Gouda Embargo

Taking Russia’s food embargo as a starting point, this project explores the inherent contradictions in today’s local-vs-global rhetoric by creating a fictional narrative that exaggerates the consequences of the political interference in food production and consumption. This narrative highlights the potential tensions that emerge within a context of growing food nativism.

The project uses food and food production as a medium to investigate our state of mind in this contradictory situation: how we see value in detaching our culinary cultures from our local identities, whether we can see the absurdity of this situation, and how we look at the phenomenon of globalisation: as a matter of unification, or as a facilitator of exchange between cultures that have their distinctive identities.

Through re-thinking the way we understand culinary identity and the tradition around it, this critical work highlights cultural tensions and frictions of globalisation in the age of increasing nativism.

Gouda Embargo – A fictional story ︎︎︎