06/11/2026
We have developed the habit of expecting simple answers from the ingredients we use: pumpkin will almost always be sweet; radicchio almost always bitter.
Our understanding of ingredients is often mediated by representations so deeply ingrained that they seem natural and inevitable: generic promises of well-being, reassuring images of the local landscape, the seemingly immutable return of the seasons, traditions presented in nostalgic and identity-driven forms.
These representations help make food familiar and desirable, but sometimes end up flattening its complexity.
We therefore ask ourselves: what remains at the margins of these representations? What possibilities continue to escape our attention?
It is precisely within this less explored space that cooking can assert itself as a discipline capable of telling the story of the present, using the grammar of taste to bring to light production processes, symbolic worlds and cultural layers.
By moving through these shadowy areas, cooking can also help expand the boundaries of what we consider possible. New relationships between ingredients — as well as new ways of transforming them and new hierarchies — can challenge established ways of producing, consuming and thinking about food.
Ultimately, cooking as a form of free inquiry: one that does not merely interpret the present or anticipate futures that have already been imagined, but helps make previously unexplored possibilities conceivable and open to experimentation.
