Meal8: Open Kitchen is centered around dishes that can be cooked in the absence of fire. With the limitations of the available kitchen in mind, we explore in this menu propositions for a kitchen without heat: cooking without a stove or oven; operating with limited access to water; and focusing on fermented, cured, macerated, preserved, and pickled ingredients.

We know it’s going to be late-summer hot, so we’ll be serving up a medley of specialty drinks and cool, fresh, restoring courses. The meal will be picnic-style, with floor seating in a shaded, grassy area. The location is wheelchair accessible and we can provide chair seating upon request.

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Red Flower Collective is a food research and eating collective organized by art historian and researcher, Erin Montanez; artist and art worker, Jenna Hamed, and artist-homemaker, Tsohil Bhatia. In the year since its inception, the collective has hosted free, open meals out of borrowed kitchens loaned by friends and institutions. With a rotating membership of artists, chefs and homecooks, and community organizers, the collective is interested in sharing food and cooking together through community meals, installations, and programs. The project takes food and the labors of cooking as key tools in forgoing the sterility of the gallery exhibition space, collaborating with practitioners to center generational culinary histories and affirm diasporic identities. 

Red Flower Collective was born during COVID 19, out of the desire to eat with people, to counter the taboo of being together and sharing home space, and to assert that food is a primary issue of public concern. We are drawn to the idea of a porous home, one that is malleable based on both individual and collective need. The provision of a meal and the meal as an event invites a group of people unfamiliar to one another to assemble. The collective aims to break the transactional nature of food consumption and instead encourage communal eating. The nature of care is at the center of the collective’s project.

Instagram: @redflowercollective