Month: September 2020

ACTION 2: Terroir – an offering.

Post author By Jeffrey Li
Post date September 28, 2020
2 Comments on ACTION 2: Terroir – an offering.

You will be partnered with a new partner (see students in time zones in the google folder). Design a food experience for them that will allow them to sample something that has meaning to you or your ancestors as a regional specialty (or a favourite food). Food is an expression of terroir, the place, ground or earth that we are most identified with. It is also a potent storytelling medium. Design a food experience as a remote sensory transmission of your (chosen) terroir. Conceive this as an offering from you to your partner. Can the offering reveal more about your own self/family/place/history/connection? How special can it be? What is the setting for this edible experience ?
A. As you design this experience, take into account the time it might take for your partner to find the right ingredients in their place in the world, and provide for adaptations. They will need time to prepare the food. Do they need special tools? How can they create the setting that will offer a full experience? Are there particular details of ambience that enhance the experience? Consider these details and deliver detailed instructions in written form with diagrams to your partner no later than Monday the 21st at 8:00 am in their time zone. (No videos or slide decks)
B. Test the instructions your partner gave you by the 23rd. Use visuals, no words, to give your partner positive and negative feedback about how well this worked. This is also what you will upload to the Moodle.

Partner: Zahra Jalali
Duration: 1 week

Beginning

Zahra was my partner for this Action. She lives in Tehran, Iran. To begin with, we shared our food preference to each other, so that we can be mindful of each other’s diet, food tolerance and restrictions when we come up with the edible experience.

Zahra made this food preference checklist

My Offering To Zahra:
八宝茶 (Babao Gaiwan Tea)

My hometown actually have some degrees of similarity in the food culture with Iran, and that surprised me when I was researching on my offering to Zahra. I wanted to offer something that is not utterly exotic to her, and can create a sense of “at-homeness” through sharing the food with family. So, Babao Gaiwan Tea came in to my mind. An one-word description for this type of tea would be – elaborate. Contrary to common types of Chineses tea that are usually made with tea leaves and hot water, Babao Gaiwan Tea is made with eight ingredients and tastes sweet (download the recipe here). It carries Muslim culinary culture and tastes from the Silk Road.

The Gaiwan Tea is really easy to brew, but it would take some time to collect all eight ingredients. Some ingredients, like dried jujube and raisin, were originally produced in Central Asia. During the research I was happy that I got to learn their Persian name as well as a bit of background knowledge. For instance, the fruit that is commonly referred as Russian olive, or wild olive (Elaeagnus angustifolia) is called سنجد‎ (Senjed) in Iran and is used in ceremonies. However, the other ingredients like crystal sugar and dried longan might be hard to find in Tehran, and I had to research for local substitutes. I was satisfied with the result, and think that those substitutes are more like enhancements than compromises to the taste.

Zahra’s Offering to me: آبگوشت (Abgoosht, Iranian Meat Stew)

Zahra’s instruction was very well designed (download PDF here), lively and packed with details. I am grateful for the including of the music which is another highlight of this experience. At first I thought of the need to find a Persian market, but then in the instruction I found that all the ingredients are available in any generic supermarket.

The making of the Abgoosht mostly requires time (4 hrs up) instead of much skills. Vegetables, beans, and meat doesn’t require preparing. In contrast to the simple nature of its ingredients and cooking, the taste of the dish is anything but simple. The richness and aroma of the broth, and the heartiness of the mashed content called Koobideh combined together made me instantly fell in love with this dish. Abgoosht is something that is calling for the need to share, literally, because of its amount – it took my girlfriend and I 3 full meals to finish.

I think I went to far on the food critique, and the following will be all about the experience.

The edible experience started through smell when the broth started to boil, concurrently with traditional Persian music that Zahra recommended played in the background (playlists are included in the instruction). At this stage, when the only thing I could and needed to do was to wait patiently for 2 hours before adding condiments, the smell and musics went beyond kitchen and transformed my apartment into another space, that is unfamiliar, but exciting. While waiting, I was doing some work on the laptop just like usual, but felt different because the occupants were immersed in a portion of Persian culture that existed in my place.

Serving was another highlight of the well curated experience. Zahra mentioned the importance of sitting on the ground, and I threw a blanket on the floor to because I couldn’t find a rug at home. Having meal on the ground is a brand new experience to me. I felt much closer to the food and to the person sharing food with me, in a way that as if we were never as intimate when eating together as now. Initially I attributed the difference to the heartiness of the broth and our hunger, which are definitely true, but I realized that there is something else. Although convenient, a table might have created an invisible barrier to the participants of the meal, which is contradictory to my understanding before (i.e. table is the vessel for family gathering). As a result, eating while sitting on the ground just made the already tasty food taste even better, and already enjoyable experience more enjoyable. Having meal on the ground is something I will celebrate more often.

One last thing I want to mention is that after this edible experience, I told Zahra that I will cook this dish for my family back in China as soon as I had the chance. On her side, she drank the Gaiwan tea with her family, and said that this drink will be made again. I really appreciate the exchange happened within a week and we got to experience something traveled across continents. Thank you Louise, Zach, and Zahra!

Presentation

Thank you for reading.

Download the offering instructions here

Zahra’s offering to me: Abgoosht Download

My offering to Zahra: Gaiwan Tea Download

Tags Action

Grad Design Studio 1

ACTION 1: Starting from Ground

Post author By Jeffrey Li
Post date September 25, 2020
No Comments on ACTION 1: Starting from Ground

We will partner you with one member of your cohort. We ask that the two of you spend some time together exploring how you can learn about each other’s home place/ground through forms of readily available distance-based media like zoom, bluejeans, email, google and cell phones. Please “meet” with each other a minimum of 3 times over the duration of this assignment.
Ask yourself: is your home ground where you are in the moment? Or is your home ground an ancestral location? What has meaning for you? What is part of your identity? How can you share some form of experience of your home ground that is more than facts and figures? How can share some visceral, emotional, sensorial experience through zoom, bluejeans, email and cell phones?

Partner: Sam Stretch
Duration: 1 week

Immersive Reflection

I was paired with Sam for Action 1, and an important part was about talking with my partner in this exercise, Sam, over virtual meetings, and receiving ideas from each other. The making in the end was actually only a small part.

There were many thoughts running through my head during and after every meeting: we would have very distinctive perceptions about the meaning of “home ground” but still agree with each other.
After the first meeting, because of the uncertainty, and to expand my limited point of view, I tried to look at the meaning of home ground through the lens of my family. To them, those places I have lived in the United States where they are absent cannot be called home. My parents always refer to the place I am living as “dormitory” even though I live in apartments outside of campus. To them what home ground means where family members live together because the close tie between everyone is what matters.

After our second meeting where I briefly talked about this perspective with Sam, I questioned if I actually agree with it. My parents’ viewpoint actually inspires me to think about where sentiments reside inside my memory when the word “home ground” is spoken, and what is the entity that really shaped how I think, write, and create? The interrogation gave me an idea. At the moment I realize that my home ground is actually the small factory town, Qingtongxia, that I was born in, and this answer feels much more affirmative than others. I could feel the weight of the place when I recall images of it from my memory. “What formed that weight?” I asked myself. I can almost be certain that a large part of it is nostalgia, a romanticized sentiment toward a place in time that influenced me greatly. The town still physically exists but the time and events were gone after I moved away.

In order to introduce Qingtong Xia to my friends from other backgrounds, I need to talk about something other than nostalgia. So I started to review its history, mostly through memorizing past verbal conversations with my family, especially my grandparents. Then I found out how extraordinary and bizarre my home ground really is, as mentioned in the presentation (texts below).

Presentation

The place is called Qingtong Xia, which literally translates to Bronze Gorge. I was born in an aluminum factory there and stayed there until the age of 12. We generally referred to it as “The factory”. The factory is so huge, that the residential areas for its 20,000 employees form an entire town.
The place was built from scratch on a barren land in the late 1950s by my grandparents’ generation, following the national industrialization movement. The architecture and infrastructure were heavily influenced, and say, assisted by the USSR. When take a wider look at where this factory is located, you would find that this is inside a Muslim autonomy province. So that this whole place is a conglomeration of socialism and Muslim religion, with its residents immigrated from all over the country. (No one at all had lived here before). Now of course everything is changing: local government is removing both the Soviet resemblances and muslim symbols; young people are leaving it for larger cities, and the factory has become a quiet and empty place.
Although I moved away from the factory a long time ago, I would return there whenever I had the chance. I would go to my old house’s location to see how tall the date tree has grown, to mourn my pet turtle buried under, to photograph sites that I have photographed many times before. This is a part of me that I never dare to wave goodbye.
I can’t even summarize what exactly are the influences that my home ground has had on me. For me personally, as one of many so-called “Children of the factory” I think about my intuitions and interests. But for the whole generation that has lived here, it is something about the socialist eras, when communal bath was still a thing, where factory workers like my grandparents had and still have, today, a strong sense of belonging to the factory, to the collective. Their sentiments and affection are really touching.
To describe the experience of being in the home ground, one cannot do so without some degree of romanticization.