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. Decolonizing the kitchen therefore involves hierarchies of knowledge. Culinary knowledge is not merely technical but political and cultural. Recipes transmit history of migration, adaption and survival as a collective memory. When such knowledge is appropriatetd without credit it can reproduce colonial patterns of extraction in cultural patterns.
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. 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.
