Our National Dish
Our National Dish is a project which aims to illustrate and celebrate the contributions made to British culture through migration via the visual representation of food.
This project highlights three of the UK’s most recognisably “authentic” dishes (English Breakfast Tea, Beans on Toast, and Fish and chips.) Primarily shot in a traditional cafe, then dissected back to their origins using typological charts; the project hopes to highlight the glaring contradiction of contemporary British Nationalism: None of these culinary icons bestowing National pride, would exist without freedom of movement and an openness to immigration.
This project also attempts to acknowledge the UK’s colonialist history through the photographic: referencing early (daguerreotype) imperialist typological charts of the late 19th and early 20th century. Through this visual language, this project seeks to highlight the further irony of Britain's anti-refugee stance in contemporary media, considering the global impacts of colonialism and its links to the refugee crisis. It aims to depict the “British” food items as the ones displaced, as they are in fact historical imports and migrants themselves.
Overall, Our National Dish ventures to platform the overlooked stories and long winding histories of products and people that we as a Nation take for granted, and wants to question the integrity of Britain’s anti-migrant stance; considering how the UK has benefited from the existence of refugees and migrants throughout history; and furthermore, how ironic this fear is given the destructive past of Britain's own colonialist migration.