UBC Graduate Research

Eating My Feelings : creating belonging and connections through food and its spaces Brasdefer, Maria Emilia

Abstract

Food invites you in, reminisces about times past. It embraces your senses in a nostalgic adventure. It follows immigration, feeding cultures and families. Food creates home, belonging. As humans, we have an innate desire to belong. However, current trends of alienation make it ever more difficult to connect to one another and to the earth, and our food culture influences several of these trends. We have lost a lot of the connection to the land on which we live. Our cities become spaces for exclusion and xenophobia rather than diversity. Even our bodies, the way we experience space, have been largely diminished to only two of our senses: vision and hearing. Food has an amazing ability to connect us, but in dominant Western culture, the processes of making and enjoying food tend to be relatively insular or include clear divisions between ‘served’ and ‘server’ and between social classes, and separate us from the land and beings that make up that food. Still, our body and our senses ask us to reach out, and food is a way in which we create connections. This project hopes to create a space for cooking and eating in which we can reconnect with our senses, with each other, and with the land that feeds us.

Item Citations and Data

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International