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I love cooking. I began to cook when I moved out last summer. I hadn’t given serious thought to preparing meals until then because I didn’t need to when I was living with my family. However, having to live away from home and start making my own food completely changed my relationship with food, and I found myself fascinated by the process of cooking. Not just that I make something delicious, but every element of it. I love the sound of chopping veggies, frying garlic and boiling broth. I like it when all the ingredients start to mix up and become something else. I’m always fond of observing the changes of colours, sound, smell and texture. As I spent more and more time in the kitchen, I was able to see cooking as something other than just making food. Sometimes cooking brings a sense of home into a completely different, alien environment, which I often find hard to fit in. Cooking for me is an emotional activity because the food I make reflects my feeling. I have learned that creating new recipes requires the same amount of imagination and creativity as drawing. The joy of performing the familiar recipe is full of rhythm, gesture, and movements. The quotation below explains well why I was so intrigued by cooking:

I discovered bit by bit not the pleasure of eating good meals (I am seldom drawn to solitary delights), but that of manipulating raw material, of organizing, combining, modifying, and inventing. I learned the tranquil joy of anticipated hospitality, when one prepares a meal to share with friends in the same way which one composes a party tune or draws: with moving hands, careful fingers, the whole body inhabited with the rhythm of working, and the mind awakening, freed from its own ponderousness, flitting from idea to memory, finally seizing on a certain chain of thought, and then modulating this tattered writing once again. Thus, surreptitiously and without suspecting it, I had been invested with the secret, tenacious pleasure of doing-cooking. (The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau, page 153)

Apart from my personal fondness, there are lots of questions regarding the cultural aspect of cooking and food I would like to seek answers to through research. As a person who came from a country asking if you’ve had meals instead of saying ‘good afternoon’ or ‘good evening’, food has always been a huge part of my life both culturally and personally. When I told my friends that I’m going to the UK for uni, they worried about the food most, not about getting lonely or the weather. These experiences led me to wonder: In what context does food become so significant to a certain culture? If food is an expression of cultural identity, can cooking be a piece of self-portrait? If so, can the act of sharing food一preparing a meal for one another一be a platform for political practice?

I believe this is an interesting subject to investigate as a visual communicator because cooking is a multi-sensory, whole-body experience. It involves tactility, smell, sound, vision, taste, and last but not least emotions and memory. I want to see cooking as a universal language, something beyond words, a bit like music or dancing. It can be something else than a day-to-day ritual for example performance or choreography. I would like to challenge its limitation and expand the surface by visually exploring it. How can it be redefined in a different context? Can cooking be a form of language or a system like coding? If so, is it possible to adapt the same logic and process to something else that isn’t edible? By answering these questions I would like to explore my relationship with cooking and culinary experience and expand my research on the cultural aspect of cooking and how it shapes our cultural identity. I will be investigating both visual and non-visual components that form cooking, like colours, sound, layout, texture, gesture, typeface, and pieces of language like recipes or oral traditions.

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One of the references that I find the most interesting so far is the book named ‘Le Corbuffet : Edible Art & Design’ by Esther Choi. Inspired by a bill of fare one László Moholy-Nagy designed for a dinner in honor of Walter Gropius in 1937, which she found while doing unrelated research, Choi decided to recreate this bill for a dinner party she too would thrown for her own friends. And so, the first ever Le Corbuffet took place in an apartment in Brooklyn, consisting of dishes bearing titles such as Mies van der Roe Dip, Martin Parrfait, William Eggleston Strata, Bananni Albers Babka, Kimchi Gordon and many more. The book features art-directed photos of the food and recipes she created which invite the readers to experiment, and share their experiences with others. Drawing a parallel with artworks in visual art and design, these recipes are meant to be reinterpreted, improvised with, remixed and savored. This book has given me an insight into the power of recipes; the language of food.

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Like event scores, the recipes prompt an engagement with techniques, concepts, and formats - from the kitchen, to the studio, and back again - to explore how ingredients can be transformed, assembled, and shaped. I invite you to enact the event score, and improvise - or rewrite it - at will, remixing mediums for maximum sensory, spatial, and social stimulation. Each recipe, like a story, artwork, dish, or building, starts with an idea, often borrowed and reimagined, to have its meaning and spirit renewed. (Le Corbuffet : Edible Art & Design, introduction)

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There are loads of great magazines that feature stories and insights about culinary culture, to name a few ‘Quaderns n.271’ and ‘Apartamento Cookbook’. One example would be ‘Chutney Magazine’, the independent magazine designed, edited and founded by Osman Bari. It shares everyday stories of culture and identity, specifically told by marginalised and underrepresented voices by introducing a refreshing approach to construct a magazine. The content is divided into three sections: “Chop, mix and preserve”, using the steps for making actual chutney as a recipe for its own structure. Chop is for stories that subvert stereotypes, Mix covers submissions exploring cross-cultural influences, and in Preserve, you’ll find lesser-known histories. All of these references would be a useful guide to collating stories in a relatable way to cooking. ‘Cooking With Scorsese: The Cookbook’ by Hato Press also comes up to mind. This could be a good starting point to think about how cooking is perceived in films and pop culture.

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Netflix's original series called ‘Chef’s Table’ has been a great inspiration for me in terms of cooking as a performance and its ability to become a multi-sensory experience. The way chefs experiment with different ingredients and their sensitive approach to the material is something I’d like to borrow for my own project.

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Ginny Davies’ cake workshop was a great format to investigate the historical and political context of food by getting people to interact with it. I’ve been reading the book called ‘Cake: A Global History’ and it got me thinking about a piece of food from a broader perspective.

To gain a more thorough insight into the act of eating and its political, environmental impact, I’m planning to read ‘Eating Animal’ by Jonathan Safran Foer. I expect this book would be really helpful to redefine my relationship between cooking and eating and guide my research towards a more responsible way.

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In addition to artistic references, primary research plays a critical role in my chosen subject area. I have been taking pictures of every food I cook since last summer, so the collection of hundreds of photographs could be an interesting resource to play around with. I visited Migration Museum located in Lewisham Shopping Center a month ago and found a plentiful first-hand account visual references of people’s experiences and memories regarding food and cultural identity so it will be worth revisiting. Interviewing my mum and collating her handwritten recipes, presumably passed onto her from her mum, would be interesting to look at as I have learned how to cook mostly from her. Most importantly, I cook almost every day! I will try to visually record my cooking process. It could be a film, drawing, sound, language, diagram, typography, or textile.

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I tried to document what I cook visually. 

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The table cloth with the embroidered recipe that I made for Political Land brief seems very relevant to my final major project in terms of subject matter as I interpreted the local Ukrainian recipe as a form of political and cultural manifesto against communism and violence committed to Ukrainian civilians. Using textile and embroidery as a medium seems relevant to this project as well since it can bring in a sense of craftsmanship to my work which I think is essential when talking about cooking. A sensitive, thoughtful approach to un-experienced cultures and lives would be a critical skill when interviewing people or planning participation of other people, which I have experienced through both Political Land and Neighbours brief. Skills I picked up from LEGS brief will also become handy, for example having a clear, specific opinion or context to subject matter and collating multiple outcomes in a considerate way as I expect my chosen topic could be expanded very broadly. The process of unpicking things from a familiar format and reinterpreting it in a refreshing way should be useful when thinking about investigating the language of recipes and a set of rules it plays. I have explored a similar process for How It’s Made brief where I borrowed the how-it’s-made format but reconstructed it from a honey bee’s perspective.

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I found this book at the library(forgot the title, will add it later!) - it features artists' and designers' projects regarding food and cooking. Scanned pages are introducing public participation projects which seem really exciting