An Annotated Video Archive of Vietnamese Chefs in New York City
About
Tomorrow’s Table is a collection of interviews with Vietnamese chefs, asking how these inheritors of war’s legacies use cooking as a practice for making lives, communities, and utopias in the everyday. This archive documents how chefs understand food and taste as practices for sustaining life after war and in the face of environmental, social, and economic uncertainty.
Tomorrow’s Table uses annotation as a tool for situating food in the worlds in which it is grown, distributed, cooked, sold, and shared. This tool allows us to chart food’s many sources, from the local to the industrial, from home kitchens to commercial cookshops. Mapping these connections, we see that eating food is always an encounter with history.
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Minh-Ha T. Pham is Professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, and the author, most recently, of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Social Media’s Influence on Fashion, Ethics, and Property. She can be reached at mpham@pratt.edu
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and the author, most recently, of Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam. She can be reached at: thuylinhtu@nyu.edu
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Tomorrow's Table films chefs at work in their kitchens, preparing dishes that are meaningful to them. While we borrow from the familiar form of the cooking show, our goal is not to show how a dish is made but to explore what it means to feed others.
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Tomorrow’s Table takes its name from a question we heard our mothers ask every day: “What should we eat tomorrow?” (Ngày mai mình ăn gì?) This project takes up the belief embedded in this question that tomorrow is made through the practice and pleasure of cooking, eating, and being together.
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