Feeding the Civic Imagination (Part Two): Digital Media and Food
/Brienna Fleming and Ioana Misc
What is your project about?
Brie: My project looks at the ways a popular YouTube cooking show, Binging with Babish, helps foster a digital food literacy, but this show is just one example of the myriad ways we can examine the growing genre of YouTube cooking channels and shows as a collection of recipes or as a digital cookbook. In English Studies, and in my field of Rhetoric and Composition, it’s becoming commonplace to foreground social justice issues through the texts we read and the papers we have students compose, and food discourse is being used more than ever to present the histories of marginalized people. Take Steven Alvarez’s course, on what he calls “Taco Literacy.” In his 2017 Composition Studies article, Alvarez discusses how he uses this Mexican heritage food can help unveil the Mexican immigration experience, racism, appropriation, and appreciation of Mexican culture and foodways. Food Studies, a discipline unto itself, asks us to consider the ways foodways are related to people and history, to intimate and personal facets of life, race and sexuality, religion, and the place we call home. In addition to the integration of popular food and culture into the composition classroom, we’re seeing an increasing need for multiliteracies, specifically a digital one. Most people in and outside academe embody a basic digital literacy, if it only emerged through social media use. So what does Binging with Babish, food, and digital literacy have to do with the civic imagination?
“If Looks Could Kale” Burger Inspired by Bob’s Burgers https://www.bingingwithbabish.com/#top
If the heart of civic imagination is to allow for the presence of an alternative, then I see a digital food literacy as a current, emerging literacy that can help audiences experience food through a perspective that’s not their own. Just as taco literacy invites students to study Mexican history and heritage, so too can we assume that people learn from engaging with digital (social media) content. In a highly polarized pandemic world, it’s easy to come up against perspectives that mirror our own, so to be a just, informed person we must be reminded to look beyond the scope of what we’re comfortable with. This matters in the real world and in higher education. Scholars still have much to do in regards to the uncovering and integration of marginalized histories and voices, as well as the sources from which these things come. Digital texts, especially those stemming from social media or personal profiles, challenge the use of traditional, print-based texts. And the food-based content they contain can be used as a teaching tool offering the users/audience an understanding of the relationship between food and personhood.
Ioana: I couldn’t agree more with your final claim that “scholars still have much to do in regards to the uncovering and integration of marginalized histories and voices, as well as the sources from which these things come.” This is valid for artists or technologists too.
While advocating for the expansion of inclusive and collaborative methodologies, my current research explores the mechanism in which gastronomy can be intertwined meaningfully with other “disciplines” (artistic, scientific, spiritual, technological) in order to awaken our imaginative senses: civic, social, creative.
An exquisite example can be found in teamLab Borderless, a highly advanced digital interactive museum in Tokyo, Japan. Among many pioneering installations, En Tea House, in particular, stood out to me for combining the sacred tea ritual with a responsive video mapping technique into a holistic journey that enchants multi-layered forms of imagination. As the teacup was emptied by each visitor, the responsive video mapping juxtaposed a choreography of flower petals that adjusts its intensity in a proportionate manner. This journey activated a sensorial tech-culinary path and a sensorial imagination. I used to call it “immersive food” as it was at the crossroads between carefully curated nutritive ingredients and highly advanced digital extensions. You are not only accessing the specific food or drink, but rather the poetic story of it. You step out from material reality in order to enter into an augmented world. The artists signing the installation teleport you into a dimension that blends food and art seamlessly. Where does food end and where does art begin? We seem to assist to the emergence of a new “species” that I tend to call food-tainment, previously nicknamed by the media as “eatertainment”.
Still from teamlab Borderless, En Tea House, Tokyo, Japan
The roots of these hybrid experiences can be found in a different movement called culinary cinema, however in that realm food was the extension of cinema, while in this case food is extended by interactive cinema. In the current evolutive context, the question I am asking is: can we perceive immersive food as an elevated form of imagination or as a form of trading our own imagination for an external authored visual experience? How can we relate to food as art or to art as food? Under what circumstances the convergence of the two could bring added value to our human experiences? Is the culinary experience intensified or rather it decreases its importance, while joined by interactive mechanics? On a personal level, I felt elevated by the experience. It seemed an intersectionality of history (tea rituals preserved from the ancient times) and futurism (interactive and responsive tech that enchants and surprises). It clearly remained a memorable experience, most probably taking into account also the novelty factor.
Another intriguing example can be found in high end experimental restaurants such as The Alchemist, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, which claims to propose to its visitors elevated forms of “holistic cuisine”. The founders even launched in 2018 an expanded manifesto in this regard.
Still from The Alchemist Facebook page, Copenhagen, Denmark
Quoting one of the lead initiators, Danish Chef Rasmus Munk, the experiences “stimulate and interact with all five senses and the intellect by exploring elements from theatre, art, science and technology”.
Although the level of innovation is high, the level of accessibility is low, as the restaurant’s rates often exceed ordinary incomes. Still, the process is revealing, encouraging us to look at food from another angle and this process alone can be replicated by anyone in the world with basic means. Munk adds a dimension that I find evocative, claiming that “the fundamental recipe of the restaurant menu has changed very little in the last 100 years - it basically works according to the same script everythere. When I started investigating how theatre can enrich gastronomy, it dawned on me how similar the dramaturgy of a restaurant meal is to that of the theatre.” Taking this idea further, we may as well ask: how can storytelling structures of theatre/cinema/VR change when inspired by food rituals?
Other restaurants such as RAW from Taipei, Taiwan, led by chef Andre Chiang aimed to create experiences blending food and virtual reality, while adding most recently to the menu a rarity of our days: “edible NFTs”. For them, the kitchen itself is “a place for creativity, a place to dream. Dream to be brave [...] If this is a dream, please don’t wake me up.” (George Calombaris).
The team launched eight NFTs, each inspired by a food principle curated by Chiang: Unique, Pure, Texture, Memory, Salt, South, Artisan, Terroir. These tags alone are a booster for civic imagination. The collectors of the NFTs would be then invited to join a private dinner. This process involving high end gastronomy, technology and sustainability is a proposing not only a new take on enjoying event-dishes, but also a new take on community formation. The idea of encouraging collective dinners for passionate strangers with similar interests may lead to creative conversations and bonds.
NFT Collectors invited at RAW, https://www.tatlerasia.com/dining/journeys/nft-we-are-what-we-eat-2021-en
However, it is not just technology the one that may turn food rituals into spectacular shows. In countries like Peru, molecular gastronomy, a blend of culinary craft and chemistry is perceived close to a national brand, being found in almost all local restaurants.
All these combinatory practices of food, philosophy, chemistry, virtual reality, film or theatre seem to prototype a new aura of contemporary food, one that blends spectacular-ness, creativity and civic imagination. In short lines, the curated intersectionality of food and other fields of life involving arts, tech, sciences or spirituality can lead to more than a food ritual, to a one-of-a-kind experience that prologues our body, mind and spirit in unprecedented manners.
How does food inspire or stifle an inclusive imagination? How can we encourage ways to involve food in civic imagination and debates on justice?
Ioana: To my mind, food is inclusive by design, however its imaginative layers might vary heavily and the question is indeed - how to preserve those and how to debate them? How can we archive the philosophies or rituals of food? And how to do it in innovative manners? How to preserve more perspectives on the same food ritual at once?
I would recall an example where (fictionalized) food culture and virtual reality are combined into an unique installation. The Doghouse emerged as a VR experience directed by Danish VR artist Johan Knattrup Jensen and produced by Mads Damsbo. The installation was designed for five persons at a time, each with his/her own VR headset, however seating at the same impeccably arranged dinner table. The story portrayed a tense, Danish family dinner seen from more angles. Each explorer could choose a character and imply his/her perspective in order to reveal the story. In other words, the explorers are allowed to inhabit the perspective of the mother, the father or the children invited for dinner (one at a time). At the end of the experience, a dialogue between all participants invited them to negotiate the story that has happened by combining all of their individual angles into a narrative that would feel coherent. Methodologically, the project felt groundbreaking in 2015 when it was launched for capturing multiple perspectives on the very same topic: a troubled family dinner. I experienced it in Tel Aviv, during The Steamer Salon (a VR program) and back then I was affiliated with the role of the mother, rooted in the story as an alcoholic woman. In VR there were numerous toasts, while in reality as well there were corresponding glasses and this flow of dimensions (from real to digital, from digital to real) allowed me to inhabit the story more profoundly than any conventional VR piece. Not the food itself, but the objects surrounding food, the forks, glasses, knives became context markers or even characters narrating the story for us further. Traces of fiction in reality and traces of reality in fiction. To me, this project tapped into a highly important topic: decoding reality and its emotional, gastronomic, social aspects from multiple angles. Once we understand more perspectives, we come closer to a form of collective justice. And this is equally valid for civic imagination. Once we collect more perspectives, we may negotiate a more meaningful societal model.
The Doghouse VR installation still, courtesy of Makropol, the production team
How can we inspire our shared imagination as we prepare meals, serve dishes and eat what we made? How does food connect with our memories and aspirations?
Brie: All of this sounds so interesting! I’m drawn to one of the first things you write, “how can we preserve and debate” notions on the inclusiveness of food? In some ways, I think this idea bridges our ideas and research together, especially because in this moment we’re both talking about “artifical” food experiences (that is to say, digital and virtual). I also find it compelling that The Doghouse offers users a chance to experience a tense and fraught family dinner with a VR experience in that it offers people a chance to experience a role and a meal from a perspective that’s not their own. While I agree with you that food is inclusive and so telling of our familial rituals and heritage, I am also of the mindset that in the real world food plays a role in a social hierarchy that isn’t so inclusive (e.g. food deserts and insecurity at large).
To me, it’s impossible for food not to connect us with our past and our memories. The trouble is without our family food literacy being passed down, where might we gather information on foodways like or unlike our own? I first noticed that YouTube and all of its popular cooking channels could be used as teaching tools when I was watching an episode of Frank Pinello’s The Pizza Show about San Marzano tomatoes. In the 3:34 minute video, Pinello takes us to Italy to meet a bunch of canning nonna’s; “masters,” according to him. I soon realized short YouTube videos such as Binging with Babish or The Pizza Show would be innovative and approachable texts in the composition classroom: students can analyze visual rhetoric or they can learn something a little deeper about a can of tomatoes they see in the market. Listening to Pinello interview those old Italian women confirmed the notion that heritage foodways are dying. Perhaps this is true of our own, but either way I think we can start taking a closer look at the educational benefits of social media food content. And the interesting thing about the connectivity of social media is that even if our own food stories have gaps, we can turn towards social media and alternative cooking shows to learn something new.
Ioana: I love the way you highlight the educational benefits of social media food content and the way you emphasize the importance of digital archival especially when it comes to “saving” dishes or practices that are almost extinct. The web can be indeed seen as an expandable gastronomic library, although a very messy one. So one question for the future is how can we index food and food content in a meaningful manner? Can food be truly “indexed” in compelling manners or can it be solely experienced?
Danish chef Ramus Munk proposed a creative take on portraying food. In his gastronomic practice, he promotes what I call “painting mimicry”, depicting ingredients as comestible creative tools.
A gastronomic dish from The Alchemist restaurant, courtesy of The Alchemist Facebook page
While coming back to the core of the question, I believe food is in many ways a display of imagination in itself, similarly to a painting or sculpture. It is just then we don’t place it in a museum, but rather in spaces that we have tagged as conventional or “non-artistic” per se. To my mind, this angle on food shall invite us to rethink our spaces as well as holistic playgrounds.
How can the media and popular culture support food and civic imagination? What are the opportunities? What are the challenges? How to reckon with the history and heritage of the food we fuse?
Brie: Right now, I think there is an upsurge of social media food content and because cooking shows and the desire to learn about food history or follow recipes is increasing in visibility, so too are the dark undercurrents of racial and gendered issues. Whereas the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) exists in the real world to protect the rights of food, hospitality, and agriculture workers in the United States, nothing like that exists to mitigate racial or gender problems in digital food-spaces. But, people are opening their eyes to inequity in online realms more and more. We see this with “mathematician and food antagonist” Joe Rosenthal’s Instagram handle who most recently is taking a swing at Bon Appetit’s chef star, Brad Leone, for spreading misinformation that could make his audience ill. Furthermore, this isn’t the first time Bon Appetit has come under fire; within the last couple of years, 14 former employees have accused the publication of a racist, sexist, and toxic work environment.
Ioana: Following this note, how could we make the ethics of food more transparent, rather than the aesthetics? This is perhaps a challenge that our century already deals with in direct and sometimes over-pressing manners.
Brie: Yes! That’s at the heart of what I’m getting at: making the ethics of food transparent. And while it’s interesting and helpful that social media, virtual, and digital spaces can continue to be used as teaching tools, with a closer examination we can also unveil the unequal power dynamics in the food industry, whether it’s “real life” or “online.”
What has the pandemic taught us about food and framing the imagination? What examples and approaches need to be documented at this moment in time?
Brie: I think that COVID sparked a lot of connections for people from online food-based social media communities. Arguably, many include a lot of women therefore such online communities are dubbed as feminist and are being analzued and writtin about more in higher education. I’m a member of a private Facebook group with more than 200 members dedicated to helping others “connect with others through baking”. It’s inclusive, too. It encourages failure and adaptation and acknowledges problems with availability or what some might have access to. On Instagram, there’s Christina Tosi’s group and hashtag “bakeclub” that’s been written about, too, and the group actually paused when Tosi was called out for being culturally insensitive during the summer of 2020 when the Black Lives Matter Movement took off and xcelerated. The pandemic leveled the ground, so to speak, making us confront inequity in the world. And that extends to food. Most recently, I’ve enjoyed Alexis Nikole aka “theblackforager” on Instagram. Her videos are short and sweet and pack an educational punch that doesn’t avoid the racist or colonial subjectivations of certain foods and native plants.
Ioana: I believe on one hand it reignated intricate food rituals, it replaced “fast food” with “slow food”, it turned food into a playground. I feel citizens have become what I call “play-zens”, people taking time to contemplate and rebalance life, to have a ludic look on topics that previously felt over-ordinary. However, on the other hand, it brought more automation and technologization in the food industry, which is not necessarily ideal in the long term. Back in 2017, IDFA DocLab displayed a project called Eat | Tech | Kitchen, where the creators designed a chatbot to develop recipes of the future, based on the input of the spectators. Emerging tech-restaurants started to program AI mechanics to assemble food bowls. Although the novelty factor is high for all these experimentations, I personally advocate for the importance of preserving and prioritizing human-crafted food.
How can we cook with civic imagination? What are the “recipes” that could guide us?
Ioana: I believe recipes could include not only comestible ingredients, but also expanded ingredients able to activate all of our senses. Music, visuals, the setting of a certain food are able to trigger more layers of civic imagination. Sometimes even an ordinary dish could become spectacular if placed in a creative context. I believe any recipe could potentially be a premise for civic imagination as long as the participants are open to expand on it creatively, socially, philosophically.
Brie: I love that you’re helping me to consider other elements of a meal that “activate our senses”, such as dinner music and the place-settings. It also has me thinking about the ways we can better understand food and class issues based on how other’s access food, prepare it, and set the table.
How do we want cooking practices to look like in the future?
Ioana: I believe cooking practices can be expanded ethically (by making sure we respect food sustainability and empower local producers), aesthetically (by combining cooking practices with artistic, technological practices) and spiritually (by taking the time to respect the rituals of cooking).
Brie: And I think some social media handles, like the blackforager (Alexis Nikole), for example, get right to the root of this in how she uses her platform to educate about local, Appalachian plants, their history, and how to safely and ethically harvest.
Are there any similarities and/or differences between your projects? What are some additional points that you think should be explored in the future?
Ioana: At a first glance, we both focus on expanding food culture and we both dive into digital media as a way of archival (Brie) or creative stimulus (myself). While Brie is focussing on including marginal voices into food culture, which is highly needed from my perspective, being what I call an “ethical expansion”, I tend to advocate for including (when fitted) more artistic, technological, spiritual practices into food culture, and this is perhaps more of a “sensorial or aesthetic expansion”. Overall, I feel our approaches combined form a holistic approach towards expanding food culture in more accessible, but also more creative and innovative manners. There are numerous questions launched in our dialogue that, if taken further, could perhaps prototype new food rituals and new food-centered educational playgrounds. So, among the leading questions I will take with me as a post-dialogue “food for thought” are - what would a school of ethical and aesthetic food culture look like? How can we expand food practices creatively and qualitatively, without altering the core? How can we decode food as a means to express imagination?
Brie: I think that Ioana articulates a conneciton between our research and ideas well. Food is sensory, and its creation (cooking) is an artistic process. The “chef” is valued and perceived as an artist and outside of what I’m looking at on YouTube and Instgram is a rich, digital world of documentaries and food-related series that are dedicated to carving out a “holistic approach towards expanding food culture in a more accessible, but creative manner.”
References:
Alvarez, Steven. “Taco Literacy: Public Advocacy and Mexican Food in the U.S. Nuevo South.” Composition Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2017, pp. 151–66, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26402788.
Beardsley, Ashley M. “‘You Are a Bright Light in These Crazy Times”: The Rhetorical Strategies of #BakeClub that Counter Pandemic Isolation and Systemic Racism. Popular Culture Studies Journal vol. 10, issue 1, 2022, pp. 219-236.
Fleitz, Elizabeth Jean. The Multimodal Kitchem: Cookbooks as Women;s Rhetorical Practice. 2009. Bowling Green State University, dissertation.
Harris, Margot, Palmer Haasch, and Rachel E. Greenspan. “A new podcast is exploring the reckoning that happened at Bon Appetit. Here’s how the publication ended up in how water, Insider, 9 Feb. 2021, https://www.insider.com/bon-apptit-timeline-allegations-drama-culture-race-andy-alex-sohla-2020-6.
Rae, A. (2020). Faq. Binging with Babish. https://www.bingingwithbabish.com/faqs.
Alchemist, Manifesto (2018), https://www.dropbox.com/s/jp4c4xzkoyel6t4/Holistic%20Cuisine%20Manifest.pdf?dl=0
Teamlab Borderless (2022), https://borderless.teamlab.art/
Eat | Tech| Kitchen (2017)https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/612ac86c-3a86-4f2f-bb72-a79f444898c6/eat-tech-kitchen
Calombaris, George, RAW website (2021) https://www.raw.com.tw/?fbclid=IwAR1RL8Esuz4uG61XRNb4YK_doiXbGPXHwjc9PB-8NUHQFJBXsqQPODexBfs
Brienna Fleming is a PhD candidate writing her prospectus and studying Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Before her PhD, she taught first-year writing and literature in eastern Oregon and Wyoming. She holds a BA in English-Literature with a minor in Women’s Studies from Penn State, and two Master’s of Arts (English-Literature and American Studies) from the University of Wyoming. Informed by feminist and queer theory, her research and writing focuses on foodways, social media, identity and communities, American literature, and the cowboy.
Ioana Mischie is a Romanian-born transmedia artist (screenwriter/director) and transmedia futurist, multi-awarded for film, VR and innovative concepts. Fulbright Grantee Alumna of USC School of Cinematic Arts (collaborating with the Civic Imagination Lab / Mixed Reality Lab / JoVRnalism / Worldbuilding Lab), and Alumna of UNATC, advanced the transmedia storytelling field as part of her doctoral study thesis completed with Summa Cum Laude. Her cinematic projects as writer/director have traveled to more than 250 festivals worldwide (Palm Springs ISFF, Hamptons IFF, Thessaloniki IFF), were developed in top-notch international programs (Berlinale Talents – Script Station, Sundance Workshop – Capalbio, Cannes International Screenwriters Pavilion) and awarded by innovation-driven platforms (The Webby Awards, F8, Golden Drum, SXSW Hackathon, Stereopsia, D&AD). She has created groundbreaking franchises such as Tangible Utopias or Government of Children, empowering children to see themselves as leaders and to redesign their society. Her most recent immersive experience, Human Violins received the first European Meta award thanks to Women in Immersive Technologies and the Immersive Creators Catalyst program. TEDxBoldandBrilliant speaker, member of Women in Film and Television LA, she teaches wholeheartedly at UNATC and UBB as a PhD lecturer. Co-Founder of Storyscapes, leading Noe-Fi Studios (a neuro-VR start-up) and Omniversity (educational VR). Envisioning the world as a neo-creative playground, she deeply believes that storytellers are “the architects of the future” (Buckminster Fuller).
