redesining London
breakfast./
CRITICAL INTERROGATION OF PRACTICE.
2016
London//Central Saint Martins
3 days project
Group: Chang Cathryn, Fu Yao,Charmain, Taousiani Stella, Stolz Lisa,Kiang Edwin Idris
Could food become a common language? If so, what would it say?
The inspiration for this idea came from food markets. We observed that in every food hall the food is divided in different nationalities, corresponding to the variety of cultures living in London. We were wondering why the division of food is always made by nationalities and not per types/ingredients of food like fish, burger or pasta etc. That fact shows that people are very aware of their origin culture and most of them keep their food traditions when moving to another country, like London. More than 50% of London’s population is constituted of ethnic groups other than British. This is also visible in the divisions of the city in different cultural concentrations like Chinatown, brick Lane etc. As the city has a long history of cultural diversity the markets and the offer of exotic ingredients adapted over the time. But still people have to find local substitutes
The other discussion that fed our initial idea was a talk in our group about the different food traditions in our countries. We stated the most significant differences in the categories “desert” and “breakfast”. This observation was later linked to the traditional “English breakfast” and its popularity, not just in local London restaurants, but also outside the country.
SERVICE, PACKAGE DESIGN URBAN INTERVENTION
Spirit of place, the palimpsest, space as discourse, dérive, Situationism and psycho-geography, hacktivism, social psychology, observer-participation, ethnography.
In this intervention we are posing the question if the “English breakfast” fulfils the appearance and nature of a multicultural London, or if the “London breakfast”, if it was directly related to its inhabitants would actually look totally different.
Subsequently we decided to record breakfast habits of different London citizens to create the ideal, or most common “London breakfast”. The first idea was to go to three different places, with different cultural backgrounds to get a preferably honest result. Because of the limited time frame, in the end, we were just able to go to one place, which was Chinatown. We still were satisfied with the intervention as we managed to take information of 30 participants (ourselves included), from 11 different countries
"What did you have today for breakfast?" Interviews in China Town
We installed our “breakfast table” in the middle of Chinatown, in front of the China Exchange building. Participants were asked, in exchange of a free coffee or chocolate, to recreate the breakfast they had on that day, using paper plates and ingredients, printed on paper. The set of the ingredients where mainly based on our own breakfast habits. With the outcome we wanted to create the ideal or most common “London breakfast” by putting together the most popular ingredients, chosen by the participants.
By analyzing the different dishes we decided to divide the breakfast in different categories:
1. Most Common (Sweet),
2.Savoury,
3.Minimal,
4.Weird
5.Our Group's - breakfast.
Out of these 5 dishes we are creating our pop up restaurant named:
ProiZaoFrüh – the new London breakfast experience
(these is a combination of the words for morning in the mother tongues of our group: Greek, Chinese and German)
As the most popular ingredients were: toast, biscuit, apple, croissant, milk, tomato, egg, ham, and avocado we saw that the majority of the participants, with foreign origins change their eating habits while living in London. Many of the participants emphasized that “This is not what I usually eat when I am back in my home country”. The reason for this change in eating habits can be either due to a limited availability of exotic/foreign and the resulting need for substitutions of ingredients or an actual change of taste. Due to the earlier mentioned quote we assume that it is a combination of both.