Describe your initial motivation for choosing this particular project.
Life is always about transition, and yet, we pretend it is not. We, as humans, fear change. A major transition presented itself to me when I realized that I had no more goals in my life. I know, it sounds weird to accomplish all your goals. Maybe I didn't set enough goals in the first place, but instead of feeling excited, I was full of sorrow. My future looked bleak. After exploring various options, I found a new place, home, and future with food studies. Food was something it was easy to be passionate about. And while food is inherently political, you can discuss it with almost anyone without the politics of food coming into place. For a university project I started thinking about the different ways I would want to explore talking about food. I have lots of thoughts and ideas all running in divergent directions, and I wanted to find a way to collect them all together and give them meaning. I knew the only way to accomplish this was with practice. For my EDGE project I wanted to explore writing about food in different ways. In the back of my mind I started thinking I might want to eventually start writing about food in newspapers or magazines. I wanted to write for the general public and present things in a really approachable way. I thought that using my blog to test out this writing would be an effective, yet low pressure way to write about food. I am the type of person who writes or talks to think, and it wasn't until I started working on this project that I really noticed all the things I didn't know.
I have always been classified as a fairly good writer and I have gathered a ton of information about food over the past few years. I noticed immediately after I started this project the disconnect I had between the act of writing and the information in my brain. Food has with it so much context that it has no single origin point. You could talk about the moment it was first consumed or domesticated in the history of the world or the first time it found its way onto the tine of my fork, but you would still be missing so much of the story. A lot of the pieces in this blog series or me working through this disconnect.
What skills did you use or gain from your work on this project?
I learned so much from working on this project. I started finding the ways that my writing can contribute to the contemporary narrative of food. I explored the ways that my thoughts and words could connect with each other. I have had a lot of experience writing blog posts in the past, but the experience of writing it with a purpose and potential audience in mind was very intimidating. I used a lot of existing skill formatting the layout of both my blog in general and each post specifically. And after the project was done, I spent a lot of time working on images for the blog posts because I didn't like how they looked. I think that the added effort of these images really adds a cohesiveness to the entire blog. I created these images using a program called Canva that I have used before, but I was really happy with the results of refining my ability to use it.