Food and Memory

Our future requires collaborative minds to solve some of the wicked problems our global communities now face. Interdisciplinarity became the focus for design activity where two or more design disciplines come together to solve complex issues. Interdisciplinary activity suggests that this collaborative activity remains confined to one discipline arena, most often with participants remaining within their skill set, and does not promote cross boundary pollination. Transdisciplinary design activity however is defined as the collaboration of two or more disciplines where participants no longer restrict their thinking or activity to their specific skill set, suggesting that lines become blurred, merging skills together to achieve solutions to complex systems. This paper will discuss the impact of transdisciplinary design activity, between design and medical students, where they collaborated within a clinical environment to improve the patient experience. Through student reflections, it explores the impact of transdisciplinarity to facilitate transformative landscapes, improving the patient experience.

Intended as a dialectic on the theme of preservation from the position of memorial, this paper examines how ritualised practices concerned with preserving can be understood in relation to demotic memorials. To preserve is to make a tangible, enduring record of a temporal event. This temporal event may signal a ‘compulsion to repeat’ a culinary tradition and also operate as a prudent strategy to extend the shelf life of seasonal produce. Trench stores and survival packs are examples of how provisions can sustain life during times of mortal danger. The concept of memorial is also evidenced in domestic provisioning where stores can be read as gifts to others: there preciousness afforded by the time and devotion given to their production and display. 
We have considered the context of food in relation to memorialisation - that what we provide for others to eat connects us through social memory.  Food is poignantly connected to both landscape and memory through material culture, as food is representative of certain rituals, in this case those rituals are associated with preservation of self.  Given this preciousness preserves are often forever preserved.  Unopened, they become memorials to the everyday, secreted away in kitchen cupboards, away from the degenerative effects of heat and light. They can be seen as memento mori’s that give weight and meaning to the temporality of the seasons, extending their life. They also act as signifiers of personal largesse.