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One of the great things about ASTRA project is encouragement of free, creative inquiry and exchange of ideas, not only in the academic community but also with stakeholders in public and civil society sectors. We all collectively carry this out through series of research visits to the European universities that are beneficiaries of this project.

After the three months I had spent working as a doctoral researcher at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Social Work, I went on my first secondment in Finland. There I worked for three months as a visiting researcher at the University of 闯测惫盲蝉办测濒盲, located at the heart of this beautiful country of great Nordic forests that cover 86 percent of its land area, interspersed with more than 180,000 clear water lakes. For the lover of wild nature as I am, that was already fascinating enough, but there was much more to it. Hundreds of thousands of reindeer and elks are roaming freely through the woods, scratching their huge antlers against evergreen trees. As those ruminant herbivores digest mainly wild plant food, some Finns half-jokingly told me that reindeer and elk meat is part of the vegetarian diet in Finland. Reindeer that I saw on my way through Lapland, the largest and northernmost region of Finland, are small semi-domesticated animals that could stubbornly occupy the road refusing to move even on loud sirens of annoyed drivers. But the real king and queen of the Nordic forests is the mighty moose, that you don鈥檛 want to see abruptly springing up from the woods dangerously approaching the road while you are driving at full speed. I extend my deepest adoration to this beautiful animal, the sacred game of Nordic hunters who share the heavenly gift of the elk鈥檚 meat with their fellow villagers in the traditional feasts celebrated to this day. I earnestly hope that I would get a chance to see this gorgeous animal in its natural habitat.

In the first month of my research visit to Finland, I met most of my friends and fellow ASTRA early stage researchers (ESRs), first at the Environmental Sustainability Transition Workshop in Oulu, 鈥渢he capital of northern 厂肠补苍诲颈苍补惫颈补鈥�, and then a few days later at the Social Sustainability Transition Workshop in 闯测惫盲蝉办测濒盲. On a clear sunny day suffused with bright orange, yellow and reddish colors of the autumn leaves, our working group leaders from the Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE) guided us through the Hupisaaret Islands (鈥淔un Islands鈥�) City Park located in the delta of the River Oulu that flows into the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea. The park is intersected with winding streamlets full of fallen decaying trunks and branches, but impeccably tended so that one couldn鈥檛 tell it from a wild place had it not been located in the city.

However, food poverty and charitable food aid programs in food secure Finland and Slovenia is what I research, and the rest of my working time in Finland I used to visit some among hundreds of charitable food aid organizations in the country. My second supervisor connected me with the managers of those organizations which flawlessly facilitated my field research with their collegial cooperation. Together with workers of Yhteinen 辫枚测迟盲 Surplus Food Terminal run by the City and Parish Union of Vantaa, I hopped on a refrigerated van wearing yellow vest and working gloves to experience first-hand the whole process of collecting the surplus food donations from retailers, wholesalers and factories in the city of Vantaa, one of the four municipalities in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. So-called welfare state in Europe and the rest of the world has been under such a violent attack in the last four decades, that even a rich country like Finland has been supplementing its basic social security benefits with food bags and parcels from charitable donations since the early 1990s.

In the Yhteinen 辫枚测迟盲鈥檚 network of partner organizations they use food as a tool to organize community building meetings where people cook, serve and eat meals together. However, they are primarily there to talk with each other and find a way to overcome their everyday problems and bring positive change in their own life and the community as a whole. That is a way in which surplus food could be used as a community building tool and not as a substitution or a supplement for the universal basic social security guarantees below which people could not fall, like the social insurance and assistance benefits indexed to living costs, affordable housing programs, universal health care and public education, universal child benefits, basic pensions and other universal public benefits and services. And that is what I have been researching, speaking and writing about in collaboration with the wonderful people I have met through this great ASTRA project.