My Food Valentine
My Food Valentine is a collective storytelling project, where users share their love for food. They express their love in the form of love letters written to directly to food. The projects aims to discover the intimate relationships that people have with food. "Love letter" is used as a metaphor so people can focus on the more abstract reasons of why they
love the food and to enable people to share memorable associations they've had with the food.
In addition to submitting love letters, the users can also add their favorite recipes. The users are further able to tag food items by cuisine or by type (i.e. fish, pasta, etc.)
The site is designed with the food as the protagonist. This gives users a new way of looking at a food site. Other food sites have, so far, focused either on the cooking process or on eating out.
The inspirations for this project are my personal experiences of growing up in a family that had never come any closer to life than around the dinner table. When we gathered around for a meal, we not only brought our hungry stomachs, we brought an appetite for "table talk". I fondly remember my father's larger-than-life narratives, often, about mundane office chores; my brother sharing his ambitions to become a cricketer; my mother who, every now and then, would slip in a question on how we liked the food. Cooking was a form of flattery for my mother and I was her most sincere flatterer. To this day, the world doesn't hold any more a soul-stirring surprise for me since my first adventure with my mother's homemade ice-cream.
Since I left home at a very early age, what I took away with me were the happy memories around the dinner table. I not only reminisce and cherish the "table talk" but - believe it or not - I remember the food - the menu, the taste and the after-taste! For me, my dinner memories are a way to hold on to the things I loved, the things I am, the things I never want to lose.
This project is really a natural extension of such innate personal experiences. I am interested in personal stories that people have, especially those centered on food. I want to provide people a platform to share their food memories and their intimate relationships
with food.
