Spiritual Flavours: using visual arts practice to explore food and faith in West London

In this paper, I present the project Spiritual Flavours to reflect on my experience of using visual arts, including photography and film, to investigate the relationship between food and faith. This is a collaborative arts project with members of different faith communities in the suburbs of West London, who contribute recipes that they relate to their spirituality and religious practices. These communities include a Synagogue, a Sri Lankan Hindu Temple, a mosque, a Sikh Gurdwara, an Anglican church, a multicultural Roman Catholic church and an ethnically diverse Pentecostal church. Through interviews and cooking sessions, which are are the basis of a 'multi-faith' short film and a photo cookbook, the project pays attention to affective relationships with food, as a vehicle to explore ideas about home, gender, inheritance, tradition, difference and belief.