Action 2
Introduction
Food is such an easy and incredible way of sharing pieces of ourselves with others. This prompt asked us to express our terroir, that is all the interconnected factors that makes us who we are and shapes our tastes- preferences. Taste was taken literally in this prompt and we were asked to then share our “taste” by sharing a favourite food experience with a partner. A food experience comprises of ways of preparing, eating and sharing food, all of which was relayed through a crafted prompt by me for Meghna, who lives half way across the world in Mumbai, India
Looking back, the sharing of these experiences, preferences and associated connections and memories felt very circular. From my expression of my terroir to receiving her feedback, both of our terroirs sort of merged at some point. The feedback that I got from Meghna was her interpretation of both of not just my terroir, but our melding terroirs, which not only further reinforced my own terroir but also shifted and shaped it. Here is a doodle of the circular terroir sharing experience.
I designed an interactive workbook to curate an experience for Meghna to share my relationship to my most favourite comfort food Khitchri. This workbook was an interactive pdf. I ask Meghna to complete the workbook
Workbook Format for Recipe Sharing
I wanted to send Meghna my prompt in a workbook format because I wanted her to engage with the ingredients of the khitchri and the process of making the khitchri using all her visceral senses and also her cognitive sense- sense making. Note taking has the power to building on and reinforce narratives. I was hoping to employ these loose prompts to get Meghna to experience and discover our merging terroir.
Two aspects of the workbook took away from its intended purpose; the digital nature of the workbook for one and also perhaps the workbook itself.
In retrospect, when I imagined a workbook, I was really visualizing a printed interactive recipe book. I was imaging the words, the instructions leaving the paper through action and material marks left behind on the paper. I liked the thought of the blurring boundary between the instruction prompt and the action, as the outcome feeds right back into the workbook shifting the prompt again every so slightly to subsequently shift the action as well- in this eternal positive feedback loop that only ends once every corner of the page is covered in notes and turmeric stains. That feedback loop is a representation of relationality when boundaries between people, modes of acting, types of material gets a bit blurry as the individual entities kinda shift and reinforce these shifts while shifting them further (very paradoxical).
The diagram below tries to elucidate this thought
The digital version of the workbook did not afford this relationality at all! Even the boxes that I used to delineate the notetaking space w454 confining. “Your notes cannot leave these four corners”- The four corners of the note box, the digital paper and the computer itself that is the interface for this interaction. There was no way there would be a fluid interaction with this medium!
Digital Notetaking
Note taking digitally is likely necessarily a practice in retrospection. How could it not? We rarely ever type on or physically interact with a computer while cooking. Even when looking through a recipe its a messy and frustrating process. So with a digital workbook you’ll want to look back on your experience. You’re automatically removed from the moment. Visceral/sensory experience is separated from the cognitive reflective experience.
Role of cognition to reinforce a thought- yay or nay?
The second point here is that do we really need a workbook as a recipe book? Does the act of reflecting while doing takes away from the process? This is the age (3 weeks (since the beginning of our class)) old question. Can’t we simply be present sensorially while making without having to cognitavely consider/reflect different aspects of our process? I’m not sure, but I have some thoughts (ofcourse…sigh).
I think there is power in sense making and contextualizing while making because then the action can be instrumentalized towards a subsequent larger action and further reflection? Isn’t that what we are doing with our weekly class actions. Action-> reflection _> subsequent action-> reflection-> so on. Its all generative
Im thinking about the act of cooking as a sensory process but also a process of making sense and then stretching that further as an act of making space – see action 3. I found this project, Chinese Protests Recipes, a recipe book for resistance. It speaks to getting in touch with your culture through food as a form of resistance (our prompt for this week!) . That is active making of sense and space.
https://www.instagram.com/thegodofcookery/?hl=en
Meghna’s Prompt
I received Meghna’s prompt to make Green Puri. It was a pretty involved process that took about 3 hours from the prep to eating. I made the puris with my mom and it was an incredibly loud and tedious process full of nostalgia and knowledge sharing. The following images show the outcome.
Non-verbal feedback
I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to think much about the method by which I could give feedback to meghna without using words. I misread the prompt and it was a tough start of the week in my house, so time was not in my favour. But from Meghna’s previous presentation, I thought she would appreciate meme’s so I went with a chronological description of the process through memes. It really refects the chaos that ensued in the kitchen.
After rereading the prompt right before class, I settled on a series of photos that show my fingers covered in ingredients to represent how I engaged with the process. I wanted to show messy fingers because the process of making green puris, as is probably the case for most cooking is a very tactile process.
Messy Fingers
I have lived with my partner for 3 years now. We have very different ways of cooking and enjoying food. I am “messy”. When I cook, the kitchen looks like a warzone (I’m privileged enough to not know what a warzone actually looks like). I use my fingers to dig into spice jars. Don’t ask me why, but when I taste a sauce while cooking, I’ll take a spoonful of the hot sauce, release it on the concavity of my palm and slurp it when its reasonably tepid. I’ve watched my mom do it for years. I eat everything with my fingers. Even when I’m using a fork and knife. My partner is the exact opposite. He is quite meticulous and clean when he’s cooking. There are delineated stations, mess is contained amidst cutting board, plate and bowl borders. When we first started living together, my tendency to get my fingers into everything really got to him (it probably still does). Did I mention he is white, has lived in Vancouver majority of his life and has European ancestry. My messy fingers have since then become an act of accepting and asserting my way of being. It is my act towards de-conditioning western notions of organization, neatness and the right way engaging with food. Meghna in her prompt asked me to get my hands dirty. She gets it! We are both from similar culture. Hence, a series of photos depicting my messy fingers was a way to reinforce this messy, squishy, gooey, oily, colourful ontology that is product of mine and Meghna’s culture.
Thinking about the role of messiness in perpetuating non western ontologies, I do wish that stains/ marks on recipe books were not an externality from the cooking process but an intentional affordance incorporated into the design of recipe books. Marking the book and leaving notes then becomes a natural part of the cooking process.
