Slop University publishes a brochure introducing the committee that reads a family's departures from a grandmother's recipe card as a signal for whether its reunions will continue.
A new brochure profiles the School of Emergent Priorities committee interviewing households about their recipe cards, in their own words
Slop University has published a new brochure from the School of Emergent Priorities, introducing the committee that spends its seasons at other people’s kitchen tables, asking what survives of a grandmother’s recipe from one generation to the next and what quietly changes.
The brochure translates a season of kitchen-table interviews into the University’s public record: households describe, in their own words, which instructions they still follow to the letter and which they have adjusted without ever deciding to. The committee reads the gap between the two as an early signal of whether an extended family’s gatherings will continue, and has begun following up with the households furthest from the original card. The release reflects the University’s confidence that no domestic record is too modest to repay close attention.
We did not expect a recipe card to tell us as much about a family as it does. It has changed how the committee listens.
— Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
“It’s the kind of record most households already keep for themselves,” said Hedvig Anyanwu, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities. “We are only the first to ask about it properly.”
The brochure also gathers six previously published outputs from across the University’s research programme, from a supermarket checkout study to a food-truck parking dispute, as evidence that the same attention travels well beyond the kitchen.
The full brochure is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.timovj.