Unwritten Recipes

‍‍Food Culture · Storytelling · Co-creation with Community
‍Year: 2025-ongoing  | Role: Project Leader/ Artist & Designer | Support: Redesign Belonging‍

Migration is more than changing locations; it reshapes memory, identity, and belonging. As a migrant woman from Istanbul now living in the Netherlands, I noticed even familiar dishes never taste quite the same. Ingredients shift, flavors adapt, and something intangible is always altered. Unwritten Recipes started with this question:
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Approach

‍‍Unwritten Recipes is a participatory project with migrant women in Tilburg. It creates spaces of reflection, co-creation, and shared knowledge; not to “solve” migration’s challenges, but to document and honor lived experiences. The process unfolds in three phases:

• Ingredients: sensory mapping, memory, and storytelling around food.
  
• Cooking: practicing adaptation and transformation in the kitchen.
• Creating the Recipe: co-creating a baggage of belonging that carries unwritten stories.
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Workshop Insights

In the first workshop, Turkish and Indonesian women shared:

• Missing ingredients & carrying food in luggage while coming to the host country.
• The “inauthentic” feel of cultural washing (e.g. packaged lahmacun, satay reduced to sauce).
• Grandmothers’ cooking as duty and care vs. today’s cooking tradition for women.
  
• Cooking as a gentle language of love, still passed across generations.
  

These reflections revealed: migration journeys may differ, but the emotions of adaptation and belonging overlap. Food became a space of connection and creativity.
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Future Perspective

• More Ingredients workshops with mixed groups.
  
• A Cooking workshop with a chef to spark creative adaptation.
  
• Collaboration with organizations like Feniks and Ronde Tafel Huis with the potential to expand to other cities.
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Last but not least

Unwritten Recipes is where food rituals become an act of belonging, not just nourishment.
It documents how food carries memory, collective identity, and care across borders.

To be continued...

Unwritten Recipes was selected as a finalist in the Redesigning Belonging Open Call funded by the European Union, organized by Laurea University of Applied Sciences (Finland, coordinator), Euro-Arab Foundation for Higher Studies (Spain), Educational Centre Visio (Finland) and the international organization What Design Can Do (The Netherlands).
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