Taste Your Feelings

For the 2019 Illustration School in Porto, I was invited to teach a workshop about cake and it’s narrative qualities. For this I prepared a lecture about cake in four different emotional settings today, to give an overview of the diversity, and of course the overlap of simultaneous emotions. I explored grief, joy, guilt/pleasure and anger. Taking examples from John Coveney’s book “Food, Morals and Meaning – The pleasure and anxiety of eating”, Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s “Confessions”, or Colum McCann’s article “Dessert”. We looked at these texts together with film excerpts of classics, such as “Matilda”, “A Ghost Story” and SNL’s “Sheetcaking” sketch. 

The lecture aimed to inspire the students in the next part of the workshop, when they were asked about your own, someone else’s or an entirely fictional emotional sweet food situation. To kick-start this process there was a veiled cake easting session in which all students stood closely opposite one another, divided by a sheet and were asked to eat different flavoured cakes, sharing the memories they brought forth, as well as the feeling of excess that the process may have triggered.