Yve le Grand

abstract:

The Politics of Cooking "comme-chez-toi",
cooking as DIY culture on Web 2.0.

Key concepts: fooding/slow food - community - social software - web 2.0 - cooking as a time bank - paradigm shift - critical mass

It is obvious that cooking habits in the western world have rigorously changed since the 80ies, with the birth of yuppies and dinks: people with lots of money but no time to cook. Gourmet take-aways and catering businesses sprang up like mushrooms and soon supermarkets - as outlets for the food industry - followed suit in providing families with a "cheap" alternative to cooking meals at home.

The industry of ready-made meals that only need nuking in the microwave exploded, and so did bad business practices. Instead of producing healthy meals made with high quality ingredients, the food industry seemed to focus more on how to make the cheapest meal possible, with the highest profit margin.

One doesn’t need to be a nutritionist, anthropologist, theoretician or sociologist to see the quite disastrous effects on us as consumers giving away the control over what we put into our bodies on a daily basis. We as consumers - happy and relieved - buy whatever the industry decides that is good for us, which in fact is what is good for them.

This lack of active participation in what exactly we put into our mouths, is what worried me, and what has led me to think about developing a social software to start home-cooked meal communities in our neighborhoods/social environments.

The time has come to make a paradigm shift: from being passive food consumers to becoming active and critical producers and consumers of our own meals, reaping the benefits, physically, materially and psychologically.

For now the project is called: "comme-chez-toi", meaning: like at home.

bio:

Yve le Grand graduated in Art History & Sculpture in Amsterdam in 1995, after doing an exchange with the SUNY Purchase School for Visual Arts, New York, doing video projects and digital art.
She did her Masters (M.F.A.) in Digital Communication & Emergent Media, with honours, for both her dissertation and pioneering internet project on interactive narrative in 1997.

Since then she has participated in 16 art exhibitions, did a project on finding a certain bar in Lisbon and made 2 documentaries.
She has written various articles for specialized magazines and has been a speaker at many international conferences, lectures and seminars about digital culture and communication. As a fervent cook, she is very interested in alternative ways of cooking and sharing meals.

mailto: y.le.grand'AT'gmail.com

linx:

'where is the bar?'
www.atmosferas.net/projectos/gs/3/index.htm

A Quest For IDentity
http://www.cascoprojects.org/data/html/c00423.html