next steps: a history of eating

food, glorious food.....

images from Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the U.S. and Vietnam (click on a photo for a larger pop-up)

 

what's next?

Our work in the past year was the culmination of four years of talking, cultural exchange and making music, performance and an installation - all about walking and desire lines.  We completed the final two residencies for the Walking Project, with six weeks in South Africa and ten weeks in Detroit.

Both residencies involved communities and partnering organizations in Detroit and KwaZulu-Natal, at the hub of which was the creation of a new theatre piece.  The residencies also included a singing festival in South Africa; jam sessions in both countries with musicians and poets; a print exchange between university students in South Africa and the US; workshops for community groups, churches and universities on themes of mapping, community development, physical theatre and performing personal stories; artist receptions in people’s homes; “culture share” workshops taught by South Africa artists who were visiting Detroit; and a series of local neighborhood walks. 

The project stimulated discussion and debate on themes of walking, modernity, technology, locality, identity, place and space – and the differences and commonalities between cultures and people, such as how a Zulu farmer may have more in common with a rural white Texan than an African American from Detroit.

what is it?

A History of Eating is a cross-disciplinary arts project, eating experience and public conversation that looks at the history of the world as a history of food – and explores the pleasures, perils, politics and cultural premise s embedded in the ways food is grown, distributed, prepared and eaten. 

It looks at individual stories, recipes, and recollections about food within a larger context,  juxtaposing personal experiences with food facts and figures, history, anthropology, evolution, politics and environmental issues – as told by neighbors, activists, growers, historians, anthropologists, economists, scientists and others whose physical or intellectual work is about food and eating. 

The project has emerged from our work on the Walking Project, which continues to teach us about the power of focusing on universal, everyday actions to bring people together across boundaries of geography, race, class and religion, and to facilitate deep listening and learning.  The stories, conversations and workshops from the Walking Project helped frame issues like urban planning, community development, health and social services from the "bottom up" perspective of people in urban neighborhoods and rural areas.

It sparked interesting ideas - like using desire lines across vacant lots in Detroit as a way of prioritizing the testing and identifying brownfields, since these paths are evidence of frequent use by people who are thus more likely to be exposed to contamination.

We have been asking ourselves how this work operates both off and on stage and how it crosses, or maybe even erases, boundaries between art and everyday life and across hierarchies of “experts” and “community participants”.  This is the conceptual framework for A History of Eating, alongside a passion for cooking, kitchen gardens and the rituals of food (from celebrations to table manners) and concerns about health, hunger and sustainability.

A History of Eating includes the preparation and sharing of food among participants, in a way that engages all of the senses – taste, touch, smell, sight and sound – creating a visceral, interactive experience that includes the pleasures, communion and adventure often involved with eating.  The process may reveal relationships between ingredients and people across time and place – with parallel stories, overlapping political concerns, agricultural cycles, scientific or technological developments – through which different eras or cultures connect with one another.  Or it may reveal entirely different results.

Communities
Food involves and includes virtually everyone – and it therefore provides an opportunity to connect people from disparate backgrounds and diverse interests.  In addition to the project’s relevance to university communities interested in the collaborative areas above, the project can engage such groups as people involved with restaurant and food businesses, soup kitchens and food rescue programs, Slow Food chapters, food service students from vocational programs, culturally-specific and international organizations, environmental activists, farmers and gardeners. Interviews, collective cooking sessions and conference/improvisation sessions will include people from these communities. 

Process
A History of Eating will drawing on the research and resources of scientists, scholars whose work addresses food, agriculture, evolution, biology, nutrition, botany and technology.  It will also involve gathering stories and information from interviews and through a series of workshops and collective cooking sessions designed to create dialogue and exploration of our personal, social and political relationships to food and eating.

We will develop a network of food activists, farmers, cooks, scholars and scientists who shape the research process, starting with one-on-one conversations and meetings.  This work will be followed up with several days of collaborative conversation and presentations that add performers, designers and technologists to the discussion in an informal environment that is part conference, part improvisation.  We will further develop the material explored during these sessions through rehearsals with performers and additional research and writing.

The process will conclude with a performances of A History of Eating as the hub of a festival of eating and food-related art, alongside roundtable discussions and environmental, agricultural and nutritional information from community organizations. 

We are also creating an interactive food-preparation installation that combines hands on cooking that uses sensor technology to contextualize the ingredients, recipes and techniques as each participant uses them – and allows people to re-mix ingredients and add their own recipes to the installation, using a core set of ingredients.  And the project will include an online space that brings together the stories, issues and resources that emerge from the project.