Thanks Meso, for submitting your story!
Meso is an exploratory food project that brings people together to craft, sample, and discuss recipes featuring hybridity in food. Our goal is to create a Mexican-Chicagoan cookbook. In this project, we set out to celebrate our hybrid identities and call out to each of us who have felt like we’re in the middle, neither this nor that, but something of two or more, and still distinctly American. There is a reason we chose to communicate through food. For those of us living with mixed-race identity in the United States, it is a fitting metaphor for experience–mixed, concocted, politicized, appropriated, and of course, consumed. Food’s very nature allows for alterations to the recipe, improvements, mistakes, and quickly the “authenticity” of a dish becomes muddled. And, in the end, food brings us together like nothing else. With this and much more in mind, we present Meso, an exploration of Mexican-Chicago cuisine. This project is a test kitchen. Our process is collaborative and inclusive. We seek people who are interested in exploring identity, making connections between foods and cultures, and are not afraid of bizarre, spicy, frothy, heavy, exquisite, charred, or whatever else might describe the concoctions coming from our chefs’ baking dishes. Our participants give honest feedback and input on food, collectively deciding which recipes are published.