a possible theme

I have been thinking all week about a theme for my sub-projects in this class. I've had many ideas, but a lot of them have been either too broad or too specific. I think I've finally settled on something, though: food and cooking.

I've had a long, fond relationship with food preparation, ranging from futzing around in the kitchen at home to being a head cook in my college co-op, where I lead a team that made dinner for 110 co-opers every week in an industrial restaurant-style kitchen. I've also had a number of friends who have worked as cooks in highly-rated restaurants (friends who made me duck confit for breakfast when I was their house guest), who've given me a glimpse into the world of professional cooking. I love working with food and talking about food, and I think it offers a lot of potential as a theme; plus, food preparation and presentation can be very rhetorical (although I think I will wait until later to get into that).

Some of my specific ideas so far:

My avatar will most likely be a chef. I have not yet decided whether he or she will be a classic, white-hat-wearing French chef or a more modern, organic-produce-cooking, creative-fusion-inventing one. I think this depends partially on how narrowly I will align my four sub-projects (will it be the same chef and the same type of cuisine involved in all four projects, or will I address different aspects of cooking in each one? I still need to think about it.)

For the digital remix, I have several ideas with a message. I could make an ad for a specific restaurant, with lots of images of the delicious food that awaits within. I could also make some sort of health education/advisory poster. Or, it could relate to some sort of extreme political food movement, such as militant veganism (conversely, it could be more of a positive food message, such as that of the Slow Food Movement).

For the film, there are also a lot of possible options. One is to do a stright forward cooking show, but that might be less exciting. I could write an action thriller or a mockumentary in which food plays a leading role. Or maybe I could make a series of short commercials for specific food products, or a longer infomercial for some sort of fictional kitchen device.

Finally, the fourth project is the one that seems most clear to me at the moment: I want to construct a restaurant. There are a lot of aesthetic possibilities for this, depending on the direction I want to take. I could make a French café, an American diner, or a fancy fusion restaurant with an open kitchen.