"Food is our last bastion of radical agency." (Caroline Hobkinson bonus episode)

0:00Radim Malinic:Hey, welcome to another bonus episode of the Daring Creativity Podcast. I'm back to unpack some of the gems from this week's conversation, pulling out those moments that deserve a second look, and dig deeper into what makes them special. This week, I spoke to Caroline Hobkinson, food artist, food anthropologist, and a person who will permanently change how you think about every meal you've eaten. In our conversation, Caroline explored why food is our last act of radical agency in an algorithm-controlled world, how sound physically changes the taste of what we eat and why we surrender to the most extraordinary experiences.

0:35Radim Malinic:The main interview published a few days ago was titled Dare to Make Food Your Art Form and it was quite difficult to settle on that title because we talked about food as the entry point to shift how we perceive ourselves and the world around us and I'm a food geek and I absolutely love talking to Caroline about all sorts of things that relate to all of us, about our five senses. If you haven't checked out the full episode, let me share with you these four standout moments from our conversation. I would say it's our last bastion of radical agency because if you give me content, visual content, there's such an onslaught of visual content, but I can close my eyes, I can avert, I can click and block other things, but food is one thing that I have absolute agency about the idea of we get really frustrated and angered when we say this is how you prepare the food from your hometown and people get really revved up no this is not the right way and I quite like that I like the passion there but actually what passes our lips is incredibly intimate it's more intimate than sex because unless we become pregnant food stays with us on a metaphysical level you can see that I had a coffee eight months ago on the strand of my hair and I think it's interesting that when it comes to time and intentionality in our world now it's full of intention when it comes to spirituality retreats the way that we put food into our body it's the ultimate marker of intentionality i didn't expect food to be compared to sex uh pretty early on in the conversation but this moment stopped me in my tracks because i somehow knew about a metaphysical level but i totally forgot about it for a very long time when you think about it what we eat literally becomes us that energy traces of the food in our hair and on a biological level caroline uses this to make a much bigger point about intentionality if something so intimate is happening multiple times a day why are most of us doing it on autopilot we should challenge the cultural tendency to treat eating as a functional and sex as meaningful when the reality is closer to the opposite.

2:48Radim Malinic:It's the kind of reframe that makes you put your phone down mid-scroll and actually think about what you just had for lunch. I think unpacking an experience like a dining experience or any kind of beautiful music experience is I think that what drives communication is the best gossip. Unpacking those moments are exactly the touch point of what makes us humanist. What did you experience? And the change in perception. That's just like what drives gossip, what drives good chats, what drives us. Because otherwise, I think it's just boring communication. But I think that's what humans, we started talking when we were sitting around a fire.

3:24People obviously told stories as well, but unpacking experience of what happened during the day when people were hunting a buffalo. That's completely it, I think. It's like what happened and just describing certain different experiences is the most beautiful way of coming together. having one good experience and then sitting for weeks afterwards and unpacking it.

3:44Radim Malinic:Caroline's observation here is that the conversation after the meal might matter as much as the meal itself. I'm sure we've all had that experience of a dinner or a gig or something else that becomes a reference point for years. Something you and the people you were with keep returning to, keep finding new meaning in. Caroline connected here that this kind of backs to our oldest human instincts sitting around fire telling stories about a day's hunt making sense of what just happened together in the culture that is now obsessed with the next experience she's making the case for dwelling in the last one it also reframes what a great dinner party actually is it's not a performance of food or hosting but is the creation of a shared material that group of people will carry forward and keep unpacking long after the plates are cleared.

4:37I am completely fascinated. The idea of you have so much preparation, so much intention, and then you have the meal and then in 50 minutes, it's gone. Poof. It's completely ephemeral. And for me, that is the beauty of it. So maybe there's some sort of the vanitas element of it's that piece of music you practice and practice and then you have one performance and that's just it it's gone it's time like music is just a timekeeper it's just telling us this moment of time and live music that's why i like working with live music because it's like life eating you can't take that away no picture will ever do it justice it's just there and it's gone and a time when we're trying to create content and we always just run then creating memories we just capture memories and i think it's really important and it's so powerful just to create a memory not capture it put the phone away so i think that's really powerful this is a direct follow-up to the

5:31Radim Malinic:previous standout moment because in our world where we photograph every meal at least it's been a trend for quite a while and mostly people stopped it it always made me laugh when there was an episode of mr bean going on a date i think it was a blind what was that thing in the uk it was like a show was it blind date i don't know it was it was hosted by sila black and they did a jokey one with mr bean he went on a date with a reusable camera and took a picture of his meal and it was frowned upon like how stupid it was because obviously mr bean made it even more funny but fast forward a few years later and everyone's photographing their meal every no three or four times a day without it being geeky thing in this instance when caroline talked about capturing moments and creating memory.

6:22Radim Malinic:She's not being anti-technology for its own sake. She's pointing out that something is genuinely lost when the documentation replaces presence. The memory you make by being fully inside an experience is stored differently, felt differently, and lasts longer than any image you scroll past three days later. She talks about a dining experience she created 15 years ago where guests arrived blindfolded and never knew the location. And people still bring it today. There's no photos from the experience and that was the whole point. It connected to something bigger of our creativity too. The best work lives the best meals, happens when you stop performing for an audience and start doing it for real.

7:05Letting people surrender towards the experience, but never breaking that moment of trust. Even if you say that's an almost bush, So trust is really important because obviously I'm willing to lean forward backwards and let myself fall. But only if I know that definitely that is not there. And the moment the trust is broken, when it comes to branding or experiences, then people lose that sense of trust. But I think because we are so much in control of everything, we're yearning and we have so much choice. It's very important to actually work with that surrender moment of, I trust you to curate that experience for me.

7:41and people really love that. When it comes to working with a lot of retreats as well, recently on radical wellness, people are willing to surrender a lot and you feel, really? Do you're going to let me be in the sauna? Like I can ask people to be for half an hour in the sauna, but as long as the trust is not broken, as long as they know that I have a perfectly choreographed soundscape to keep them in the sauna, to do this, to give them something cooling in the end, that needs to be really tight and that trust needs to be onboarded, needs to be established, but never broken and then you can get people out of their usual state but i think that is definitely something that surrendering towards other people's creating that experience is

8:22Radim Malinic:it's definitely a big thing there was a number of words that stood out in the conversation surrender greed envy it was perception it was brilliant because throughout a conversation Caroline used the word surrender a lot and I pushed back on it a few times because culturally we treat surrender as a weakness or being passive but with Caroline's moments she actually talked about something more nuanced true surrender is an active conscious choice you make from a position of trust it requires more courage than staying in control not less this applies well beyond dining to creative collaboration to leadership to how we engage with experiences we didn't design ourselves the best creative work often happens when someone hands over the brief and genuinely let's go the moment the trust breaks the whole thing collapses it's a small idea with a normal practical reach and it's one of those moments that a little bit rewires how you think about working with other people approach experiences thank you for joining me on this bonus episode if you haven't checked out a full episode with caroline i only can encourage you to do so it's a beautiful episode full of passion for food passion for shared humanity for experiences and kind of gives us a glimpse of when we could be going next as a society thank you for being here and I'll catch you on the next one.

9:53Radim Malinic:If you enjoyed this episode and would like more accessible resources to help you discover your daring creativity, you can pick up one of my books on themes of mindful creativity, creative business, branding and graphic design. Every physical book purchase comes with a free digital bundle including an ebook and audiobook to make the content accessible wherever you are and whatever you do. To get 10 % of your order visit novemberuniverse.co.uk and use the code podcast. Have a look around and start living daringly.