As many of you may know, I have been hunkered down applying for a Fulbright scholarship for the past month. This experience has been wonderful in how I have been forced to focus and start to build a language around food, design, and social practices in relation to my own process of creativity. Below are two pieces I had to write for the scholarship: a personal statement and my statement of purpose. They have become the springboard for which I am building my creative practice on and foresee many new and exciting projects, ideas, and design concepts emerging from.
PERSONAL STATEMENT
As an urban planner, I felt that I constantly had my hands tied, powerless to events unfolding before me. I distinctly remember a proposal for a new development that would not only eradicate protected wetlands along the Potomac River but also encourage rapid gentrification and higher property taxes for a neighborhood heavily populated with Mexican, Nicaraguan, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Ethiopian immigrants. My fellow planners and I sat across the table from the confident and ever-persuasive developers; fully aware this was a lost cause. The vote was unanimous amongst the confused, non-English speaking community members. The pretty pictures of new schools that their children would unknowingly never attend had won out over the practical advice the planners were unable to communicate effectively. This was a turning point for me, realizing the necessity of creative and empowering social interaction as a non-exclusionary mode of communication.
I began to really question the whole notion of communication and how effectively it is done on a day-to-day basis between people. What brings people together, what divides them, and on what terms are they most comfortable openly communicating? During my undergraduate studies, I was part of a select group awarded the honor of working for two and a half months on planning issues on Crete, Greece due to the upcoming summer Olympic games. Food was a major presence in social and even professional engagements. It was the barrier-breaker between cultures that everyone on both sides found conversation and common ground. Food became the “in” to experiencing true Greek daily life that we otherwise would have been denied because of our cultural differences.
However, these experiences and the underlying questions about social interactions still burned strong. They led me to pursue my Masters in Fine Arts degree at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where I was awarded the Presidential Merit Scholarship. Last year I was awarded a travel scholarship to Tokyo, Japan to attend their design biennial. Over my short two-week stay, the most engaging moments I had were with local Japanese and their friends, sharing a bowl of steaming noodle soup or drinking hot tea. The language barriers seemed to melt away and a newfound mode for communicating was discovered on both ends through the comfort of local cuisine.
I decided to experiment in my own community about my notions of food as a facilitator in empowering social interaction. In August, I orchestrated a community-wide event called Pietopia. A unique call to entry was put out to the city of Portland: How would your thoughts, joys, or concerns transform into the All-American pie? Entirely advertised through word of mouth and local posters I had made, there were more than 50 entrants from as far away as Seattle and San Francisco who submitted a pie recipe and 300-word story to explain the ingredients. The five winners brought their pies for a community wide tasting. Winners ranged from a recent mastectomy and cancer survivor to a young Latino homosexual in search of his ancestral roots. The community responded with tremendous enthusiasm and an article was written about the event in Portland’s newspaper, The Oregonian.
My experiences as an urban planner and traveling abroad have helped formulate my concerns and approaches to genuine community interaction. Through my experiences, food as the common denominator has allowed for more open and honest communication. Fulbright would be the ultimate opportunity for me to immerse myself in a foreign culture and community, allowing for an in depth exploration of food as a medium for exploring personal history through taste and memory.
STATEMENT OF GRANT PURPOSE
Eating Design
In the past few years the United States has taken part in a widespread resurgence in traditional foods, local and organic production methods, and sustainable agriculture. This food revolution has not taken hold in mainstream America due to complex socio-economic issues. For those living on tight budgets, the cheapest foods are often the most processed and farthest away from their natural sources. The politics of food are of great concern to me and I have begun to use my expertise in design to formulate solutions for these issues. By asking, for example, what does it mean when corn, mango, or meat is on your plate? Through peeling back layers of modern American culture, my goal is to revive one root of America’s culinary foundation as originated in the European tradition. The aspiration of sustainable eating can be brought to the next level through the creation of a place for innovative community interaction and exploration of food as identity, memory, and history.
Throughout my recent investigations in food and especially my work on Pietopia, an event centered on people’s personal experiences as translated through pie, I came across the work of Marije Vogelzang, a Dutch designer and creator of Proef. Proef, meaning to taste and test in Dutch, is a taste laboratory and restaurant in both Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Vogelzang’s projects explore how food is made and consumed, taking the everyday act of eating and turning it inside out. Working with the Historical Museum of Rotterdam to recreate a meal for World War II veterans, Vogelzang reconstructed a moment that the veterans had not experienced since the war. The emotional attachment to the food was strong and a true testament to the powers of taste and memory.
In the spirit of Proef, I hope to create a place where cultural and community issues can be addressed openly through the medium of food. I would like to open my own taste laboratory and restaurant as a community platform for discussion and problem solving. I am interested in design as a sustainable practice, not focused only on object making but as an approach to critical inquiry. Food acts a window into a particular culture and way of life but is also the common denominator amongst people.
Eating as design is a new topic of inquiry dominated by European thought and perspective. It is an essential part of my inquiry to go and study with a forerunner of this new and exciting practice in design. Vogelzang engages the public through unique avenues and unexpected encounters with food. Through my apprenticeship with her, I will be able to bring back my experiences and research that will help shape a unique approach in creating my own food laboratory. Utilizing food through design is exciting because everybody eats it and is inclusive by nature. It embodies the forward thinking direction that design is heading: design as a mode of thought and action, creation with a heart and mind approach, and a primary focus on human concerns and sustainability.
I am interested in how food can be infused with meaning, the history of foods in relationship to culture and the body, and food as a representation of individual and collective memory. Integrating food into design through culinary and community-based activities is a search for meaning and contributes to a specific line of design-based inquiry. I am challenging the notions of art making by working through a rarified realm of social practice to create a venue that connects people in an authentic, community based experience.
While in the Netherlands, I hope to promote mutual understanding between cultures through everyday gestures of generosity such as cooking meals with local people, creating discussions around cultural identity, and fabricating a forum for exchange. The methodology to my practice includes working with local and seasonal foods and engaging the community through meals, cooking together, and discussions. I would like to host a series of events centered on cross-cultural communication through food. In the spirit of several projects completed within the past year, my aim is to dissipate cultural barriers through food based exchange. I want to gain a deep understanding of the Dutch community through discussion about their views of American identity and the constantly changing place the United States holds on the world stage.
Despite cross-cultural influence, the Netherlands has had it’s own struggles with cultural differences as exemplified in the 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh. His death spoke to Americans because it represented the clash between Western and Eastern practices as is happening all over the world. Perhaps through food the accepting and open-armed spirit so deeply ingrained in Dutch society can be used to promote a greater understanding between cultures. Multi-cultural differences are a part of daily life for both the US and the Netherlands. However, they are both dealt with differently.
I am applying to volunteer with the John Adams Institute “Americans in the Schools” program to help facilitate the meaningful connection with the Dutch community that I am seeking. I plan on starting my apprenticeship in late June 2009, staying through the allotted nine months until February 2010. This timeframe includes three seasons: summer, fall, and winter. I will be exploring what foods are available there for each particular season as well as traditional and new ways of preparing them, what they have meant historically vs. now, why they have been made that way, how they have been integrated with new cultural influences. I want to explore the relationships individuals have with the food itself via taste, place, history, and memory.
Food is a major part of a culture and says a lot about it. The Netherlands has deep and rich traditions in agriculture and specifically in cheese making. Traditional cuisine is simple fare, with a strong focus on food as a necessity rather than a luxury. However, the country’s cultural diversity and receptiveness to foreign influences has had impact on everyday food culture. Like in America, the Dutch national cuisine has become a melting pot of flavors and influences from Indonesia and Suriname to Turkey and Morocco. Food has become a way for cultures to distinguish themselves as globalization continues to threaten homogenization of the world’s diverse ethnicities.
Through study in Holland, I will not only gain invaluable design skills, I will be able to learn how another culture is dealing with these differences. Juxtaposed with my cultures’ coping mechanisms, I will create ways of expanding beyond the notion of tolerance to really understanding and accepting another people through food which is the most basic and accessible format. This project at the forefront of design and is utilizing innovative modes of design as a sustainable practice from two different cultural perspectives for a global approach to problem solving.
