E-Dogz
E-Dogz
E-Dogz Mobile Culinary Community Center
E-Dogz Mobile Culinary Community Center is a collaborative mobile kitchen project that is a platform for the cross-pollinating of foodways. Through collaborative cooking practices, I develop new recipes with guest chefs that reflect the contemporary food landscape while promoting evolving cultural expressions. The guests chefs that work with E-Dogz range from professionals to home cooks and from artists to scientists whom I have struck a dialog with in my continual food- obsessed travels and research. Oftentimes, I allow for the collaborator to guide the menu and its context with their own recipes and traditions, while I play role more as curator of ingredients. I bring to the table ingredients that demonstrate my worldview of contemporary eating, which is a common sense, sustainable approach that challenges societal prejudices toward potential food sources. Ingredients may include foraged mushrooms, indoor/urban grown vegetables, insects, and invasive species. Other times the project may work inverted to this logic, with guests that provide ingredients for me to create recipes for. The process is collaborative and fluid and develops through dialog.
The resulting foodstuffs are offered free to the public during celebratory open-air events, some events will repeat in different communities and are always promoted to attract wide audiences. The intent of the project is to bridge cultural ideas about eating and cooking and promote discourse about food.
E-Dogz intends to advocate deeper understandings of what we eat- where it comes from and who is making it. The practices of cooking and eating are undeniably central to our lives and thusly are an easy-to-pick up conversation topic that transcends social differences. Street food, the kind of stuff prepared with modest facilities and resources, and served out in the open to the public is a catalyst for such engagement. Its sites serve as sort of an urban oasis, a gathering place for the hungry and provide a likely occasion for lively discussion.
The sites of street food are nexuses of culture in urban centers for ever- shifting populations. Not only do these sites provide food on the go and cheap for working people, but also becomes sites of cultural expression. They become a catalyst for the meeting and cross-pollination of the different traditions of the urban melting pot. Chicago, after all, is the birthplace of many great street foods, mongrel cuisine born out of necessity for affordable and portable foods for the mobile workforce. Foods such as the Italian beef, the Chicago style hotdog, and the jibarito represent a true fusion of immigrant cookery. Promoting a type of democratic, evolving cuisine is the goal of the E-Dogz project.
Open air food vending has been a hot button issue in Chicago in the past several years- a national frenzy for food trucks from New York to Austin to Portland has led to a scrutiny of the politics of Chicago’s licensing procedures. This attention is a positive development for street food in this city. However, due to prohibitive licensing and fees to start up such businesses in Chicago, the resulting businesses risk becoming expensive, elitist, and fetishistic models that are antithetical to my ideals of street eating. The inspirations for E-Dogz are the kind of mom-and-pop roadside stands, trailers, shacks, or tarps-with-a-charcoal-grillset- up-underneath that are so rare in Chicago. E-Dogz aims to change the street food landscape, promoting the rootsy, down-homeness of the corner-cum-urbanoasis that I so appreciate about street food culture in the contemporary landscape of so many other cities around the world. All the while challenging societal prejudices towards food sources and promoting street level sustainable food politics.
Eric "E-Dogz" May: http://www.ericchristophmay.com/
Five Questions with Eric May: http://thespeak-easy.org/2012/02/03/five-questions-for-eric-may/
April 6, 2012: E-Dogz "BBQ Migration" in Kansas City, MO
More info here
