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.

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.