The Food Your Grandmother Made | Preserving My Family's Recipes

For a very long time, I’ve had a fear of losing my culture. It’s an inevitable trend I see among my peers. I live in Toronto, it’s filled with many, many pockets of different cultures. People from all over the world come here. When people settle and start a family, their children will become distant with their heritage due to the environment they live in. An obvious case of this is language and customs. I struggle to speak Mandarin formally. I can carry out a casual conversation, but that’s about it. I can read and write some Chinese, if I went on Chinese social media, I would be able to understand about 40%-50% of it. I am afraid of my culture disappearing over the next couple of generations in my family. I think if certain customs are forgotten, it would be such a shame. This project aims at preserving an aspect of my family through food.

I believe food is the most accessible aspect of any culture. It’s something anyone can easily enjoy eating and making. Food allows us to share an experience our ancestors have enjoyed. One day when I am no longer alive, I hope this project can give future generations in my family a way to learn about us. Maybe they will better understand themselves in this process. Maybe they will find comfort and love in the food their grandmother makes.

See the project: https://janezhang.ca/work/the-food-yo...
Read the process: https://janezhang.ca/posts/the-food-y...

------------

Music:

Words by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Artist: http://audionautix.com/

Disco Knights by Quincas Moreira
   / @quincasmoreira  

------------

I am a Data Visualization Designer from Toronto, Canada. I specialize in static visualizations with the goal to explore how data visualization can teach us how to think. Check out my work on my website.

Website: https://www.janezhang.ca
Twitter:   / janezhgw  
Instagram:   / janezhgw  
Sign up for my newsletter on my journey as an independent dataviz designer: https://janezhang.substack.com/