“Comfort Food – Comfortable for Who?” – Questions the true comfort of our eating habits, critically addressing our prevalent unsustainable animal-based food cultures by exploring genuine comfort food through design.
In my process I have researched why our eating habits are so hard to change, from our psychological attachment to meat to the patriarchal foundation of our food cultures. By exploring the medium of food and cooking as design practice, I have encountered how essential the element of comfort is to human’s eating experience. Resulting in an approach to plant-based eating where the essential comfort factors of our food cultures meet the beyond-human comfort needs. The resulting change-making methods had to involve a fair compromise, one that respected and valued our normative habits while sufficiently challenging them.
As part of my process I invited my family and friends to explore the idea of genuine comfort food with me, in collaborative interviews and cooking sessions. In five sessions we cooked together a comfort-for-all version of the participant’s ultimate comfort food. The goal with this personal approach to changing eating habits is to encourage change in a caring and compassionate way. The result is a collection of ten recipes, five of which address the trends in our consumption of animals, as common comfort-for all recipes. The other five are based on the participant’s more individual comfort food preferences, as personal comfort-for-all recipes.
The recipes are meant as inspirational methods for new ways of eating and cooking, I encourage you to try them out for yourself or share them with a family member or friend. For the full recipes click this link: https://comfortfoodforwho.com
How can we design new ways of preparing and eating food that serve comfort beyond human-only needs?