September 6, 2026
For the last 18 months, East of Moon has been experimenting with a new way of coming together; community dinner parties. Every few months we invite a group of people through our network of friends and Fellow Travellers to spend an evening over a home-cooked meal and share food, drink and conversation on topics and ideas that are relevant to our explorations.
The individuals who have participated in our dinner parties are varied, and might not otherwise have the opportunity to sit around the same table. The desire to host these events comes from a place of wanting more meaningful connections across disciplines and communities. Programmers and poets, artists and anthropologists, and a whole range of folk in between, rub shoulders and pass the butter.
Our latest experimentation in this field of research took place at the end of August. For this iteration we tried out having a defined theme; The Poetry of Economics. We wanted to see what the intentional juxtaposition of these seemingly disparate practices could result in. Both areas involve speculative thinking, imagined outcomes, and concise expression. We seem to be increasingly interested in the economics of artistic output, but are there some things that should be applied in reverse?
The methodology of this experiment consists of creating a guestlist, designing and sending invites, researching and building a menu and shopping and cooking for the meal. In addition, this time we collected wildflowers and decorated the room, commissioned dessert (thank you, Lilý), and invented a welcome cocktail. While some parts of this process are becoming streamlined through experience, it is still always a lot of work to feed and host people. Further experimentation with menu creation in the future may lighten this load, but it is also enjoyable to invest labour into making something that will go on to nourish others.
Our guests at the Poetry of Economics dinner were welcomed to the evening with an introduction from Arnar, before taking part in an activity facilitated by Marina Tselepi. We shared a meal of aubergine tomato pasta, green beans with toasted almonds and white bean and fennel salad, and finished with basque cheesecake and strawberry coulis.
While dinner can of course just be dinner, it seems like a meaningful exercise to do as has been done for thousands of years of human history and bring people together in this way. With many pressing problems to solve in society, both large and small in scale, conversation across fields, disciplines and practices is needed more than ever. And it stands to say that those engaged in creatively engaging with these challenges should at the very least not be hungry when they do so.
If you would like East of Moon to facilitate a dinner party for your organisation or community, or if you would like to attend our next meal, write to us at hello@eastofmoon.com.
