Conflict Kitchen and Enemy Kitchen: Socially Engaged Food Pedagogy

Abstract

In this article, we examine food-engaged art practice and its artistic and pedagogical possibilities. First, we describe the precedents of socially engaged food art practices and provide a detailed account of Conflict Kitchen and Enemy Kitchen, from which we envision new pedagogical possibilities to embrace food and cooking as socially engaged art. In the second part of the study, we discuss the two kitchens through Deleuzian concepts such as nomadism, agencément, and becoming-others, to explore and encourage a shift from the pedagogy of being to the pedagogy of becoming. We argue that art educators pay attention to the becoming pedagogy as a rhizomatic, transforming, and unresting status of socially engaged learning, challenging the being pedagogy of the structured, goals-oriented, and standard-based learning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The Conflictkitchen.org website is now permanently closed. However, you can read brief information about Conflict Kitchen from Jon Rubin’s website at www.jonrubin.net/test-page.

² Jon Rubin and Don Weleski of Conflict Kitchen interviewed the North Korean defectors to develop the placemat/wrapper. Readers can find the North Korean placemat of Conflict Kitchen at www.conflictkitchen.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/korea_wrapper3.pdf.

³ This is an example of what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) called a becoming: The wasp, enlisted into the reproductive cycle of the orchid, engages in a becoming-orchid. This is not, they stress, an act of imitation, but a genuine incorporation of the body of the wasp into the orchid’s reproduction. The same is true in turn for the orchid itself, which engages in a becoming-wasp, not by copying the female wasp, but by crossing over into the zone of indiscernibility between it and the wasp in a series of de- and re-territorializations.

⁴ Deleuze (1994) defined learning as an exploration into ideas. Deleuze’s ideas engender a world of multiplicity, which is in the process of genesis, indicating constant generation in between multiplicities. Therefore, learners who explore the world of ideas are open to all events, meanings, and happenings possibly caused by the encounter with the signs (i.e., Conflict Kitchen and Enemy Kitchen), and they are compelled to transform themselves.

⁵ Smooth spaces are nonlinear, open-ended, heterogeneous, and nomadic, whereas striated space is “that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 478). Smooth space is the territory of the nomads; striated space is instituted by the state apparatus. Smoother space is where transformation and change emerge in and through a new event.