Food Stories
I have largely found that the people who truly love food tend to hold a love for life as well. To work with food is to work with life; to study food is to study life. Food, like life, is temporary: it exists as it is for a finite amount of time and then it is consumed, altered, destroyed - first witnessed and then transformed.
Careers in food are not usually the most financially lucrative, nor are they the most socially prestigious. Food people are often underpaid, overworked, and vastly undervalued for their knowledge, experience, and skill.
What this leaves, then, are individuals who do their work for the sake of the work itself. Food Stories is an attempt at better understanding who these people are.
Through a mixture of interviews, conversations, photographs, and writings, this project is a sharing of lives and a telling of stories. If you are interested in being involved, please reach out to me at quinnahadley@gmail.com.
What food stories do you have to tell?
“Homesickness was always for this little slice of the Brazilian south - for the way the floor tiles creaked in my grandmother’s kitchen; for the rosca de polvilho that would be dipped into scalding coffee; for the silence of the afternoon as we all napped after lunch; for the smell of wet soil and forest in summer, and burning wood and bergamot come winter.”
“Kitchen sounds speak for me, when words don’t seem enough.... When I break a thumb of ginger, or rip up coriander and release that smell of pure life, I am reminded that to be alive is to taste, smell, see, touch and feel. Certain foods spur certain emotions, certain smells unearth buried memories.”
