Hello! An update from Fortified.
We thought we’d write in to welcome all our new subscribers, offer an overview of what Fortified does, and to give some updates of what we’ve been up to over the last few months.
Fortified is run by us: Sinae Park (she/her) and Kate Morgan (they/them). With it, we seek to make space for expansive writing about food: its production, cooking, eating, sharing (or not sharing). We’re really keen to support and help develop food-adjacent writing that is unwieldy, enthusiastic, demanding, soft, generous, untidy. As editors, we would like to bring such work together in common space to see what that does.
The publication takes two forms. Our online iteration (what you’re reading now) is The Fortified Gazette, an irregular newsletter that each time comes from the home of a different individual. We share in their space and their eating for the week; a kind of food diary. This writing is more immediate, not overly worked. Normally we have someone scheduled every fortnight or so – and this could be you. The Gazette is open to all, so just get in touch and we can arrange a week for you to contribute. Find more information and guidelines here, and don’t hesitate to email us at contactfortified@gmail.com if you’re interested, or have any questions.
Fortified Journal is our print publication. Fortified was initially founded by Sinae as a project in her final year at uni in Norwich four years ago, an excuse to meet people who also think about food a lot and write, make stuff about it. A space for her illustration practice that is drawing, design but also writing, talking to others, thinking out loud, listening, making stuff together and not together. For the current and future issues of the Fortified, Kate joins Sinae as co-editor. We had only met twice in person before this summer, but we met on Zoom twice a month for a year (between Busan and Glasgow, mostly) to visualise Fortified, but also to get to know each other better. The process of this is all part of Fortified Journal Issue 3. In July we launched Issue 3 together in Glasgow at Glasgow Zine Festival, and it is now also available at Magculture, Books Peckham, and Good Press, OR buy it directly from us and get a free lil’ risograph bookmark thrown in. Email us to order, they’re £10 plus p+p.
The publication includes long and short form writing, critical and personal essays, and visual responses. Contributors are Ari Níelsson, Hattie Morrison, Isobel Neviazsky, Jennifer Bailey, Kate Morgan, Maria Blom, Melanie Xu, Rodrigo Vaiapraia, Rosie O’Grady, Seo Hye Lee, Sinae Park, Tilly Heydon, Vivien Chan. It is 56 pages of essays, poems, prose, and images, and has a digitally printed inner, with a lovely riso printed lilac and gold jacket made for us by Sundays.
Now, read our introduction to Issue 3, which gives a flavour of the publication.
Best!
Sinae and Kate
Introduction
‘It’s nice to see you. how are you?’, holding a mug of coffee, misty eyes, plants, pictures and writings stuck on the white wall, construction noise in the background, a howling sound, the puppy wanting to go for a little walk, fingers rummaging through bookshelves to pluck out titles for a reference – all the vignettes of each other’s lives are very much part of the making of the third issue of Fortified.
Sinae started Fortified in 2018, and last year invited Kate to join in the making of the publication going forward. We’ve only met twice in person, so this outlet gave us the opportunity to get to know each other both as friends and collaborators: a happy excuse to maintain a conversation about our relationship to food, cooking, and eating, and to continue to write and draw on this subject.
Over regular video calls we’ve accessed each other’s domestic environments, which often shift from kitchen to work-room depending on the (physical and emotional) light of the day. This allowed for more intimate, honest interactions and conversations, despite the occasional choppy audio and moments of voices awkwardly overlapped by a delay. We feel extremely fortunate to have worked with each other and the practitioners involved in this issue of Fortified, and for the invite into their kitchens and contexts that their works offer.
We’ve been thinking about how food writing incites action. How it, indirectly or very directly, plants hooks that, be it that afternoon or a year later, feed a longing, empty the fridge, urge one to act.
We’ve been thinking about what the act of handling food opens up: how it bends time for the cook, how it holds time for the eater, and how cooking a grain of rice reorders the world.
What happens when we begin to ‘cook’? – can ‘cooking’ also mean non-cooking activities: the time we think about cooking, writing down recipes, deciding not to include aubergine because I had it the whole week and adding courgette instead, letting it cook while writing/reading/applying for a job/talking on the phone. Is this all cooking?
We have been thinking about what the act of preparation opens up. In this collection of texts and images, intact, ‘perfect’ objects (blackberries, cherries, the oat) are broken down and reconstituted, often to mush. We reorder: make new sense of. Sometimes this happens in the cooking down, at others in the working through.
Sometimes food tells us about appetites – appetites for connection, chaos, being able to express vulnerability, desire – it holds emotion. Food changes with time, its material qualities slacken or harden, and the fact of this instability can be a comfort. Leftovers, once exciting, rich, sweet, might become burdensome on the second day. Porridge once-edible opens up to become something other as leftovers – used instead for its material sculptural qualities.
At other times, food is prepared at work: an exchange of labour where one belly gets fed and the cook nourishes themselves by other means. A recipe is a bookmark to a food memory – one which offers us the ability to revisit that place/time/meal/experience/person, to step back and recollect, reconstruct and remember on our own terms. This is a comfort. To focus on the sound of cooking reconjures a memory differently. Tracing the trajectory of how someone cooks, the movement and objects around the act. She makes her way around the space. It is a stage where characters exercise emotional engagement with each other through the sensory experience, building up expectations for the culinary experience. The description of this allows us as readers to become part of the play.
To follow a recipe is a constant negotiation between our ingredients and our selves. In cooking and making, food is no longer just an edible object that is passive to the hands of cooks, but an active object that influences us. Food is no longer inanimate – our behaviours shift in relation to it. When we eat together we carve out space for how we would like the world to be. Ragu is a portal to the kinds of relationships we want to nurture; porridge binds us.