SOURCED: launched!

Hello and welcome.

Hello!

Welcome to our first newsletter - thank you so much for being here!

We will be sending out this newsletter once a month, it will include insight on SOURCED pieces, what we’ve been reading and updates on upcoming Sourced events. 

We also have a twice monthly paid-subscription newsletter, which is from £3.50 a month - the first one will be out on Tuesday! This week,  Anna will discuss how she approaches the topic of decolonisation, recipes and our thoughts on what else is being researched, spoken about and discussed when it comes to culinary systems and how we source. If you are a paid subscriber we will also be starting discussion groups around topics discussed in our newsletters. 

For transparency, these paid for newsletters are how we hope to fund this project. If SOURCED reaches 1,000 subscribers, Chloe and Anna are able to dedicate one day a week each to SOURCED, and commission two short pieces of research and/or writing a month. We believe strongly that in order for SOURCED to be a successful project, it needs to showcase a variety of voices and we believe equally strongly that those voices get paid. Your subscription will help ensure the success of this project.

Why we started SOURCED

In case you haven’t had a chance to look through our website (there is a lot of information on it!), here is a little background on why we started SOURCED. 

We realised the work we wanted to create had very few venues for publication. We want to lead discussions that we feel is often missing within food media as a whole. The work we want to produce is accessible research on food and drink culture with a decolonialised perspective, that is inclusive and global. We are a public research project as we believe information should be available for all. 

Anna has been researching and writing around farming in the Borneo - which has similar links to other tropical and equator based farmers - as well as looking at the journeys that ingredients take and trying to find ways to interrogate those systems and focus conversations around sustainability on the people in the supply chains. 

Chloe has always been interested in the difference of opinion regarding the domestic and professional chef. Her research into 19th century domestic guides and the creation of a distinctly ‘American’ homemaker looks at the presence of exclusionary white feminism and nationalism in food media. Her work aims to unravel dominant narratives and create space for broader conversations about food and drink as cultural products.

Within the cultural space of food and drink gatekeepers have restricted the variety of voices that are allowed to be heard and seen. As academics who work with food we wanted to create a space for experts to showcase and share their research while engaging in a community that views food and food culture as political, complicated and expressive.

We think our research and published work will be beneficial learning for those in and around the food and drink world and have created this space to operate as a place of wider information sharing that can be implemented on a daily basis. We hope people see us as a resource but also as a place for interesting stories about food and drink.

Here is more information about our drive to launch SOURCED, plus our publishing schedule, which we hope to build on.

The Ten 

These are a set of questions we will be asking a range of people across the year. More about them here. For this newsletter we’ve highlight three interviews and what they made us think about - click on the names to read the full interviews!

Selassie Atadika, Chef & Founder of Midunu in Accra Ghana

“I found her focus on stories and people really interesting. It isn’t the immediate response when you think you’d get when you ask a chef about culinary systems. This resonated so much with me, as I think the only way we can really tackle the big issues - especially around creating environmentally sustainable systems - is through looking at how people feature in them” Anna’s response to Selassie’s The Ten.

Jenny Lau, on and off-line community organizer, @celestialpeach_uk on Instagram, London, UK

“Jenny’s engagement with food centres on community organising. When I approached her about The Ten she wasn’t sure if she qualified as a food ‘professional’ but her work on and offline has built an international community of people using food to communicate the diaspora experience — it may not be her profession but it’s definitely more than a hobby. She mentions that ‘food is an easy way to delve deeper,’ in response to The Ten. Food isn’t necessarily a way to ‘unite’ people, rather a conversation starter that can lead to deeper understanding.” Chloe’s response to Jenny’s The Ten. 

Miles Munroe, Head Distiller & Blender - Westward Whiskey, Oregon,USA

“I really appreciate that Miles mentions accountability when he talks about culinary systems. For him, that accountability comes from working with a very local system of suppliers and farmers to create great whisky. When we think about culinary systems I think we have a tendency to think on a macro scale but when you break it down into smaller micro systems I think the concept becomes easier to visualise and understand.” Chloe’s response to Miles’s The Ten

Tutorials

We will be doing tutorials once a month to discuss a part of the topic we are covering. Our first one was last Tuesday, this was an introduction to us where we answered The Ten! We discussed what culinary systems meant to us and referenced a number of books that have informed our decisions. 

Here is the tutorial (with some technical issues, technology is wonderful, but not always perfect!)

Recommendations

We are big fans of Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter, we highly recommend signing up.
This week Alicia interviewed Anna for her paid subscribers, and two weeks ago she wrote about restaurants and the death of the chef, quoting Chloe.