critical cookery studies
@choosing.hue, Instagram
While I believe we will be unpacking the intricacies of living through a pandemic for three years, I often return to my covid years due to its fertile ground. The pandemic for me was a time that marked a significant change in my life, a change that shifted the direction I took. After I completed my master’s– where my research in Cooking and Performance began, I was about 6 months into Covid and the world was in lockdown. But the years that followed August 2020, I witnessed a cooking reemergence on instagram and TikTok. People returned to the kitchen and began sharing their favourite recipes, creating viral trends, reviewing restaurants; mukbung, ASMR content grew and regular people became celebrities. To me it marked a shift in our collective relationship to food. People became more aware, knowledge was passed on and people like me, got a chance to talk to a celebrity chef that I may have never talked to because we live in different parts of the world. I believe there was a movement that happened and it had to do with people returning to the kitchen space and creating. Still to this day, we can see the effects of that time permeating the algorithm.
CRITICAL COOKERY STUDIES is a reflective inquiry that confronts cooking to be a pathway that reveals self. I ask the questions, what haven't we learned about cooking our own food? And how does cookery impact a community socially?
