We are seeking visual and textual recipes of dissent. These poetic/experimental recipes will be compiled into The Anti-Cookbook Cookbook, which is interested in nonconventional recipe forms and musings on  refusal, language, and the politics of food.The cookbook industry often cannibalizes narratives of displacement and nostalgia to depoliticize food and open it for the consuming gaze. As American food writer and television host Padma Lakshmi writes, “the best thing about immigrant culture is the choice and variety of tastes and ingredients it offers.” Culinary tropes found in cookbooks exotify cultural differences to whet the appetite of Western readers. In response to the growing market of ethnic cookbooks, packaged multiculturalism, and the hyper-consumption of ethnic differences, this zine hopes to create alternative visions of relationality through food. What’s in your recipe for liberation? How do you revive a broken heart, feed a community, nourish your love? How do you protect your family secrets, your culinary inheritance? What’s in your decolonial food practice? What brands are we boycotting? How do you make your stomach not hurt? How do you adapt tradition, make ritual?

Please submit your recipes (10-500 words and/or 5 images) and remember to keep it abstract. We are seeking poetic/experimental recipes that can get creative with form, rather than sticking to the basic (intelligible/universal) form. Submissions may be in any language, but for non-English text, we ask that English translations be provided for the selection process, as well as a note about whether you intend to publish the piece with our without translations. Eligibility: International open call.

Selected contributors will receive $300CAD. 

Email noorbhangu[at]gmail[dot]com, hajjarchristina[at]gmail[dot]com

Header photo: Alex Sassine and Batoul Faour, When it Reigns, It Pours (still image), Lebanon, 2020.