Project: The Meal

I responded to the Art House Co-op’s first annual global snack project, called The Meal, which the team in New York, based at Brooklyn Art Library, described in a few simple but beautiful words as “One moment. One meal. Let’s eat”. The team had asked thousands of people around the world to participate in a simultaneous meal with strangers, which took place on 24th Feb 2012 at 12pm EST. The team had also said that the aim of the project was to encourage the artists to “take a moment from our hectic lives” in order “to inspire a feeling of community across geographic and cultural boundaries”, while addressing the statement “you are what you eat”. The slogan “what you eat” is never enough for nearly a billion people around the world and the project is, therefore, a call for our awareness of the growing problem in the struggle against global hunger.

My piece is called London Meal as I have lived in London (UK) for over 20 years. As London is ahead of New York for 5 hours, it meant that my meal had to be prepared for a traditional British afternoon tea at 5pm (GMT), to be eaten with a cup of British style tea rather than with a can of Coca-Cola as in New York. To emphasise the concept of the multi-cultural and global event, I, therefore, decided to test my technical – culinary – skills that I learnt in my mother’s kitchen in Slovenia. I also thought that such a global collaborative event had to be documented differently, not directly associated with the cooking skills of Slovenia, but by applying a valuable skill of hand-made lettering, I have ‘acquired’ it in London while attending a pioneering course on experimental typography at the University of the Arts. The course reopened endless thoughts and searches on how one can make use of any traditional technical skill for a project and recycle it in another context to give it a new meaning.

I first prepared yeast dough, used traditionally in Slovenia at the carnival and at other special occasions, which needed to rise. I then created letter templates for letters based on Helvetica. Once I cut out the letters from the dough, the letters had to rise again. They were then deep-fried, drained from oil and decorated with icing sugar.

All photos were shown in an exhibition documenting the world’s largest communal snack on 5 April 2012 at Brooklyn Art Library.

 

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