Who are you Nadia Sammut? 

I am the daughter of Reine and Guy Sammut, founders of the Fenière inn in the Luberon. I am intolerant of gluten and lactose since birth, but I am above all a very very positive person in life! 

Tell us about your journey?

I live with an immune imbalance for life. At the age of 10, doctors, who did not know my pathology at the time, told my parents that I had to eat like everyone else. What I did for 20 years, therefore poisoning myself and poisoning my immune system. 

When at 30 I fell really sick and everything became complicated, it allowed me to realize one thing: I had to live by being who I am!  That is to say a person with an imbalance, a person who must therefore seek to restore balance, to become master of himself and his body. This experience allowed me to build myself, by keeping only the good side of things, and to leave neither the ego nor the fear polluting my acute positivism! 

How do you get positive? 

The law of self-confiction! I have the chance and the difficulty of wanting to be only what I decided to be and I want to be positive! So I draw in memories, and remember joyful emotions to give me back to the heart. This is also what I like to bring to others. And then the campaign is an incredible place of resources; When you spend your hands with your hands in the ground, in the material, you are connected with real elements. 

Speaking of earth, You also manage the restaurant vegetable garden. So cooking, is there just one step? 

Cooking for me is, and it must be absolutely an extension of nature. Overproduction and overconsumption have transformed the content of our plates, and therefore the content of our emotions, making them intensive and disconnected from life. It is important, even major, that people find the awareness of this link between cooking and vegetable patch. 

I believe that real wisdom is to have time to make them give the best of themselves. This was the case with culture kitchens, region kitchens; They are only traditional because we had productions that allowed us to make certain dishes. Example, in Provence where slow terracotta cooks reigned, the dishes that simmered, like stuffed tomatoes. Today, we absolutely try to shorten time, while a tian, a packet foot, it must cook slowly to let the flavors are born.  Ultimately, the kitchen must be visceral.  It must take you to the body, make you want to understand, transmit and choose what you eat. 

You are the author of a free kitchen ©. WHAT IS THIS ?

Free cuisine is a movement that advocates inclusion. It’s not a kitchen without. When I started, we made the shortcut when talking about my kitchen as gluten -free. While no, I don't have gluten -free cuisine, I cook with the terroir, I will look for products from here to make my flours in my mill. I am inspired by nature that surrounds me to exercise my creativity. For example, here I work a dessert around the cocoa, and in this dessert, I do not put additional sugar, on the other hand when I put it on the table, I serve aside an unrefined coconut sugar, with a few seeds and spices. This is a way of saying: we can do without sugar, here is just the little sweet dose that makes you feel good, that's all. 

How did it come to you? 

All this is based on a constant reflection around taste, social inclusion, carbon footprint, etc. I create techniques, systems with my teams so that my dish has the flavor of this reflection there.

It is a gathering cuisine: it is tolerant, it is vibrant since I only work in lifetime, it is subtle because I do not mask tastes. I'm looking for raw, pure, end. It is a slow work that comes to seek body and mind, in tranquility, in serenity. 

It is a liberating serotonin. The taste for happiness in short. It supports the idea that eating, above all, it makes you happy. It’s extremely important to me, because it was a time when eating made me sick. Today, this world I have created is a world that welcomes me and with which I welcome others. 

Was it easy to set up such a kitchen? 

No it was not easy, when I was talking about gluten -free I was taken for an extraterrestrial. It is also a kitchen that requires emotional commitment, you have to be present and ask yourself the right questions. This is why we also have to be in training, in the support of teams and customers. When you go to the garden, the dessert must go up to your head, you get blooming trees, pollens, sap. This is what allows you to tell a story. This allows us to create a link, make awareness and support in the food transition. 

On this subject, you are about to create the first place of life of positive food. What is positive food? 

It is a conscience diet that takes into account all the parameters: environment, production, human work. This makes it possible to create natural and positive experiences for the eater since they do not come to create problems either on the digestive side or on the moral side. It is therefore a place at the crossroads of three paths: agriculture, food and health. What I would have dreamed of meeting when I was not well. 

What will we find there? 

Meetings of inspiring people: this is one of the fundamental points to keep an open and positive mind. There will also be a free cooking institute ©, dedicated to research and culinary training. It will be, among other things, a question of health since I already accompany French doctors on the importance of patient meals and the role of the pleasure of eating. We would also like to offer a place of regeneration, a real place of life around cooking, readings, art, work in the vegetable garden, etc. The idea is to be able to make a revolution: a revolution in life. 

You also offer awareness workshops for children; For what purpose do you do it? 

Awareness should start as soon as possible. I had created civic food education in schools, which is very close to the edible school of Camille Labro (see her interview here), which I am now with particular attention because for me it is important to go to the source and to offer from the start a positive and creative vision of food! I remember that, with friends and girlfriends, we enjoyed cooking recipes that we were then going to sell at the market, it was like a little sun in the head. 

A feel-good ritual that you would like to share? 

Calm! Knowing how to create moments of calm, meditation to step back and be in the moment. It allows you to be aligned, to regain balance. Reconnect to yourself leads to happiness. 

A souvenir in jar? 

"I raised my sourdough in a jar Le Parfait. It's alive! You literally see life through the jar! Then I cooked my bread directly in the jar, in which I also could keep it! »»