Cuisine Zines ~ North Lancs Food Stories

Charlotte Done
Apr 30
3 min read

Updated: May 5

The Project

The Cuisine Zine project began with the idea of making a collaborative DiY publication as an alternative to the glossy world of mainstream media, and to spread the idea of making zines as a way to share food stories, recipes, and the growing sustainable and food justice culture in North Lancashire.

Why Cuisine Zines? Because sometimes there's a sign, in the form of a rhyme! You can read more about the idea here in:

Blog 1 and Blog 2

Making Zines About Food

Conversations about food are commonplace, no matter where you’re from or what your angle is, and during the zine making workshops we chatted over our inherited food cultures, food heavens and food hells.

Stories emerged from around the table, about problems with the current food system – like food poverty, ultra processed food, plastics in packaging, the price of food, availability of fresh vegetables, and where our food is from.

But also more personal stories:

Tales of foraging, food phobias, memories of family meals and counting fruit stones, to dads hilarious home made food labels.

Those personal food stories may seem, at first glance, straightforward and uncontentious.

But sometimes focusing on food can lead to other stories - about our histories and our struggles - and those can help us form connections.

A powerful thing about a zine, is that it can be revisited. Here Jill Anderson reflects on a zine about her own food memories - how she made it, and remade it over time.

Revisiting One Food Related Zine

By Jill Anderson

"I started out by sticking circles in (for plates). I filled them with delicious food (like Ayesha’s dahl) and disgusting food (like grey, lumpy mince with peas) that I was forced to eat at primary school dinners.

Childhood food sticks in one’s mind. My German grandmother’s food had memorable names - ‘Teewurst’, ‘Lachschinken’, ‘Marmurkuchen’. They went in my zine too.

I had a chat with my mum, a while back, about her own grandmother. She lived in an apartment in Berlin. Every day my mum’s dad would pick mum up from school and take her to her grandmother’s for lunch.

Mum’s grandmother made great soup. She had a saying that my mum passed on to me:: ‘Ein Zwiebelchen verdirbt nichts’ (‘ a little onion never spoiled anything’). I flipped my zine over, like a tablecloth. I wrote that saying on the underside.

My mum and I both love to cook - perhaps it is mum’s grandmother that we have to thank for that. She died before I was born, of course, but she never saw my mum grow up either. The lunches stopped. My mum came here to England. Her grandmother died in Auschwitz.

My zine sat in The Morecambe & Lancaster Zine library, at the Good Things Collective, for some months. Then one day - having been thinking a lot about my mum and her childhood - I took it out and back home with me.

I returned to the page with mum’s grandmother’s saying on. At first I collaged with some onion skin, but then I added a few facts I know about her life: her date of birth, the date and number of the transport from Berlin, her date and place of death.

Those stark details felt so out of keeping with the only thing of my great grandmother’s that I have - that the zine, now more complete, helps me to hold close. Her gift is four words with the warmth of soup, filled with the smell of onions, drifting down the apartment stairs on a school day lunchtime.

Writing this, I am thinking about something Lou Aphramor said recently - that when we talk about food there can be joy and there can be trauma in the room."

A PAUSE ............................................................

Future Plans

Lou Aphramor is a radical dietician and we've invited Lou to Lancaster to help us find new ways of talking, and of sharing, around food. Lou is interested in disrupting and queering conventional food narratives, and in making space for different kinds of stories. They will be at Lanc uni on May 16th.

To find out more and book a place follow this link...