Food has a much larger effect on us than just keeping our organism alive – It shapes us and the way we understand our world. With our project Tasting Emotions our aim lies in creating tools and settings to bring more consciousness to the multiple layers that constitute our daily meals.
We took taste as our mediator to ask and collectively explore two powerful aspects of consuming food: Taste as storytelling - How do taste and emotions/memories relate? Conscious consumption - What drives our food choices?
For our research we created and brought dishes with a twist to the streets of Bolzano collecting stories awakened by the tastes. In our workshop at Casa Goethe exploring what leads to our desires and choices of food. Our lexicon as well as our card set should serve anyone who is curious to explore and connect in a different way with the ingredients that give us life.
Street research
Curious to explore peoples associations between tastes, emotions and memories we set up our first research station close to the Talvera in Bolzano. We created 4 recipes inspired by local dishes to offer to pedestrians who were invited to first taste and the note down what feelings and memories came to them in that moment. We were able to collect a wide array of associations, demonstrating how deeply personal food journeys are.
The overarching theme for our workshop at afzack in Casa Goethe were the 10 different types of hunger. Through 4 exercises we wanted to introduce our participants to the concept of different hungers in life and discuss potential personal interpretations.
We approached this theme in a playful way, engaging the participants in a journey of all 5 senses, accompanied by a dialogue on how food is emotionally coded. The workshop offered an exciting opportunity to explore how sensorial experiences can mediate this information.
