Cooking Architecture » Sharing food and design

It is what it is.

This short phrase has popped up in a variety of different contexts in my life. Sometimes it irks me. Sometimes it makes me smile. And sometimes I don’t quite understand the meaning or intention of it. Recently, these dinners have taught me more about the power of those five words.

Just like a studio project, I plan for these meals like a maniac for the week before the dinner—making lists on every flat surface I find and wondering if it will play out like the tiny movie in my head. The day of the meal, though, I’m relaxed and calm, focusing on one of my favorite parts of all of this—cooking alone in my kitchen.

But then all of a sudden, a couple hours before dinner, that false sense of calm quickly disappears, and I don’t have enough time!  I load and unload everything, run around spastically setting the table, taking photos, or trying to remember where I cleverly hid that knife so I would know where it was. But as people trickle in, everyone starts to pitch in, and then…things just start to fall into place. No one complains because dinner is an hour late. They just laugh with each other while sipping wine and putting the finishing touches on the table—enjoying the moment. And I stop. Take a deep breath and remind myself, it is what it is.

For this meal, we focused on the last element of making a ritual: memories. Vincent initiated the installation by suspending the paper that was on the floor from the last meal. I asked the group of six that worked on the shipping containers if they would make a course that related to their memories of food and place. Each person also chose a side of a record as a music pairing for the course.

I was a bit anxious about the flow of the dinner as a whole because no one knew what everyone else was cooking. But as always, we pulled it off smoothly and beautifully. As the meal came to a close, the hosts explained their dishes and the memories that inspired them. The focus of the evening then shifted from the individuality of each course to the memories that each of us shared with each other. As Ashley said, we were using food as a medium to share these personal memories, within an installation that created an intimate dining area.

These meals have become markers of time for my life. They live here physically on the blog, but they are in their truest forms in my memories.  Every meal that we have done has had such an intense physical, intellectual, and emotional impact on me, which is what drives me to make another meal, to see how far it can go. At times I think to myself, I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m going to do it anyway. But I am mostly able to do this because of the incredible group of people I am so thankful I get to work with, be inspired by, and make things with. As always, these experiences wouldn’t be possible, or nearly as rich and developed, without them.  And this was enormously visible in this meal.

This phrase, it is what is, cannot be an excuse for not investing enough time, planning, and creativity into the endeavor. But instead, it is about relinquishing control, letting the medium take its own path. It allows you to take a step back and acknowledge all the preparation, determination, and hurdles that have prepared you for this moment. Then you have the freedom to see how it really is.