decolonizing kitchens

Decolonizing kitchens is not a matter of taste, but—this is where the discomfort begins—a matter of power. The kitchen is often imagined as a warm, sensual space, a place of care and intimacy. Yet this is precisely the trick. It is a social dispositif. It distributes visibility, value, and authority. It decides who speaks and who merely works, who names and who is named. Colonial logics operate here not as historical backdrop but as an operating system: efficient, invisible, seemingly without alternative.

Imagine a kitchen. It is brightly lit, yet the light hums. Something is off. You may not notice it at first, but the room knows more than it shows. Taste is only the surface. Beneath it, something else is at work. Something that orders.

Consider the asymmetry of recognition. Knowledge from colonized or marginalized contexts often exists for a long time only as noise, as atmosphere, as a vague “influence.” It circulates without truly being heard. Only when it is pressed through the filters of institutions in the global North—academies, media, stars, capital—does it suddenly become legible, citable, marketable. At that moment it is given a voice, but it is no longer the same voice. Something has been cut away. Something translated until it fits. This is not a misunderstanding but an order. Recognition feels like a gift, yet it is often a transformation. The decisive gesture of decolonization here would not be integration, but the radical questioning of the very instance that distributes recognition in the first place.

Further back, the economy of extraction is at work. Quiet, precise, efficient. Kitchens are part of global circuits that strikingly resemble colonial trade routes: ideas, labor, and bodies move from the periphery to the center, while value, prestige, and interpretive authority travel in the opposite direction. Today this is often called cooperation or inspiration. Structurally, however, it remains an upward redistribution. The movement repeats itself. Again and again. Within every generation. Like a loop one cannot simply exit. Decolonization would not mean thanking more fairly, but rethinking ownership. Who owns knowledge? Who owns risk? Who owns success?

Then there is time. Colonial kitchens think in rhythms of acceleration: faster service, reproducible quality, scalable processes. Time becomes a resource to be optimized. Clocks hang on the walls, but they run wrong. Many forms of knowledge resist this logic. They are slow, situational, unruly. They emerge through repetition, waiting, failure. This time does not fit the system. So it is ignored or romanticized. Both render it invisible. Decolonization here means not merely tolerating other temporalities, but recognizing them as equal. Professionalism is not what is fast, but what endures.

Especially insidious is the language of authority. Words like “authentic,” “modern,” or “innovative” constantly whisper through the room. They sound neutral, but they cut. They arrange cultures along a timeline in which the West occupies the present and the future, while others are fixed in the “traditional”—like exhibits in a museum one visits occasionally but never inhabits. Language becomes architecture: invisible, yet structuring. To destabilize these terms is to relinquish control over meaning. And that is precisely what systems fear.

Decolonization is therefore not a goal, not a seal, not a certificate. It is a permanent act of unlearning. A process that creates unease because it makes privileges visible—even the well-intentioned ones. It is less about representation than about decision-making power. Who sets standards? Who defines quality? Who is allowed to fail, and who must function? The kitchen is not a neutral space. It is political. And sometimes, it stares back.

Perhaps the real rupture lies in no longer understanding the kitchen as a stage on which identities are performed, but as a system of relations. Relations between people, knowledge, labor, land, capital, and time. Everything is connected. Pull one thread, and the entire room vibrates.

Decolonization does not mean redecorating this space. It means changing its structure. Slowly. Irreversibly. Every kitchen is a social sculpture. The only question is who shapes it—and whose hands we have chosen not to see.