Project looks at relationships to what we eat
By John Fladd
Shanta Lee knows that you have a fascinating story about food, and she wants to hear it.
“We all are connected as humans to food,” she said. “Whether or not we want to walk across that bridge, whether or not it’s something either warm and cozy for us, or painful and uncomfortable, we all have a connection and a relationship to food.”
Lee is an artist, oral historian, photographer and poet. Her current project is called Food Stories: We Are What We Eat. She is gathering stories from people from different backgrounds that tell something specific about their relationships with food.
“It’s a discussion between food, memory, identity and our stories,” she said. “And the main goal is to get people thinking about ‘How do these things intersect?’ It’s all the different ranges and ways that we are connected to food — not just personal stories either, but also individuals who work in food industries, people who work with food sustainability, people who work with food insecurity, ordinary people who recall why they really can’t stand a certain kind of food.”
Ultimately, Lee said, these stories will culminate in an exhibition.
“Those stories, those vignettes, those visuals, those are all going to be within an exhibition that’s happening at some point in the fall this year in Manchester,” she said. “I’m still looking for a place. At some point soon, I’ll be putting out a call to artists, and inviting them to contribute to this exhibition as well, if they have their own pieces that they want to be a part of this exhibition about food.”
One of the parts of Lee’s project that excites her is a book that will tie in with the exhibition.
“When the exhibition takes place,” she said, “There will be a booklet, what you might traditionally call an exhibition catalog, and some of the stories will be in there. There might be some of the questions that I use to help prompt the writers who contributed the stories, so that maybe people can continue talking about the food stories, and still engage with the project.”
Some of the early stories she has received have been engrossing, Lee said.
“There is a story I just got from a person named Taffi: ‘One afternoon I was washing chicken feet and cleaning gizzards before putting them in the freezer. Each pair of chicken feet seemed to be speaking to me. I loved the unusual textures and colors of both chicken feet and the skins of gizzards, so I ran for my camera. I took pictures of various arrangements. For years, I’ve been concerned about the food I eat. I grow and put up most of what I eat. I buy my meat from farmers I know.’”
“So, Lee observed, “it’s talking about this deep relation to food and also the relationship to this specific kind of food.”
Another story came from a novice cook who was deeply determined to bake lasagna but got distracted by a video game and burned it to cinders.
“It was a funny story,” Lee said, “because we’ve all been there. We try so hard, we toil on it, on the dish, and then it burns. Again, whether it’s a bridge that brings together or a bridge that involves some kind of reaction to [a shared experience], there’s always a story with it and you don’t need much when it comes to involving or including food.”
Lee will collect stories for the next three or four months.
“I’m going to wrap up collecting stories by early June,” she said, “so I can prepare for the exhibition in the fall. People will be able to submit their stories to me through my website, ShantaLee.com, but I also have a Facebook page called Food Stories. People can DM me there, if they want. Ballot boxes will be showing up in different places in Manchester, so if people are so inclined to put pen to paper, they could do that.”
Ultimately, Lee said, this project is about the way food brings people together. “There’s a whole range of what attracts us to or detracts us from food,” she said, “but it’s also a social and cultural lubricant. There’s a reason we have the phrase, ‘breaking bread together.’”
Food Stories
To find out more about the Food Stories project and Shanta Lee’s partners in the project, visit shantalee.com/foodstories, her “Food Stories” Facebook page, or instagram.com/mz.shanta_lee.
Featured photo: Shanta Lee. Courtesy photo.
