Content — Natalia Ramírez

Sobremesa is a community platform dedicated to local food research and education in Panama. Our mission is to bridge the gap between sustainable agriculture and the culinary world.

Food Index

In an effort to put Panama’s natural ecosystem on the map, we are building a digital index that identifies our local farmers, producers and ingredients. Our index eases the challenge of sourcing local foods for chefs and consumers, allowing them to find unique, heirloom ingredients in their respective climates and regions across the country. Updated regularly to reflect the changes in seasons, our index will show where farmers are, what they’re growing and what farming practices they use.

Community Platform

The website that hosts our index also functions as an educational platform for editorial content, engaging our audience with unique stories to connect us to the lives and worlds of our featured land stewards and native ingredients. Recipes and their origin stories are an integral part of the platform.

Featured stories are built around the concept that being able to hold knowledge about our local food ecologies is the cornerstone of a new sustainable food culture.

Seasonal Dinner Series

To bring our ecosystem to life, Sobremesa hosts food gatherings around the same ingredients, farmers, chefs, stories and recipes featured in our index. We believe that direct engagement and physical interactions with our community is essential in connecting consumers to our vision of local food.

Sobremesa is, all in all, about food—food across climates and landscapes, food throughout culture, food for and with community.

In Spanish, the term sobremesa means the time spent gathered around the table, in conversation, after a meal has been shared. We want to add our own meaning to that:

Sobremesa is about changing the way that we talk about food so that origin, community and the environment are always at the center of our conversations and of our tables.

Currently (re)reading: Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara