I am beginning to realise my projects full potential and am now aware that it is seemingly more intrinsically linked to my context report than I had previously imagined. In the report I stated that I intended to consider designing interventions to improve the diets and the relationships that people have with food due to the chronic fragmentation that has accumulated over the last 70 years. I had anticipated a physical design outcome, linked to the growing, and production of food within urban environments.
I held workshops within schools in an attempt to investigate the diets of those within dense housing estates, so not only did I rummage through their bins but also I provided the participants with cameras and food diaries to document their diets accordingly. I had considered mobile food units whose aim was to educate and impart basic cookery skills.
The centre of my focus has been those typically exposed and vulnerable to the perils of fast and convenient food. Deliberating over possible interventions, I next moved onto to looking at enterprising ways in which food manufacture may be used on a local level as an alleviating tool for those in socially and economically malnourished environments. I began researching London’s existing boroughs and mapped what food products could be created by inhabitants from dense areas, which led to the concept of a ‘culinary geographies’ map, which highlighted the fact that a large percentage of London’s boroughs, despite being multi-cultural have a unique culinary identity. I thought about using this concept as the driving force behind an idea that used London as a culinary product umbrella, under which it’s various culinary boroughs could be clearly identified and products manufactured by inhabitants accordingly. The idea being that each distinct area would boast a series of products directly reflecting the producing ethnicities involved, thus creating a not-for-profit organization that sought to create enterprise through hands on education and acquired business acumen.
In the case of the above idea I had significantly jumped the gun, taking a concept and leaping to outcome omitting any natural evolution that would have transpired within. An idea that I would like to pursue at some point but development is still required.
During a tutorial my tutor then in fact proceeded to highlight the feasibility of the idea, but the suggested the outcome be discarded. More positively he commented on the informal food dispensers that I had identified, such as the Bombay mix vendor and suggested that I create a service, a series of tours that take people of journeys of these key, unreported areas, but I had no intention of catering for a tourist market so a explosion of the idea was required.
What I have decided to create as a result of my research consequently is a map, a culinary map of London that identifies the main hubs of its 60+ non-indigenous communities. Each of these communities has it’s own culinary identity, its own traditions, it’s own shops, it’s own eating practices, it’s own restaurants. What I aim to create is a map that charts these places through the mouths and the experiences of its inhabitants, through their eyes, not a reviewers, not a food critics but from the mouths that inhabit the area. I want them to create a rich portrait of where it is they live through the food that that eat and the experiences that are intrinsically entwined, stories, videos, recipes, menus, environments will be all linked and mapped into an easily digestible and accessible format.
The map/platform aims to be:
- An educationally tool, a window into the eating traditions and environments of its ethnic communities
- A tool that creates social/community cohesion
- A tool to stimulate interest in the city and create awareness and understanding
- That promotes cultural identity within the city in a genuine format as to an ‘authentic’ one
- To encourage tourism outside of the common areas
- To be an accessible platform that comprehensively illustrates the capitals ethnic diversity
- A way for members of certain ethnic groups to contact others of the same ethnicity
- Self-promotion
- Something for a range of users from communities, tourists, schools, Londoners, foodies, the list could go on
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