Food is family. Food is a gift. Food is grief. Food is pain. Food is art. Food is a celebration.

How does food help us with grief? How does it celebrate happiness? How does it pass on our own history? Does it shape who we are? Is creating a meal a human act?

For my capstone, I want to explore the history and complexities behind the food we eat and the food that we hold dear to our hearts – and why.

I want to look at the dynamics of food from a variety of unique and equally important perspectives in the local community, and my own family – including community members from Third Street Alliance, participants in a treatment center for eating disorders, local chefs and restaurant owners, and farmers.

Through a series of these individual vignettes, I will carry the story along with my own personal connection to food: my Nonni. While unraveling the stories of others, I will center my film with my own personal story of old and new, life and death, and how the recipes we make guide us and accompany us through our happiest moments and our most devastating moments. This fall, my mom prepares to finally let go of her mother’s ashes and scatter them in Casco Bay with her father’s ashes. Beforehand, I want to explore my mom’s relationship with her mother, my Nonni, and their relationship of food together – as well as the process of grief and losing a parent. I want to film us exploring her old handwritten recipes, incorporate found footage and images – and ultimately tackling recipes that neither of us have tried, while gaining a deeper understanding of what food meant to Nonni and what it now means to our family.

I plan to weave in these ‘storytelling’ sessions and cooking with my mother with these outside vignettes, as well as interviews with my older brother and my 96 year old great aunt (my Nonni’s sister), shaping them all into a cohesive storytelling of life and death, and the influence of food throughout all stages of life.

I currently have some (very limited) footage of my mom in Italy for the first time, and a couple interviews with her. I plan (italicized for tentativeness) to film interviews with my great aunt, my brother (who is a cook), and a member of a local counseling center for eating disorders before returning to school. I also may interview a chef and farmer while in New Hampshire, but might run out of time and shoot in PA. Meanwhile, I am digging up any found footage of my Nonni and mom, still images, handwritten recipes, and anything else integral to the story.

Please let me know if you think this idea is scatterbrained or if it needs to be cleaned up for clarity, and if anyone has any suggestions I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks all.