CODE Quarterly: my round up

I write for CODE Quarterly, various thought pieces about where the industry is today and looking to ask questions around where we are heading. Here is a round up of all the pieces I have written for CODE Quarterly, thus far.

The waiting game: does FoH need a re-brand?
The price of everything: the meaning of value
Casting a net, working for change: networking in the industry
What’s in a name? The“modern British food” question
Technologyin restaurants: where is it taking us?

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The Body Eats

When I first saw Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) I remember feeling a deep hunger. My belly rumbled, my torso tightened and the muscles sucked into my belly button as my body concaved in on itself. I could feel my arms wanting to desperately reach out and seek things to fill me up, to bring close to me, to suck up and consume. I wanted to devour the world. I watched it the first year of my Performing Arts undergraduate, where I thought I would major in dance and movement. In the end I didn’t, switching in the final semester to acting, after struggling to feel fully comfortable with my body moving through space for people to watch. I decided I preferred to hide behind words. Dance has always been a space of thirst, for cravings, for desire – a way to seek out and pursue, a way to rampage through ideas. Moving to be sated. Finishing dance exams growing up I would always be hungry, never being able to eat when nervous. Navigating how to feel in leotards, in front of mirrors, o

The undoing and redoing of me

I am often thinking about the line between public and private, the way it wavers, blurs, disappears. In a world of social media it is a question for everyone, and not just for the stars, royalty, politicians. For me the question broadens into the realm of work. Where do I begin, and where do ‘I’ end. The ‘I’ must interrogate my place within power structures, within cultural narratives, within relatability. My academic research was about a community I am part of, through my father. It was an ‘objective’ approach to examine storytelling, but because it was not a culture I participated in on a daily basis I was constantly negotiating my position in the work, my lens in the re-telling, my biases, my outside-ness and my inside-ness. The story of me became integral to the condition of the research. And, as my professional career has progressed, my approximation to this culture, one that is less known in the wider world, means I have become a tool to crack into these spheres - I have the con

Understanding Malaysia: part one of ?

‘The (Malay)Asian Friend’ I think this will be a series of essays, a disgruntled thread that may take a lifetime to untangle. The continued misunderstanding of a complex nation, where borders and boundaries come from flux, where the jungle makes lines in the earth an impossibility and yet politics, nationalism, colonial lens and the exotic touristic eye compete to limit and define a nation built on migration and the movement of people. (and I realise that this could refer to not just Malaysia!) My original gripe comes from the limitation of how Malaysia food, and therefore Malaysians, gets represented in London. I write in my book (out in a year’s time) that we are boiled down to a few dishes - “roti canai, beef rendang, nasi lemak, nasi goreng, maybe sambal, and now laksa.” The request for these dishes is like a checklist of if a restaurant is ‘authentically’ Malaysia, or someone is authentically Malaysian if they know/like/eat them. You don’t crave nasi lemak, are you really Malaysi

TALKING ABOUT FOOD

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