The Meals at the Cave 2018
Generation Gap:
These imagined, fictional dinner tables from around the world are multi-generational, showing their degrees of separations and disconnects between various generations. What we eat speaks so much about who we are. Besides the cultural influence, social factors as in religion, economical status, trends and popular diets shape our diets on the individual level. But increasingly, eating has become a political act in modern societies as people learn more about how food affects our health, the health of our environment and sustainability of our future food supplies, while overall diets around the world are getting homogenized.
In this series:
Zhang family (Shanghai)
Dinner with colleagues (London)
Tanaka family breakfast (Nagoya)
Jones family lunch (San Francisco)
Patel family (Mumbai)
Question of authenticity:
Cultural appropriation of food is an inevitable result of globalization. While traditionalists and preservationists often challenge and disapprove of the authenticity of food introduced into another culture, this is not a new phenomenon. What and who defines authenticity? Does it matter if the reinvented version is actually good? In this series, the fictitious people around the world present their versions of the dish that has become part of their cuisine whether it was introduced from another culture or not.
In this series:
Custards
Curries
Corn in America
One of the most processed commodities, corn came from The Americas and has been processed throughout American history by different people and they’re all very much enjoyed even to this day. While the list of American invented processed food is pretty long, what would the meal look like if four Americans from different time periods were invited to bring their version of processed corn?
Evolution of Processed Food
Food processing has prolonged the shelf-life of food, made food safe and nutritiously efficient for our optimal health, made it possible for us to conserve scarce natural resources and free from eating animal products, and opened the door for innovations and novelty to the level of luxury. On one hand, processed foods have been under the attack of health problems, pollutions and unethical food production practices, but techniques like canning, vacuum-sealing and freeze-drying revolutionized food industry by being able to produce mass quantity of affordable food to keep up with our population growth, preserving food for emergency, MRE, and long-distance traveling like backpacking. Processed food also brought convenience and increased productivity by freeing women from spending too much time cooking at home and entering the workforce. So, is it all that bad after all? Can it be improved as we learn from our mistakes?
Closing:
These fictitious people and foods are not meant to represent certain ethnic groups or to stereotype them, but rather, to raise awareness of seemingly simple choices we make every day and to contemplate why we choose what we eat. While generalizations of culture and food do exist to a certain degree, it’s impossible to paint any culture in such simplicity. The images are meant to be reflective and interpretive. Please enjoy exploring your imagination to create unique stories behind each table. Bon appetite.