More about the project "Between Red & Yellow"

Workshop on drawing your memory

🍳 Between Red & Yellow: A Dish, A Memory, A Rebellion 🍅

What if a simple plate of fried tomato and egg could rewrite cultural narratives?

🥢 The Story Behind the Dish

In London’s immigrant-run Chinese restaurants, *fanqie chaodan* (fried tomato and egg) has quietly vanished from menus. Why? To adapt to Western tastes, many restaurants strip away “unmarketable” dishes, leaving behind stereotypes of Chinese cuisine—cheap, exotic, or outdated. But this dish isn’t just food. For Chinese students and diaspora communities, it’s a thread connecting them to home, family, and identity.

🎨 Our Project: Drawing Memories, Not Menus

Instead of cooking, we asked Chinese participants to *draw* their memories of this dish. Through sketches, they shared stories of how their mothers sliced tomatoes, how their fathers seasoned the eggs, and how the scent filled their London kitchens. Each variation—a differently cut tomato, a splash of soy sauce—became a love letter to identity.

🔥 Key Insights

- Food = Resistance: When immigrant kitchens erase traditional dishes to survive, they risk erasing culture. Fried tomato and egg’s absence mirrors a larger struggle: whose stories get told?

- Art Unlocks Emotion: Drawing transcended language. Participants used color, texture, and symbols to express nostalgia, loneliness, and resilience.

- Design as World-Making: As Arturo Escobar says, *we design and are designed by our world. By amplifying marginalized voices, we challenge whose “world” gets centered.

🌍 Why This Matters

Stereotypes simplify. They reduce vibrant cultures into tropes—like “authentic” Chinese food being whatever sells. But fried tomato and egg isn’t on menus because it’s “too ordinary.” Its erasure reflects whose tastes—and lives—are deemed valuable.

💡 What’s Next?

We’re reimagining how design can honor cultural complexity. Could zines, exhibitions, or community recipes recenter these narratives? How do we create spaces where immigrant stories aren’t performative, but *powerful*?

🍅 Join the Conversation

What dish connects you to your roots? How do you navigate belonging in a world that often demands simplification? Let’s talk about food, memory, and the quiet acts of resistance on our plates.

#CulturalIdentity #FoodPolitics #DesignJustice #ImmigrantStories #ServiceDesign #BetweenRedAndYellow