Around the Table
Book, research project
Dublin September 2016 - March 2017
A project about food in Dublin, commissioned by Dublin City Council's Neighbourhood Project in 2016, together with historian Donal Fallon and photographer Jeanette Lowe, culminating in a book, a seminar and a series of aprons.
We looked back at the journey of food into the city; met the dock workers and those that had grown up around the vegetable and fish markets; the vital systems (formal and informal) used to share food with others. We looked to the National Library for a different set of heritage - old nutritional journals, recipes, reviews.
“You’d never go hungry in Dublin City” is a recurring missive. Again and again we hear examples of makeshift points of hospitality - imagine the second flat from the right on the first floor where a grandmother prepares fish & chips to twenty three members of her extended family over the course of a Friday afternoon; a pot of stew appears outside the front door of a dock worker who didn’t get work that week (nothing said); a volunteer at the Capuchin Day Centre sets his alarm clock for 2:30am on Christmas week to get food parcels ready"
From Around the Table (link to PDF of book)
