idea. We have both individually started processing the fact that that’s how they do tantra there and how that’s not for us. Does it have to be that way? I guess both of us answered that question with a “no” and we were individually working on an idea of what would a tantric event that we’d like to attend look like. I was calling it a retreat, Clara was calling it a festival, but the more we talked about it the more it became obvious that we were actually talking about the same thing and that we shared a vision.”
Clara and Alina met in Paris in the summer of 2020 to combine everything that made their hearts sparkle. The list included food, art, and most importantly sensuality and sexuality in their own way of exploring it. They started designing the webpage with juicy and bold in-your-face imagery, authentically daring to show up and express their style, while trusting that it will resonate with the right people. In the process of identity creation, Alina and Clara were thinking of names. We Feast hit the spot because it crystallised as something that merged the idea of a festival, a retreat, and the aspect of abundant food indulging and sensual feasts.
“We Feast is a very heart-centred project in the way that we communicate and the way we talk to people. We also have a newsletter where we journal and feature artists and neuroscientists, so we try to do something personal. Not really giving a shit about what people think about it, because the people who really resonate with us ultimately are the ones who’d love to attend our events.”
food and sensuality
“Alina and I are foodies. When you have a bite of something new, it can really put you in a trance-like state. Food experiences are so linked to your emotions, and it’s something that you literally merge with, it’s something from outside coming into your body. Your relationship with food is something very intimate. It’s similar to sexuality which can also put you in a trance state and take you out of your daily routine approach to things.
Also in a very neurological way, sexuality/sensuality and food trigger the same pleasure zone in the brain. They are both very fundamental human instincts. The reproductive system and the digestive system are really embodied in what we do. And the more we think about it, Alina & I realise how they overlap in many ways, even historically speaking. Like you wrote in your article about this subject, when you think of Greek orgies you think of people sensually eating grapes."
first feasts in the making
The first two events were planned for November 2020 in Berlin, and the application process was complete. The curation process for the Feast consists of forms to be completed followed by interviews, from which 44 people were selected for the first two events. Two weeks before the event, Germany was hit with severe pandemic restrictions, so the Feast had to be postponed. However, a good portion of the people who signed up for the first feast ended up attending once it became possible again, which was in March this year.
The first day consists of workshops where people are getting familiar, cuddling one another, really getting into their bodies, and already slowly shedding the different layers we all walk around with, really just becoming one with this kind of magical space.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen. We have a structure of the program, but it really becomes alive through people's participation and that’s something we cannot and do not want to control. And having these people there, even before we started any group-building process, people were bonding and talking, and a group feeling emerged. We were off to a great start. The day carried itself and it was exactly like what we hoped and wanted it to be, without beforehand projecting and expecting what it was exactly gonna look like. And the feedback was just out of this world amazing.”
FIRST COURSE: COCKTAIL PARTY
We Feast is otherwise a completely sober event with an aim to get high on natural hormones, but for the cocktail party, a glass of crémant is optional. People have a drink, walk around, flirt, all of that without using any words. So there’s this aspect of sense deprivation, in order to experience something very familiar from a new perspective and to find something surprising in it.
SECOND COURSE: PERFORMATIVE DINNER
The performative dinner consists of several bites each linked to different emotions and the chefs were really involved in the creation of that. There were numerous calls about which emotion should be appearing at what time, what taste connects to which emotion, and different moments of surprise. During this part of the dinner people are blindfolded. The aim is for people to be in a vulnerable state while being deprived of one of their senses. Each bite is only 1 spoon, including different textures and flavours, from which they can experience the entire landscape in their mouth while being blindfolded.
THIRD COURSE: DESSERT
A little break and breathing time intended to integrate the quite powerful experience follows the second course. The third course is the dessert, of course. This is where it becomes more of an immersive participatory food experience. People are asked to form into little groups that they feel good and comfortable in and they essentially take turns using each other as living body canvas. They are provided with artist palettes with high-quality ceremonial cacao chocolate paste, as well as other toppings. They have brushes available to them and they paint on each other on body canvases, play with the chocolate, lick the chocolate from each other and kind of create this ephemeral chocolate art piece.
Being full after this dining experience is not the point, so for those who are hungry, there’s a surrealistic food landscape buffet made by the chefs, with a lot of refills and treats as the night approaches.
“We really wanted to design something that they haven’t experienced before. One of those moments when you know you’re exactly with the right people, at the right place, at the right time in your life and this is exactly what you should be doing with your life right now. And this moment only happened because we tried something together that is really deeply close to our core. I think we didn’t expect to see how people get changed, saying that they’re gonna carry some of these memories for years. That’s really meaningful. Touching people. Touching their essence.”
Interestingly enough, Alina recalls that one of her first sexual experiences ever was a moment involving food. This was when she was a young girl and sex was still an undiscovered mystery, yet she was having these intensely enjoyable experiences with food that activated parts of her that were entirely new. It wasn’t until later that she understood that something else was going on.
“If somebody doubts that food is an intimate thing, just have them be fed by somebody else.”
future feasts
We Feast has two more events planned this year, both of them special in their own ways. The Feast on July 2/3rd will be the same concept as the one before, two days in a nice location in Berlin with 22 participants, this time with a film crew documenting parts of it for an ARTE documentary. The next one in December will be just outside of Berlin, will include more people and this time will also last a bit longer so the vibe will be a bit different. They are in the process of expanding on the collaborative aspect by joining forces with artists, sex-positive businesses, promoting them, and bringing more people together, and also giving them a platform to do their thing. Aside from that, going forward, We Feast continues to offer workshops at festivals, preparing custom-made experiences in various settings, and much more.
“We keep coming up with new ideas. It’s not like we’ve found a formula that works and now let’s just reproduce it. It’s alive and we love to be surprised when we create.”
true luxury
“The mix between being recognised and seen. When you enter an environment and you feel like you’re in the right place and you’re recognised as being in the right place, the right moment, or being seen. You can experience luxury in a lodge in Namibia in the desert, wherever you feel the luxury of the moment. It’s the fact that you recognise yourself as belonging to something. And it can be in nature or a different setting, where you feel like this is where you’re supposed to be.”
– Clara
“Sometimes it’s really nice to be in a swanky hotel and drink good champagne and have a Michelin star meal. I really enjoy those things. Also camping and making a simple meal on a gas cooker. They are both on the same level. They can both feel really luxurious. To me, it’s really simply about quality. The quality doesn’t depend on external factors like how much it costs. It’s about the quality of attention that has gone into creating this experience. It’s not about what you do and how much it costs, but how you do it. How much care and attention and love do you put into creating these experiences. I can put the gas stove on the ground and start cooking away, but I can also level it out first, put a circle of stones around it, make it look nice and pretty. It’s like that on every single level. I think oftentimes luxury in terms of expensive stuff tends to be higher quality, because the resources allow you to take the time that you need to make the best decisions on every single level when you’re not pressed for time as you are with fast food. The resource there is the expertise, the trained eye, the care, and the time. Time is money and that’s where it translates.”
– Alina