’s what led me to doing cooking as a performance project. They both have to do with subjectivity and telling stories. This is again connected to memory, and how you construct images and stories in your head based on what you remember from the past. I immediately saw the performative aspect of cooking. I’m trained as a performer, meaning I use my body a lot, and cooking is physical on so many levels.
I’m glad you brought that up. I wanted to ask you about the similarities between dancing and cooking?
They’re both choreography. Choreo, which meaning time, and Graphy, a map of time. In dancing you use your body to map time. In cooking you use different tools, and instead of moving yourself within a space, you see and feel the transformation of the ingredients. It’s a beautiful way to map time. Performance for me is something I started doing because it is transformative, meaning it makes me keep revisiting who I am. The more I perform, the more I discover things about myself, so it’s also about repetition.
Cooking is very repetitive, but here, it’s important to not turn cooking into a routine, but instead let it become a ritual. We can do that with everything that we repeatedly do. If we are aware of our movements, they become a ritual. If we lose sight, they become routine.
Yes! And as soon as you make it a ritual it almost becomes a spiritual thing.
As soon as you become aware of it, yes. A lot in our society is trying to make [cooking] invisible. People start to think of time as something outside of them, something that they have to fit into. Something that they have to pursue. A frame that they have to not miss; Not miss the train, not miss the work, not to be late. Time becomes something external. With dancing or with cooking, you become aware of it again.
Cooking is very repetitive, but here, it’s important to not turn cooking into a routine, but instead let it become a ritual. If we are aware of our movements, they become a ritual. If we lose sight, they become routine.
You arrived at cooking from a theoretical standpoint, as an artist rather than a traditional chef, and I can tell that you’re really into etymology. The word leftovers, already puts the concept at a disadvantage, because it makes it sound superfluous—like something that can be easily wasted.
The development of language goes hand in hand with the way our society is conditioned, meaning our cultural conventions and language are intertwined.
For example, in the Philippines we use a lot of words relating to taste or smell, not just to describe food, but to speak of transcendental things like feelings, our feelings towards each other, the weather and even sexuality. For example, sourness connotes sexual ripeness, meaning a person is… how do you say it… good to go.
This is part of the things I started to observe after leaving the Philippines, and it has become an integral part of how I do research for my food related performances.
My interviewee just got done with lunch service at the Agora café and has cooked for hours, following a double shift in the kitchen for a big event the previous day, Pepe is surely ‘cooked out’ by now. Yet he still accepts my ‘fun challenge’ to whip up a small dish from a haphazard spread of leftovers and ingredients collected from my fridge at home, as well as whatever we could scavenge from the Agora café kitchen.
We start by tasting a sliver of Norwegian ‘brown cheese’ (a traditional, and sweet tasting cheese made from whey and goats milk) and talk about how food and certain flavors bring back memories.
I’m interested in your creative process? When you look at something like this spread of random foods, what goes through your mind? How do you decide what to make?
The second most important thing that I recognized is the need to start doing something, even if you don’t know what to do. You have to keep going, even if you’re in despair. It was like that today, where some of what you do just ends up being reflex actions. But times like these are often when I’m the most creative.
And, out came the colorful and beautiful plate we just had for lunch!
It also has to do with leniency. I only had wine as a spice, all though I would have liked to have lemon and other stuff. But limitation is an important component. It’s nice to have a sense of limitation because when you limit yourself, what you’re actually limiting is your ego. Some of the most beautiful things I’ve created have come from surrendering to what is there.
When you cook with leftovers, you tend to make something completely different from what it was originally. It can be a challenge for most of us to see past the cold pizza or pasta in our fridges and make something other than re-heated pizza or pasta with it. Can you talk about the difference between ‘heating up’ leftovers and ‘cooking’ with leftovers?
Well, I think people are challenged by a linear framework of thinking. Things have a beginning and an end, and during its lifespan, it remains constant. To use the example of the pizza, it remains a pizza throughout its existence, and when you’re done eating what you want of it, there’s no new life after the death of your pizza. Once the rest is put into ‘the holy fridge’ you start to forget about it. This is what’s so problematic about leftovers—it becomes a valid excuse for wasting food. Because we are so closed off in our minds, there’s nothing new left to do with it anymore. Many live their lives like this as well. They’ll screw up and think, ‘my life is fucked now, there’s nothing I can do about it’. Many people are prisoners of this mindset. Pizza is just a metaphor.
People don’t give themselves second chances. But I heard this thing in meditation class, that when you think you have made a mistake or failed, it is just a matter of our own framework of thinking. What is failure and success anyway? It’s all a matter of perception—again it’s embedded in our language.
We always want to brand something as either good or bad—we want to give everything a label. The problem with leftovers also has to do with branding. Leftovers are misbranded. The work we need to do has to do with rebranding.
So would you want to change the name of leftovers to something else? What would you change it to?
That’s the thing. I don’t think that it needs a special name at all.
You’re saying we should just call it food?
Exactly! Calling it leftovers gives us the idea that it’s second rate food.
It’s interesting that a lot of very traditional dishes from around the world originate from leftovers. Different casseroles, paella, fried rice, shepherds pie and pizza are all dishes that were allegedly invented as a way to use up leftovers.
Yes, and another one of the national dishes of Spain, the Tortilla, is just made from potatoes, onions and eggs. Why? There are so many foods in Spain that are way more elaborate. Why is it potatoes and eggs? It’s often the simple, everyday stuff that becomes tradition.
Whenever I cook, people ask questions like, ‘What kind of cuisine is this?’ or, ‘What type of food is this?’, and I’ll say, ‘It’s Nowhere Kitchen’. When I started the residency at Agora too, they’d ask, ‘What’s the name of this dish?’ thinking that the specifics would help enhance their eating experience. We started doing a lot of stuff to change how people were asking about the food and it was really rewarding to not get asked those same questions anymore. Instead new questions arose like, ‘What’s in it?’ or ‘How was it made?’, which are much more interesting questions, because it keeps people curious.
My work is about changing people’s perception and how they view food. One thing I always get a lot as donations are cookie leftovers. You know, it’s a cookie, and for a lot of people, it’s hard to accept that it’s basically flour. Reconstituted flour. If it’s been constructed, you can deconstruct it, and when you deconstruct a cookie, you get flour that you can use for whatever you would use flour for. People will eat something rolled in ‘cookie flour’ and ask ‘Are you sure this has no meat?’ — ‘Yeah, it’s vegetarian.’ ‘Really? What’s in it?’. ‘Cookie’. But people will think it is chicken because the sweet cookie flour will remind them of some version of a chicken nugget or something.
I wanted to ask you about food waste, which is obviously a huge problem in our society. You don’t talk about that much, but is there a political agenda behind what you do, or is that just a byproduct?
Each person’s individual choice of how they want to live their lives is the most political thing there is. If I can affect and inspire people to do something different with, and use up their leftovers by showing them what they already know how to do, then that is very political to me.
We tend to view politics as something that happens in parliament or in public spaces, but never in private homes and in people’s kitchens. But that’s often where the real politics is happening. Perhaps our unawareness