Private Food or Public Good? – by David Gill

This project, produced for Law 315: Business Associations (taught by Rebecca Johnson), was an engagement with questions raised in J.K. Gibson-Graham et al’s, Take Back the Economy.  The project was composed of 4 parts:

  • The Menu

  • The Meal

  • Notes to Accompany the Meal (A book of poems and images)

  • A Reflection on the Project

Each of these can be seen below, along with a few reflections by the professor on the process of assessing (that is, ‘eating’) this project.

 

The Menu

Morels from an aging apple orchard

Poached eggs from my friends:
Rosebud, Catherine, Valentine and Ms. Stanley Featherbottom

Lady fern fiddleheads from the forest

Nodding onions from my garden

Salt boiled from China Beach seawater

Kombucha made with Morgan’s starter,
wild nettles and honey from a lost love

 

Everything on this menu originates in a direct relationship with a place or person. The ingredients cost no money – they were gathered through going out on the land, caring for friends, both feathered and not, and tending the garden.

The Meal

Notes to Accompany the Meal

“Private Food or Public Good?
Notes on a meal drawn from the capital of relationships
with no money down.”

Click here

Final Reflections

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This particular project, again in the context of business associations class, was a menu and a meal and a paper. This particular project was handed in at the . . . business associations exam final. I had been sick that day and was home, so the people from the office wrapped up this meal and delivered it to me, so I had a meal for two delivered to my home with the poached eggs still warm. One of the interesting things about this paper was the experience of eating the meal itself. . . This project, maybe more than any others I have encountered before, made me think very seriously about the experience of eating. So, reading the paper and thinking about the individual ingredients and items as poems, in some ways, left this meal feeling. . . like a sacrament almost more than a meal in and of itself as the labour that had been made to produce the meal made the experience of eating seem highly significant in ways that are probably true for papers but, somehow, the work in a paper feels different than the work involved in the production of food.

Rebecca Johnson

Take Back the Market Pizza – by Ian Trimble

This pizza was submitted, along with a paper, by Ian Trimble for Rebecca Johnson’s Business Associations class. About the project, Professor Rebecca Johnson states the following:

“In this particular work, the student produced a paper for me in business associations but had also asked if I would be available at a specific time for the delivery of another element of the project. When it arrived, it was a pizza in a pizza box, still hot from the oven. I walked down the hall, sharing pieces of pizza with my colleagues, before I started to read the paper. As I read the paper, the student discussed his exploration of what would be necessary in order to take seriously local economies by figuring out how to produce a pizza that was sourced entirely from materials available on Vancouver Island. What was particularly interesting was that, as I ate the pizza, I thought to myself “oh it could have used a few other minutes in the oven” because the cheese was not as melty as I would ordinarily prefer. As I headed to the paper, there was a large discussion of the processes he had been involved in in order to make cheese from milk available on the Island and the ways which, given the sources available to him, he could only produce a cheese that had a certain chewiness to it in that it would not melt sufficiently. And so, there was a very embodied experience of feeling in my mouth the experience that he described in his paper of what kinds of losses would be necessary if one were to take seriously fully the demands of what is available in the economy in which we live.”

Rebecca Johnson