02: Biomimicry as a queer culinary practice
Every food becomes you and resonates with you. It has it’s own sound and silence.
The soup is steaming- it’s human, it’s me - taste it. The tomato, the beef, the milk and butter doesn’t conform to industrial logic. Protect it’s personalities. It doesn’t grow in sync with supply chains. Sometimes it bursts. Sometimes it rots. Mould is good.
It lives - fully. And then it fades - fully.
In the kitchen, we’ve forgotten how to listen.
We dominate. We extract.
We say: Here is the recipe.
We say: Follow the rules, follow the form. Yes chef! we say.
Hands are swollen. For hours and hours we are hoping. To feel the freedom in us.
The freedom of food.
But the spider spins otherwise. It’s old hands touching our remembering of a smell.
The hands are building a web of odures. It doesn’t ask if the web is perfect.
It asks: Where’s the wind? Where’s the light?
And then it spins . Yourself into a shape of ideas and needs.
You’re cocooned now. And it feels okay, it feels right. Can you smell it?
Biomimicry in gastronomy
is not some gimmicky tick-box for eco-branding.
It’s an invitation:
To feel like moss.
To hear like fungal threads.
To think like an ecosystem.
To move like skin on a bone.
To see like the sound of burning wood.
The Recipe of Resonance
A mushroom dish isn’t just a meat substitute.
It teaches us what symbiosis means:
Fungus and tree. Chef and soil.
Guest and culture. Planet and light.
Instead of hierarchy on the plate -
protein, sides, garnish, we design dishes like coral reefs:
layered, polyphonic, sometimes queer in texture.
Crisp, slimy, unruly. Spiky and irritating.
Not made for every palate - and that’s okay.
What if we stopped composing menus and started curating them the way a forest does itself? Like the sea is given us salt as a present. It invites us- why are we taking more space then ever needed ?
Waves don’t ask for permission. They respond.
To the spoon stirring the pot.
Water holds memory - it’s an archive
Generations, mountains, migrations, hands, time.
It has no fixed form, only phases of becoming.
Like gender. Like broth of mussels and thyme.
In gastronomy, water is too often overlooked. Boiled. Reduced. Forgotten.
But water is story. It carries. Us. It cares.
To cook with water is to collaborate with something ancient and alive.
It’s to let go of precision and step into process. Water doesn’t follow recipes.
It flows through them.
A stove is no altar to the ego.
It’s a node in the web of metabolism.
That sizzle you hear is fermentation -
not control, but collaboration. It is fire.
We think ourselves out of separation.
Human here, nature there.
Chef here, animal there.
But the kitchen is the place, to converte nature into culture. Melting together.
To entangle it with your surrounding. Feel the language of food.
We think ourselves back into becoming.
And in the End? No End. Only shifts.
Biomimicry is not a trend.
It’s a return.
To something that never left.
Only got drowned out.
Now someone’s listening again.
Maybe you. Like water.
