Climate Exploration Cookbook is a participatory project that combines data science, digital technology, cooking, and food to help diverse communities to make sense of issues surrounding climate change through their food culture, cooking, and eating habits.
The project explores people’s subjective perception, their complex identities (e.g.their socio-cultural capital, their expected demeanor, who they want to become), and how their unique backgrounds affect their actions in tackling the climate crisis.
In the pilot project, a group of East and South-East Asian(ESEA) Chinese participants aged 20-70 years old living in and around Chinatown, London together made sense of issues surrounding climate change through Chinese food culture and their eating and cooking habits. Over a period of 3 weeks, participants experimented with cooking low carbon versions of two traditional Chinese dishes chosen by themselves – Mapo Tofu and Braised Pork Belly.
Developed during the COVID pandemic, the project is part digital part physical. Using a custom digital platform, each participant documented their own cooking process at home, capturing information relating to ingredient types, source of ingredients, and cooking methods. Data relating to the carbon footprint incurred through different phases of the cooking process were also shown to encourage participants to think of inventive ways to reduce their meal’s carbon footprint. The user-friendly digital platform enables participants to share their experience with each other throughout the experimentation phase.
Together, they collectively developed a set of low-carbon recipes that reduce the dishes’ impact on the climate while maintaining traditional Chinese cooking culture and their collective identities and backgrounds as immigrants and migrants in the UK.
Scroll through the project website below to learn about the impact of our food on the climate and experiment with creating your own low carbon recipe of Braised Pork Belly and Mapo Tofu.
The process culminated in a physical workshop gathering where participants, together with members of Chinatown Community Centre shared their experience on the project and their perspective on tackling the climate crisis. Data were also shown to them about the result of their collective effort in reducing carbon footprint through their experiment.
(equating it to the carbon footprint incurred from consuming pigs, i.e. from farming, processing, transport to retail and consumption)
The recipes created by the participants were also passed on to two Chinese chefs from Chinatown Community Centre who in turn prepared their own version of low-carbon Mapo Tofu and Braised Pork Belly dishes that were shared with the participants and the wider Chinese communities who reside/frequent Chinatown.
Learn about the making of low-carbon version of Mapo Tofu and Braised Pork Belly by Chef Edward and Chef Alan.
Special thanks to:
All participants who took part in the project
Chef Edward and Alan
London Chinese Community Centre
An-Ting, Jodie and Christine from Chinese Arts Now
Data scientist Usamah Khan
Climate Exploration Cookbook is a project by Ling Tan. The pilot version was commissioned by Chinese Arts Now and Season for Change.
