Jon Rubin and  Conflict Kitchen
Channel: MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Date: 07/06/2018

In this Civic Media Lunch, the MIT Center for Civic Media welcomed Jon Rubin, co-creator of Conflict Kitchen, a Pittsburgh restaurant (and art project) that serves food only from countries the U.S. is in conflict with.

Read a full write-up: civic.mit.edu/blog/rahulb/civic-lunch-jon-rubin-on-conflict-kitchen

"They stuck a facade onto the building (cleverly getting around permitting issues). Now they run two restaurants out of one kitchen. Now that this project has moved out over the internet, various people are asking them for advice. They stumbled onto this idea; nobody liked the idea. They said there was no market for the food, nor the political conversation. Jon talks about these as bad business model, but it worked.

The first version was an Iranian one. The visuals are important. They wanted it to be strange and wonderful to the visual landscape of the city. They worked with local Iranians as well as Iranians from other places. This came from the rhetoric in the media at the time (four years ago), that was over-simplified. Could we create a place that complicates people's perspectives? And bypass people's ideology with hunger?

'Can we bypass ideology with hunger? Can we engage people on a daily basis?' Jon stays they are not a pop-up, they are a restaurant. 'The pop-up thing implies a lack of depth and commitment, and that we know what we are doing and we will tell you. ' They tried to create a space for co-education and co-learning. You have to have a call and response system, an iterative system. They decided to use the food as a storytelling device. Jon says, 'Let’s let the food be a mechanism for carrying information.' The wrapper carries text that tried to connect the culture to Pittsburgh and its residents."