A project for Paths to Pier 42 in collaboration with Meredith Drum (2014-2015)

For our artist project I designed 56 page spiral-bound community cookbook, a wordpress website hosting recipes and showcasing our process, flyers in three languages for soliciting recipes, a mail-in postcard and a button.

//

Fish Stories Community Cookbook is a collection of seafood recipes, local histories, stories and drawings alongside ecological information contributed by people who live and work in the Lower East Side. The book was produced by the Oyster City Project (artists Meredith Drum and Rachel Stevens) for Paths to Pier 42 and was distributed at the Paths to Pier 42 Fall Celebration on October 25, 2015.

The project is inspired by spiral bound community cookbooks produced by local Grange chapters, the Provincetown Cookbook, and the Slingshot Organizer (a collectively designed Anarchist calendar). The name “Fish Stories” is meant to elicit playful contributions and is also an homage to Allan Sekula, an artist and theorist whose work interrogates the politics of labor and the flow of global capital in the maritime industry. Through recipe exchanges, workshops and other activities the artists solicited useful and imaginative contributions to the cookbook in order to highlight relationships to waters near and far. As inhabitants of the local ecology and participants in local food systems and economies, how can we be become better stewards of the environment? Fish Stories Community Cookbook celebrates the diasporic cultural histories tied to New York City’s dynamic harbor and embraces cooking and eating as central everyday spaces through which we can envision a sustainable future for our city’s estuary.

In the process of soliciting recipes and stories from people in the Lower East Side we have held workshops or shown up to talk with people at the Hamilton-Madison House Senior Center, the fishing clinic at the Lower East Side Ecology Center, the P.S. 184 Shuang Wen School Summer Carnival Fundraiser, the Loisaida Festival, the after school program 2 Bridges Kids! at Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, Family Day at the Vladeck Houses, Weinberg Center for Balanced Living at the Manny Cantor Center, a performance at Pier 42 by Arm of the Sea Theater and, most recently, held a seafood recipe exchange at the Mulberry Street Branch of the New York Public Library.

Fish Stories Community Cookbook is available at Bluestockings, a volunteer-powered and collectively-owned radical bookstore, fair trade cafe, and activist center in the Lower East Side, NYC.