Kitchen Futures: Participatory Taste Workshops and the Battle for Together

ABSTRACT

Since 2016 I have been developing and performing what I call ‘participatory taste workshops’. Embedded within art festivals, the workshops research taste by using taste as a transdisciplinary method. Site-responsive kitchen laboratories invite experimental ethnographies of culturally specific tasting conditions. In April 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I collaborated with culinary historian Allison Reynolds to organize a Zoom event, Bake Together: Anzac Biscuits Live. The virtual format created markedly different futures from the futures made by in person workshops. Zoom distilled and complicated feminist, queer methodologies activated by in-person workshops. Writing from these differences, this article traces the feminist futuring implications of Bake Together methodologies. Moving between participatory taste workshop methods and the practices of contemporary artists working in Australia and the US, including Mēlani Douglass, Michael Mandiberg, Laurie Anderson, James Nguyen, Michael Rakowitz, Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, I trace how domestic corridors of soft power flow through Bake Together into broader social worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Anzac biscuits
• Zoom
• COVID-19
• kitchens
• feminist
• participatory art
• metabolism

The plan was to land in Sydney from an overseas trip on Friday morning and immediately bake Anzac biscuits to bring along to the Country Women’s Association (CWA) Tea Room at the Sydney Royal Easter Show on Saturday. Then COVID-19 changed everything except my cupboard full of ingredients. Founded during the 1922 Easter Show, the seven State and Territory CWAs together form Australia’s largest advocacy group for women and regional populations. The Easter Show, an agricultural show and fair, has closed on only three occasions since 1869: the Spanish flu outbreak in 1919, World War II, and in 2020 during COVID-19. When I arrived in Sydney on March 19, the Easter Show and many other events were already cancelled. Mine was one of the last flights to land before the introduction of mandatory hotel quarantine. Fourteen days of self-isolation loomed. I had spent my career cultivating scholarly and artistic methods that depended on eating and talking in person. My cupboard of Anzac biscuit ingredients – oats, coconut, butter, flour, bicarb and, of course, golden syrup – became significant, even poignant. Without their Easter show future, what would these ingredients become?

This article documents how the feminist methods underpinning my ‘participatory taste workshops’ changed during the weeks and months following my return to locked-down Sydney. The COVID-19 pandemic created conditions that challenged and extended how the kitchen might function as an infrastructure for critically remaking feminist futures using a workshop format. The pivot to online delivery made pre-pandemic and largely unquestioned conditions of togetherness visible to reveal what I theorise in the Australasian context as a ‘battle for together’. Recognizing togetherness as a battle compels a surprising queering of early COVID-19 rhetoric about togetherness (‘we’re all in it together’ and other slogans). In this same moment Lauren Berlant observes how ‘fantasies of democracy as the experience of collectively equal exposure to vulnerability tried to establish a ground where there is no ground’ (2022, 113). Lockdown opened new debates about how togetherness might be understood in (crip, queer, feminist) futures.

Anzac biscuit ingredients and recipes provide a material and methodological throughline for my argument. Anzac biscuits are simple sweet biscuits made by dissolving bicarbonate of soda into melted butter and golden syrup, then adding the foamy results to a mixture of oats, flour, desiccated coconut, and sugar. Australia and Aotearoa both claim the recipe (not an uncommon situation: the meringue-based pavlova causes similar controversy). Based on the data I have collected over the years, one could be forgiven for assuming that all Australian or Aotearoan Anzac biscuit consumers have impassioned views on whether Anzac biscuits should be chewy or crispy. As an outsider whose accent carries the ‘non-Australian overtones’ that led to a ban on trade in ‘Anzac cookies’, I am still learning these biscuits, both their recipe and their cultural significance (Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs 2020).

Baked for Anzac Day on April 25, and on every other day too, Anzac biscuits memorialize the Australia New Zealand Army Corps’ (ANZAC) participation in the Gallipoli campaign during World War I. The idea was to capture Constantinople, and for eight months ANZAC soldiers were engaged in a stalemate, poorly supplied, and famously poorly fed. The ubiquitous Anzac biscuit reveals a culinary entanglement of ‘everyday militarisms’ that we continue to digest (see Kelley 2023b). When asked to bring biscuits along to a fundraiser or volunteer tearoom such as the one at the Royal Easter Show, Anzacs are a biscuit of choice. Looking at my cupboard on day one of self-isolation, I decided that Anzac biscuits had to be the perfect Australasian comfort food to bake while staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anzac biscuits were developed during trying times that resonate with COVID-19 pandemic border restrictions and lockdowns: with supply chains disrupted, shortages abound, and travel becomes slow to impossible in ways that recall how travel was slow to impossible a century ago. These slow impossibilities revealed how being together became a battle during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scholars and historians debate every aspect of the Anzac biscuit’s history, ingredients, and preparation methods. Sociologist Sían Supski finds Anzac biscuit ancestors in Scottish oatcakes (2006). Culinary historian Allison Reynolds follows the melting method, the part of the process where butter and golden syrup melt together, to trace an Anzac genealogy back to ginger biscuits and parkins or sticky ginger cakes (2018). Australian War Memorial curator Dianne Rutherford has experimented with baking early Anzac biscuit recipes and found the results to be shockingly diverse: one recipe even includes icing (2013). Rutherford’s historic Anzac biscuits are so different from today’s that they would likely violate legislation standardising commercial preparation of Anzac biscuits. Anzac biscuits may be the only biscuit in the world to be regulated by federal governments (Australian Department of Veterans’ Affairs 2020; Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage 2020).

Biscuits occupy spaces often perceived as unimportant, marginalized, feminized: kitchens, tea rooms, bake sales, the supermarket. The CWA appears to be similarly marginalized and feminized, with public events focused on activities such as baking, handicrafts, and, historically, baby shows.¹ These spaces and social settings link to the consistent taste profile and mouthfeel of Anzac biscuits: golden-syrup sweet, textured but not outrageously so, Anzac biscuits are feminine, familiar, everyday, benign. The tearoom, the CWA, and the golden syrup sweetness of Anzac biscuits exercise forms of ‘soft power’ nationalism within Australia and Aotearoa. Soft power emerges from post-Cold War US political science, and refers to co-opting through sociocultural and persuasive means rather than coercing or forcing (Nye 2004). ‘Co-opt’ enfolds two key terms for this article, ‘together’, (the co- prefix) and choice (the Latin optare). The term has been challenged, nuanced, and reinterpreted through feminist praxis (Cheung 2022; Domett 2005; Dominijanni 2017). Soft power, like Anzac biscuits themselves, will never escape ‘everyday militarisms’, or the ‘domesticity of war’ (Pardo Pedraza et al. 2023). I join these feminist approaches to position the baking aisle in the supermarket, the RSL fundraising table, and the CWA Land Cookery Competition as corridors of power.

By documenting and contextualizing taste-led sensory ethnography methods, I trace a shift from in-person models for togetherness practiced before the COVID-19 pandemic to moving kitchen-centred creative practice online during COVID-19. The pivot to online modalities revealed subtle qualities of in-person interactions previously taken for granted. At the same time, working in distributed kitchens online triggered debates about what forms togetherness might take in the future.

Participatory Taste Workshop 1: Tasting History at the Kandos CWA

Since 2016, I have been developing, hosting, and performing what I call ‘participatory taste workshops’. The workshops are designed to capture data through traditional means such as photographs and audio recordings as well as less traditional means, such as tableware, recipes, baked goods, and digestive networks. With anchor points in FLUXUS (an art movement that values and extends food as art), socially engaged and participatory art involves specific publics in dialogical and edible exchanges (Bishop 2006; Fizell 2021; Kester 2004; Smith 2013). Participatory art about food takes many forms, appearing as material object, as active agent or subject, and/or as reward for participation. Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (2003-ongoing) looks like a food truck, but interactions with staff (US military veterans and Iraqi refugees among them) reveal the truck to be a participatory art event designed to involve American eaters in ‘a strange communion’ with Iraqi cuisine (Boucher 2018). James Nguyen’s two-channel video installation, Magic Pudding / Bánh Thánh, responds to the 100-year anniversary of Norman Lindsay’s children’s book The Magic Pudding. By attending to Mr Curry Rice, the pudding’s original owner, who is quickly stolen from, abandoned, and left to drown, Nguyen and his family reveal the colonial racist underpinnings of the story (Nguyen 2019). Developing links between what Elspeth Probyn calls ‘realms of taste and history’ (2016, 50), where the past touches the palate, and established tactics demonstrated by Rakowitz and Nguyen, my frameworks for in-person participatory taste workshops map sensations at the nexus of food, taste, and culture.

As with Rakowitz and Nguyen’s work, participatory taste workshops are embedded within art festivals, exhibitions, and academic symposia. I focus on two iterations of participatory taste workshops dedicated to Anzac biscuits, one of three case study foods supporting Tasting History, a multiyear research project about ‘biscuits, culture, and national identity’.² Publications, props, and university ethics applications were all designed for live events focused on groups of about twenty people preparing and tasting food in proximity. The first workshop was presented with the title Tasting History in person in 2019 at the Cementa Contemporary Arts Festival in Kandos, NSW. The second workshop, Bake Together, was presented on Zoom in collaboration with Reynolds in 2020.

Cementa festivalgoers joined locals to bake Anzac biscuits in groups across two days. We baked in the Kandos CWA rooms, and our biscuits were sold to raise funds for CWA community projects. Elsewhere, I have reflected at length on how the Kandos workshop series developed methods that I call ‘baking strange’, named after Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarization or ostranenie, ‘making strange’ (Kelley 2022a). Although taste and its traces activate and transform intangible aspects of embodied memory and cultural experience across in-person and Zoom participatory taste workshops, this article focuses on what I learned about ‘together’ as an affordance. I interpret ‘affordance’ in Arseli Dokumaci’s sense, ‘how disabled people – literally make up whatever affordances fail to readily materialize in their environments … and at the same time must make up for that failure’ (Dokumaci 2023, 6). My work with ‘baking strange’ only partially engaged the precise terms of togetherness in the CWA rooms. Togetherness was taken as a given rather than requiring methodological support: in-person interaction was an assumed condition. We did not have to make up for failures in order to work together. COVID-19 would reveal our shared surfaces, air, and ingestions as particular and privileged affordances.

Locating, troubleshooting, and utilizing kitchen facilities set the tone for negotiating with collaborators and festival organizers. Arguing that institutional kitchens are simultaneously ‘ignored, unnoticed, taken-for-granted’ and ‘vital places … where moments away from time-on-task … may be gratefully grabbed’, Carol Taylor finds that ‘acts of unbidden voluntary generosity are done with no obligation for gratitude in return’ (2022, 34–39). This freely given collectivity creates a soft space that is both inside and outside of the festival or university context, and inside and outside of patriarchy. Kitchens reveal the conditions of production of a given institutional setting and function as vectors between soft tissue – the practical work of eating digesting, and metabolizing – and soft politics – the cultural work of creating community through domestic norms. As workshop sites, institutional kitchens can function as what Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Tessa Zettel, and Astrida Neimanis describe as eating ‘together differently’, referring to eating activities that ‘neither have to be convened indoors around a kitchen table with a nuclear family nor conducted via commerce in a café’ (2021, 249). Office workers care for their collective culinary environment, or not, and this care manifests in the number of forks available, the number and tone of signs workers feel obliged to post, and the distribution of unpaid housekeeping labour required to make the kitchen function. In Kandos, the CWA building became the office kitchen for Cementa, operating as a refuge from bushfire-tinged air.

After introducing ourselves by way of the controversial question ‘Crispy or chewy?’ Kandos participants organized into small groups, picked a recipe, improvised a recipe, or in one case called their grandmother for a recipe. The baking process – mixing, shaping, smushing mid-bake, cooling – structured the rest of our time together, and we closed with a cup of tea and a taste test. The CWA hosts competitions and trains its members to judge baked goods. While competitive baking has become the norm on mainstream reality TV shows such as MasterChef (Philips 2016), this activity has also inspired artists, as with the Barbara Cleveland Institute’s marathon Mass Action endurance bake (2012) and Oron Catts' and the Centre for Genomic Gastronomy’s Art Meat Flesh (2016). Ranging from lacy forms that spread across the entire pan to crunchy, crispy, and even salty circles, the diversity of our participatory taste workshop products might have been judged harshly by CWA standards. Given how the Anzac biscuit is regulated by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs in Australia, only some of what we made could even be sold as Anzac biscuits. One professional baker among us discussed how he decided to stop selling olive oil-based oat biscuits as ‘Anzac biscuits’. Although not targeted by authorities, he had internalized the regulations and recognized that he was no longer working within the boundaries of the traditional recipe.

During our tea and tasting conversation, I introduced the idea of digestive networks to illustrate how when we eat these specific ingredients, our mouths, stomachs, and guts are networked with global supply chains and with one another. In Kandos, digestive networks were formed from the Anzac biscuit recipe basics that I supplied, ingredients outside the confines of the recipe that participants found in the CWA kitchen (salt, olive oil) and ingredients participants had with them or went out and purchased (dried fruit). When we leave the workshop having baked and consumed these ingredients together, we create a dispersed digestive network. Elsewhere, I describe how digestive networks ‘carry the performances outward to interfere with existing patterns and create … community’ (Kelley 2023a, 4). Using ingredients that exceed the lawful boundaries of the Anzac biscuit recipe contributes to this community-building interference. Our ‘personal microbial clouds’ seeded the ‘built environment microbiome’ formed in the CWA hall, further enmeshing and networking participating bodies (Meadow et al. 2015).

Networked bodies become bioart incubators. ‘Bioart’ refers to an overlap between art materials, living systems, and conditions of production that may include research laboratories, domestic spaces, public spaces, and kitchens. I have argued that ‘bioart emerges from feminist performance practice, food art, domestic computing and Home Economics’, with each of these fields relying on ‘the kitchen as a site of knowledge production’ (Kelley 2016, 2). Kitchens become gendered spaces not only because women historically inhabit nuclear family home kitchens as waged and unwaged, sometimes enslaved, domestic workers but also because of the digestive networks that form around specific kitchen outcomes. Participatory taste workshops produce embodied kitchen knowledge drawn from technologies of the kitchen and of the incubator. Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts’s critical history of incubators shows how incubators ‘outsource the female body’ and engage ‘thermobiopolitics’ (2023, 73) that contribute to and critique ‘thermal relationships’ premised on imperial logics (Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Julia 2022, 2). Ovens inform thermobiopolitics multiply. Incubators are ovens, and everyday sayings such as ‘bun in the oven’ imply that wombs are ovens, too.

Kitchens create atmospheres that could be likened to ‘weather worlds’ theorized by Hamilton, Zettel, and Neimanis. Weather worlds and weathering articulate responses to ‘the total atmospheres that bodies are made to bear’, and seek to ‘resist the simplistic claim that “we are in this together”, and inquire into how we can weather together, better, where such “better weathering” would entail both attention to and accountability for different bodies’ weatherings’ (Hamilton, Zettel 2021, 239). Anzac biscuits are a particularly fickle and atmosphere-dependent biscuit. Batches made from the same recipe can be different, depending on countless variables from the amount of air added by the bicarb reaction to minute differences in oven interiors. By making connections between baking techniques, participant ingestions, and microbial clouds conscious through critical conversation about ingredients and supply chains, digestive networks form thermal futures. Each participating body transforms shared materials to become what Zurr and Catts call, after Donna Haraway, a Compostcubator.³

When Kandos bakers walk away from tasting the biscuits made in the CWA kitchen, our stomachs carry forward the politics and labour of manufacturing, the generosity of institutional kitchens, and the specific gut effects of this bag of oats and these coconuts. Our microbial clouds touch, separate, disperse, and through the linked metabolic cycles of bodies and the planet, reconfigure and reform, transform and compost, to touch again. Although every meal forms such networks, participatory taste workshops aim to trouble commonly understood divisions between first, food as ‘substance ontology’ versus ‘relational ontology’ (Heldke 2012) and second, ‘conscious taste perception’ versus ‘subconscious metabolic responses’ (Breslin 2018). Climate crisis and food industry conditions impact how these ingredients will land in and flow through bodies, ecologies, waterways, and worlds. Tasting methods in the workshop create feminist futures grounded in material conditions and animated by the soft power held within guts and stomach linings. These same futures modelled forms of togetherness that were taken for granted before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Participatory Taste Workshop 2: Bake Together on Zoom

In early March 2020, I had been planning how I might best encounter Anzac biscuits in April. The scheduled Anzac Day public events that scaffolded these plans were all cancelled as the COVID-19 pandemic levelled my calendar. Australia closed its borders to everyone but celebrities, politicians, and people who could find an expensive seat on a limited number of international flights, then petition for, endure, and afford hotel quarantine. As I timed my forays into the kitchen to avoid others in my household while isolating following international travel, the participatory taste workshops in the Kandos CWA rooms seemed unfathomable. Just a few months earlier, groups of strangers had stood shoulder-to-shoulder rolling out balls of dough and assisting each other with measuring ingredients. We touched shared surfaces that I was now compulsively disinfecting. We talked; recordings from the event document the hubbub of our shared atmosphere.

As a wave of workers lost their lives and more workers lost their jobs, office workers and academics acclimated to video meetings and online teaching. Baking became a primary pastime. Flour was quickly rationed, along with pasta and toilet paper. On April 8, days after I was able to leave the house following my two weeks of self-isolation, I walked to three nearby grocery stores in search of flour. I eventually sourced a 5 kg bag. I was so thrilled to find it that I posted a picture on social media. The brand, ‘Defiance’, was new to me and although it was high protein bread flour, I was happy to use it for anything I might bake in the coming weeks, including Anzac biscuits (Figure 1). Meanwhile, industry bakers were selling ingredients they would not be able to use after restaurants closed and artists and arts workers were improvising, pivoting, scrambling, retraining, but most of all, cancelled (Flore, Hendry, and Gaylor 2023; Holcombe-James, Flore, and Hendry 2022). Futures for participatory installation and social practice art seemed bleak; as one friend put it, ‘there is no space for us’.

Figure 1 . Defiance White Baker’s Flour. Photograph by the author, 8 April 2020.

Collective stress baking produced creative responses formed by lack and desire. Isolated with a sweet tooth, home bakers wanted what we could not have. We invented the toilet paper cake, adapted flourless versions of classic recipes, and committed to wild sourdough. Yeast shortages coupled with the time-killing properties of elaborate starter preparation to make sourdough a COVID-19 staple that became a stereotype. Curator Megan Fizell narrates her flat first attempt at wild starter sourdough, admitting to stress baking in her March 2020 bread art roundup: ‘in my final year of my PhD candidacy, it was only a matter of time before I pulled out the container of flour and started kneading away’ (2020). ‘Iso culture’ (isolation culture: Australian English prefers to shorten words) brought unsuspecting mainstream people into queer and disabled cultural norms. In conversation with unemployed and underemployed friends in a sunny Sydney backyard, novelist Tilly Lawless’s unnamed heroine asks, ‘Don’t you reckon iso culture is, like, lesbian culture? You know, baking sourdough and tending plants and taking up crafts and stuff? … I’m talking about straight people discovering what lesbians have been doing since forever’ (2021, 204). Sourdough culture and lesbian culture gather the strength to resist patriarchy one cup of tea at a time. Introducing the broader public to these cultures produced kitchen methods that made COVID-19 rhetorically if not physically ‘beatable’. Food writer and baker Regula Ysewijn started the hashtag #bakecorona on social media, declaring that if ‘we bake it, we will beat it’ (2020). Thousands of homebakers joined her, posting everything from Battenberg cakes to hot cross buns.

Celebrity bakers and chefs began broadcasting from their home kitchens. Their zoom backgrounds became a collective public domestic space. In August 2020, I speculated about how the pandemic has ‘levelled the playing field of baking at home because everyone’s at home, even … famous chefs and bakers are baking at home’ (Kelley 2020b). Martha Stewart’s kitchen offers ‘a glimpse of [her] covetable home kitchen’ while Rachel Ray produced informal videos from her home kitchen, which ‘boasts subway-tile walls, butcher block countertops, and enough cutting boards to outfit a restaurant kitchen’ (Hansen 2020). When commercial kitchens appeared on social media screens, such spaces were too quiet, as with Christina Tosi’s archive of cookie tips videos. The atmosphere of a working bakery reduces to the ambient white noise of her recording setup, while comments flag how Tosi has laid off the workers who would have been generating buzz and clatter (Tosi 2020).

With Anzac Day gatherings cancelled or adapted to televisual presentation, Anzac biscuits were poised to have their own #bakecorona moment. Joining scrambling and pivoting arts workers, albeit from a position of secure employment privilege, I adapted the participatory taste workshop method to ‘iso culture’ by hosting a Zoom Anzac biscuit event, Bake Together: Anzac Biscuits Live (Figure 2). I asked Reynolds to lead us, she agreed, and home bakers attended from across Australia and Aotearoa and from as far away as New York City and London. Hundreds of people responded to the invitation, which was promoted by Time Out Sydney (Venkataraman 2020).

Figure 2 . ‘Bake Together: Anzac Biscuits Live’ screencapture. Photograph by the author, 23 April 2020.

Bake Together adapted the methods developed in the Kandos CWA workshops to the constraints and affordances of early COVID-19 Zoom adoption. This adaptation to online delivery revealed what ‘participatory’ meant in the ‘before times’ while simultaneously triggering debates about how collectivist and feminist futures should operate moving forward. Following the format of live quarantine baking tutorial videos, we hundreds of Bake Together bakers followed Reynolds as she demonstrated the ‘crispy’ recipe she developed for her book, Anzac Biscuits: The Power and Spirit of an Everyday Icon (2018). Bake Together had many of the same qualities as the in-person participatory taste workshop in Kandos: a recipe was agreed upon, people improvised as needed with ingredients and method, and bakers watched one another step through the process, directing questions to Reynolds and each other. To fulfill the promise of the event’s title by participating alongside everyone else, I prepped my dry ingredients ahead of time. With hundreds of participants and limited time, the Zoom workshop skipped groups and introductions entirely. Groups formed anyway. At any given moment, a small group activated, with a handful of people engaging and asking questions while others focused on their process. These ad-hoc small groups formed through Zoom’s ability to gather active participants on the top screen. Sometimes these groups coincided with affinities established through the registration process when friends and neighbours signed up together. From my position hosting the workshop, I observed that everyone who attended was mixing batter, shaping biscuits, and baking them in real time. Participants held up their bowls, batters, and trays to their cameras to engage in conversation about dough texture, doneness, and taste. A few people in incompatible timezones admitted to listening in rather than baking, although one participant in New York City followed up to report on vegan cookies baked in solidarity the following day. I watched people move around in their kitchens and observed syncopated and seemingly choreographed actions across the grid of zoom screens. As biscuits came out of the oven, we held up our pans to the camera and admired each other’s efforts.

COVID-19 Zoom culture emerges from isolation at home coupled with routine online meetings for workers accustomed to working in person. Choices about webcam presentation are not new; sex workers have been staging webcam intimacy for decades before office workers started broadcasting their surroundings en masse during lockdown (Jones 2020; Nayar 2017). When people choose to render their surroundings soft and fuzzy with filters, institutional and domestic kitchens blur. Tasked with developing a bespoke background for a talk reflecting on Bake Together, designer Juune Lee created a grid of hand-drawn baked goods and ingredients resting on blurry backgrounds that suggest kitchen spaces. The biscuits, butter, and baking trays rendered in focus become participants in a meeting of their own. Depending on one’s tasks, Zoom calls may include pages of participant grids to be scrolled through or ignored. Lee’s design convenes biscuits and ingredients in an object-oriented conference, implying that networked kitchens form intimacies without people (Figure 3).

Figure 3 . Juune Lee, ‘Baking Together’ background image, 31 August 2020. Courtesy of Juune Lee.

Michael Mandiberg started painting Zoom backgrounds during daily calls as a way to respond to the isolation of the pandemic and the experience of ‘visit[ing] makeshift office spaces, the kitchens of coworkers and family members, friends’ dinner tables, and the childhood bedrooms of my students’ (2021, 83). The paintings never show the participant, only the room behind them. For Mandiberg, their visits to and paintings of Zoom rooms are about ‘the interchangeability of these spaces. The nowhereness of the blank wall. The aloneness. The loneliness. And the disassociation’ (2021, 83). Presented in spacious grids, the screen-sized canvases travel beside Danila Machado’s description of ‘crip nightlife praxis’ that created a ‘rupture’: ‘our own walls collapsed outward and engulfed the spaciousness of many many other rooms’ (2021, 16). The perceptive skills Machado enlists to participate in the Remote Access parties only became widely taken up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recalling Lawless’s lesbian sourdough culture and Dokumaci’s activist affordances, Machado finds that ‘some crips were now the most equipped for the abrupt digital switch that occurred for many’ (2021, 16). The folding and unfolding walls of Zoom space trouble and extend methods for being ‘together’.

In my public presentations of Bake Together, the word ‘together’ was mobilized to suggest that the best kind of ‘together’ was in person, pre-COVID-19, as if the world before COVID-19 was an ideal or even acceptable situation. ‘Together’ was complicated before 2020: Karen Barad reminds us that ‘our (intra)actions’ are ‘a matter of cutting things together and apart’ (Barad 2007, 394). Together cuts and separates. In 2021, editors of the ‘Do-It-Together (DIT): Collective Action in and Against the Anthropocene’ issue of Feral Feminisms contextualize these cuts as ‘composing and decomposing particular collectives, ways of life, and worlds, … a tension between holding firmly to and making separation’ (Singer et al. 2021, 16). In 2020, I reproduced the simplest register of ‘together’ and its regressive humanist linear futurity because I did not yet have the experience to understand how ‘together’ cuts and splits, because of my own ableism and bias, because media outlets wanted to tell hopeful, upbeat stories that reinforced these same biases, and because I was willing to work with such narratives to encourage people to join for Bake Together. Positioning an Anzac biscuit baking event as a dystopian nightmare or ontological shift toward the posthuman may have negatively impacted participation. In 2020, ‘after the pandemic’ was an often-heard phrase, a phrase which signals denial even today, as emergency orders end and pop-up testing tents fold. ‘After the pandemic’ created a singular future when people would be together again.

Battling for Together

Together-in-person became a battle, first suggested by a Conversation editor’s headline for my article, ‘Anzac biscuits, battles and a great Australian isolation bake-off’ (Kelley 2020a). Together-in-person was and remains a battle, in the sense of risking one’s life and risking harm to friends and strangers – being together cuts apart. Artist and musician Laurie Anderson looks around New York, only a few subway stops away from Mandiberg making paintings in Brooklyn, to find that ‘when I walk around right now in this early spring of 2021, it looks like there’s been a war. So many buildings are closed, and places I used to go to all the time … are all closed’ (2021). Incorporating Zoom backgrounds, face filters, and electronic music experiments, Anderson’s Zoom performance lectures dwell on time spent in the space between life and death. Losing my grip on a cohesive future together, on before/after, and on clock time becomes a way to loosen my grip on the colonial violence that props up these concepts.

The battle for together, as with Gallipoli, starts as a stalemate. Together must account for the ruptures, uninhabited voids, and quiet domestic resistance of lesbian sourdough, crip nightlife, and iso culture. Kitchens stage the battle that ‘together’ has become. As spaces of creative knowledge production akin to the laboratory and the studio, people experiment, learn, and develop new techniques in the kitchen. As key infrastructure for armies, domestic and institutional kitchens fuel war (Kelley 2022b; Mintz 1996), compel most military research and development on food preparation and preservation technologies (Marx de Salcedo 2015), and have long been spaces of racial and gender-segregated paid and unpaid domestic work (Bressey 2020; J. Hamilton 2019). The feminist future implications of Bake Together methodologies depend on the capacity of kitchens to be networked, culturally productive, and, with Zoom, blur public and private.

Kitchens are spaces of revolutionary soft power. During COVID-19 lockdowns, kitchens, to borrow from an analysis of ‘interruption videos’, ‘stage the collision of professional and domestic identities in a way that presses on the charged thematics of time-keeping and care-giving’ (McIntyre, Negra, and O’Leary 2021, 17). Kitchens themselves weather, adapt, and hold tensions between collective co-option, infrastructure, and difference. Machado’s kitchen hosted their participation in the Remote Access parties because that was where they set up for work. Reynolds and I carefully framed our lockdown cooking show, bringing our laptops to our benchtops. Mandiberg’s Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom, 3:00–4:00 PM, 16 August 2020 depicts an uninhabited kitchen-in-process with cabinets’ open and active countertops: this scene could have seamlessly slotted into the grids formed during Bake Together (Figure 4). Each of these kitchen scenes document shared preferences and cultural credibility that indicate soft power at work, from the presence of built-in ovens to collective agreements about which appliances should be present, where things go and how bodies should move through the space. With Zoom and #bakecorona, domestic corridors of soft power become ‘virtualities’ (Morse 1998). Digestive networks formed through cloud-based applications such as Zoom confront the isolation of microbial clouds, both socially and individually, as with the ‘lost microbes of COVID-19’, the observed loss of microbiome diversity in COVID-19 positive patients (Hazan et al. 2022).

Figure 4 . Michael Mandiberg, Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom, 3:00–4:00 pm, August 16 2020, oil on canvas, 6h×11w in. Courtesy of Michael Mandiberg and Denny Gallery.

While I was moving participatory taste workshops online and Mandiberg was painting Zoom backgrounds as ‘coping mechanism’, ‘attempt to log memory’, and ‘a practice of self-care and preservation’ (2021, 85–86), Mēlani Douglass, an artist and curator based in Washington D.C., was adapting and rescripting the project Reclamation: Recipes, Remedies, Rituals on a timeline notably similar to my timeline for Bake Together. Douglass planned to activate the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) with ‘an intimate, participatory, in-person exhibition surrounding the built elements of a kitchen’ (2022, 8). This proposed Reclamation kitchen may have operated similarly to the kitchen created at the Kandos CWA participatory taste workshop: institutional, outside of the nuclear family, outside of commerce, simultaneously personal and political. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Reclamation changed. The exhibition ‘became a virtual respite for women artists from around the world to share their personal rituals, remedies, and recipes with a broader community’ while maintaining a focus on ‘the critical pedagogies and organizing tenets of feminism, womanism, Black and Third World feminisms, photography, and staged community interventions’ (Carroll 2022). Douglass and I were not aware of each other’s work until after our projects closed, but when we did connect, we found that we were both in project planning and grant writing stages in 2018, we both scheduled a number of in-person performance and exhibition opportunities in February 2020, and in March, we both reckoned with how institutional closures and working from home changed the contours of our workshop-led kitchen infrastructures.

With the word ‘liberation’ joining arts writer Angela Carroll’s call, with poet Audre Lorde, to enlist ‘her mother’s mortar’ in creating ‘a portal, an archive, … a sanctuary’, nourishment becomes ‘revolutionary’, a battle waged against patriarchy and white supremacy (2022, 33). Reclamation offers a larger program than Bake Together; more than a workshop, the exhibition stages a public platform to support eight commissioned artists as well as local businesses focused on food justice. Different histories inform Douglass’s standpoint in Washington DC and my position in Sydney, yet the blur between battle and liberation in the kitchen finds common ground in soft power strategies for resisting the ongoing patriarchal violence and anti-Blackness that inform the settler colonial logics of both Australia and the United States.

Reclamation artists produced videos that share form and content with the activities participants undertook during Bake Together, including time-lapse videos, cooking demonstrations, and recipes. The Reclamation videos and the Bake Together workshop share an ethos of bringing different recipes and their digestive networks into the shifting, blurry, conversational exchange afforded by remote participation. Lauren Von Der Pool, a high-profile professional chef, responded to Douglass’s prompts with elaborate stagecraft and costumes referencing Black cultural history. Her sumptuous Reclamation Smoothie Bowl includes a long list of uncommon ingredients and more than one ‘spark of extravagance’ (National Museum of Women in the Arts 2022). With Anu Chef: Her First Pound Cake, Douglass documents her daughter at work mixing batter followed by a time-lapse video documenting an intergenerational table consuming the resulting poundcake. Douglass’s camera circles her daughter until she appears upside-down in the frame, generating a feeling of close oversight and holding. Her positive reinforcement and gentle response to her daughter’s reference to Gordon Ramsay (a British celebrity chef known for enacting and promoting toxic kitchen culture) enter into conversation with Von Der Pool, who uses chef language (‘let’s go in with’, ‘add some fragrance’) to guide participants without raising her voice. Although historical links between pound cake and the Black diaspora in the United States can be difficult to pin down (Kearny 2021), pound cake is an iconic Black dessert, especially in the Southern states. Presenting the videos in a grid that echoes a Zoom grid allows Von Der Pool’s elaborate staging of an elaborate recipe to cut together with the familiar ease of Douglass’s pound cake, parenting, and puzzle. Different forms of participatory work shape domestic kitchens as networked sites for resistance and collectivity. In a moment when futures were contested and uncertain, the workshop format coupled with the kitchen infrastructure started to build new methodologies for imagination and action. Both Reclamation and Bake Together reveal what was taken for granted about ‘participatory’ practice prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and both articulate feminist futures that could not have been imagined without the online pivot.

Feminist workshop methods in Bake Together and Reclamation highlight how collective baking forms digestive networks. When together shifts to the Zoom grid, digestive networks change. Microbiome clouds touch digital clouds. Kitchens and domestic spaces gather soft power by means of ‘material-semiotic’ political potential (Haraway 1997). Our COVID-19 battles together were creative responses formed by lack and desire. For stress bakers, digestive networks are often left implicit or undefined. Sometimes stress-baked battles together reveal the soft cultural power of objects and behaviours bakers may have been taking for granted, as with the toilet paper cake. Other times, as with sourdough bread, the terms of engagement depend on the baker’s situation, and form digestive networks through difference. Is sourdough procrastination, as with Fizell? Is sourdough a yeast shortage? Is sourdough Lawless’s lesbian iso culture or Machado’s crip preparedness? Is sourdough a desire to nurture a fickle life form that could not be accommodated by capitalist nine-to-five work schedules?

Douglass articulates a kitchen-led political potential and nutritive gathering while reflecting on how her curatorial practice changed in response to taking Reclamation online. ‘Iso culture’ futures depend on storytelling: ‘Instead of focusing on their mediums, I focused on their methods, asking myself, are they good storytellers? I was looking for … artists whose processes are just as creative as their final products and whose work is informed by daily living and social change’ – artists who would be able to ‘see the kitchen as the studio and the table as the site for liberation and art-making, anchored in nourishment’ (Douglass 2022, 8, 9). Working in the kitchen becomes a means of positioning oneself. Unpacking her kitchen spices, Sara Ahmed is ‘never sure where the smell of spices takes me, as it has followed me everywhere. … I have been pulled to another place and another time’ (2006, 10). Digital splitting, sorting, and gathering pull participants to other clouds, other places and times, and other battles. Whether consumed around the dining table or celebrated by expert judges, domestic baked goods from the Anzac biscuit to pound cake to sourdough shape complex identity formations that perpetuate and reproduce the kitchens that feed the modern nation state. Workshop methods reveal this shaping and reproductive soft power of kitchen spaces by insisting on persisting after participants walk away or log off. Participants digest together for days afterward, metabolizing both cultural and nutritive forms. Lockdown-era participatory taste workshops reveal how togetherness must be continually made up and created as feminist, queer affordances.

Acknowledgements

Thank you Allison Reynolds, Jennifer Biddle and Mēlani Douglass for collaboration, conversation, and support. This article draws from a talk given at the Everyday Militarisms collaboratory organized by Astrida Neimanis and Tess Lea at the University of Sydney in 2019 and articles published in the Sydney Environment Institute blog, the Conversation, and under the auspices of UNSomnia 2020, all produced on unceded Gadigal-Bidjigal land. Thank you to Juune Lee and Michael Mandiberg for permission to reproduce images, to the anonymous reviewers for your nuanced readings and to the special issue editors, Katrina Jungnickel and Rebecca Coleman, for encouraging more feminism and more methods. Thank you for reading drafts, Ari Heinrich and Scott East. Thank you, Jenny Reardon and Beth Stephens, for supporting my time as a visiting scholar at the Science and Justice Research Center at the University of California Santa Cruz. This appointment gave me time and space to write. UCSC sits on the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. Workshops were undertaken under UNSW human research ethics reference number HC190344. Bake Together was hosted and recorded by Cementa, Inc., on unceded Wiradjuri land. Dedicated to Margaret Morse, whose work was so far ahead of her time, we are only beginning to introject her arguments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE190100080).

Notes

1 Elsewhere I describe the complexities of the CWA’s position in Australian national politics: ‘Writing about how the CWA facilitated solidarity between Aboriginal and white country women, Jennifer Jones observes that ‘the Country Women’s Association is easily stereotyped as a conservative white organization controlled by the ‘blue-rinse set’ and resistant to social progress or innovation,’ but ‘this image does not do justice to diversity amongst CWA members, nor their willingness to support social initiatives that challenged some fundamental assumptions in their rural communities'. My collaborator in Kandos called the CWA ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ referring to the radical political work that the women manage to accomplish despite a seemingly benign activity base, much of which is centered on cooking, baking, and handicrafts’ (Kelley 2022a, 244).

2 The other two case study foods are hardtack (or ship’s biscuits) and frybread, a light, ephemeral fried dough that forms the basis for the ‘Indian taco’ or ‘Navajo taco,’ a ubiquitous staple throughout Native land all over Turtle Island but especially in the Western states of both so-called United States and so-called Canada (‘Navajo taco’ would be used in proximity to the Navajo Nation, which crosses Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah).

3 The Compostcubator (2016-) is a research-driven bioart initiative manifesting as both indoor and outdoor iterations of ‘a compost pile which creates heat to care for mammalian cells in a tissue culture flask’ (2023, 68).