DATS MashUp: The Project

DATS MashUp

Oct 9, 2:30-4:00, 2010
DATS 2010: FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Sawtooth Center, Winston-Salem

Four cooking teams each consisting of a professional chef and refugee-immigrant will present and discuss their joint creations using the Stokes Purple sweet potato as their point of inspiration. Each team will face language, tradition and cultural barriers as they work to communicate, collaborate, and create a great new recipe.

Today people from all over the world have brought new flavors, ingredients, techniques and tastes to the Piedmont. The Stokes Purple sweet potato is an exceptional product available at Whole Foods and developed by enterprising Stokes County farmers from a variety of Ipomoea batatas cultivated in Asia. As a world food, the sweet potato is a familiar ingredient to newcomers from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central and South America.

THE MASHUP CONTINUES

DATS MashUp is about breaking the cultural and linguistic isolation refugees face here in the Piedmont of North Carolina.

Using food as a communication medium and creating an event (the DATS MashUp Collaborative Cooking event held at the 2010 Design, Art, Technology Symposium), we brought together American professionals, artists, designers, researchers and technologists who had common interests with refugees and newcomers.

Now we follow the leads from the event, tracking how connections made there evolve into relationships, opportunities and for the individual refugees, fuller participation in mainstream American life.

What is DATS MashUp?

FOOD is a reflection of culture.

I developed this project as part of DATS 2010 as way to reach refugee-immigrants in our area and to point out to the American side how much we lose when we fail to capitalize on the region's collective talents and resources.

Sharing food traditions is an obvious, cheap, enjoyable, and humanly-scaled way to reduce obstacles to communication and understanding.

We need people from other lands and traditions who equate food with life to remind us just how bad we've let things go and how we could fix them.

—Andrew Young
http://youngprojects.blogspot.com

DATS 2010 (October 9-11, 2010) is the Design, Art, and Technology Symposium that rotates to High Point, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro, NC each year. http://2010.datstriad.org

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The Project