Care fully : critical care through making with food

Abstract

"In focusing on the intersection of food and care, I have shaped this text as a public-facing anthology of materials and media objects in the form and performance of a cookbook. In doing so, this anthology features the prioritization of care to do the work of purposeful action for justice. More specifically, this anthology, taking the form of a cookbook for community use and practice, catalogs practices and procedures of making food as experimental and experiential learning rooted in care. This book includes multi modal elements (text, images, art pieces) that provide readers with methods and steps to conceptualize and practice critical care. By promoting a pursuit to experiment and actionize critical care, this work also strives to reinforce knowledge legitimacy through distinctively feminist and feminized modes of production. Here I look to cookbooks, namely those produced in and through community-based efforts, and explore their capacities as objects and practice of knowledge that are flawed yet hold the capability to facilitate accessible and equitable knowledge sharing due to their participatory, multi modal, subversive, and autobiographical nature. And while not all cookbooks reflect this capacity, we see how many cookbooks follow this tradition and precedent. This is seen in their originating form as collected communal practices of generational, cultural, educational, gendered knowledge-sharing, which I trace and explore throughout this work. ... This work takes on an intersectional, material feminism lens to produce a public-facing anthology of food-making practices, materials and media objects rooted in care. This work performs the community-engaged knowledge and production-sharing of a cookbook as it introduces a memoir of methods to conceptualize and practice critical care, reinforces knowledge legitimacy through distinctively feminist and feminized modes of production, and justifies multi modal experimentation for the pursuit and actionization of critical care. Throughout this work, I explore community-engaged practices around food to argue that the forms of knowledge that emerge from these experiences actionize equity and justice, are historically feminized labor and thus rendered invisible, and are rooted in care. As such, I simultaneously investigate the capacity of cookbooks as objects and artifacts focused on such community-engagement and are rooted in community care, feminized labor, and co-creative experiential learning." - p. 3-4 of text