A short bonus episode showcasing a few standout moments from this week's guest interview with Caroline Hobkinson ~

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Radim: 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 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 the 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, 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 Five Senses.

If you haven't checked out a full episode, Let me share with you these four standout moments from our conversation.

Caroline: I would say it's our last bus 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 you say this is how you prepare the food from your hometown.

And people get really revved up. It's no, this is not the right way. And I quite like that. I like the passion there is 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.

Radim: I didn't expect foods to be compared to sex.

 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.

 our 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.

Caroline: 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. 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. It's the best gossip. unpacking those moments are exactly the touch point of what makes us human.

It's what did you experience? And the change in perception that's just like what drives gossip? What drives good chat? What drives us? Because otherwise, I think it's just boring communication. But I think that's what's humans. We started talking when we were sitting around a fire.

 People 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. It's the most beautiful way of coming together. Having one good experience and then sitting for weeks afterwards and unpacking it.

Radim: 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 instinct sitting around fire, telling stories about a day's hunt, making sense of what just happened together in a 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 a 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.

Caroline: I 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 vanita 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 life music. That's why I like working with life music because it's like life eating. You can't take that away. No picture will ever do it.

Justice is just there and it's gone. And a time when we are trying to create content. We are always just rather than 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. It's put the phone away. So I think that's really powerful.

Radim: This is a direct follow up to the 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, 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. With that, it being a geeky thing. in this instance, when Caroline talked about capturing moments and creating memory, she's not been 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 last 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 about creativity too.

The best work lives, the best meals happens when you stop performing for an audience and start doing it for real.

Caroline: Letting people surrender towards the experience, but never breaking that moment of trust. It's like even if you say that's an almost bush, it's like, so trust is really important because obviously I'm willing to lean, fall backwards and let myself fall, but only if I know that definitely that is not there and the moment that 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 are 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. And people really love that. Like 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 gonna let me be in the sauna? Ask, 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, is definitely a big thing. 

Radim: It 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 weakness of being passive. but with Caroline's moment, 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 enormous practical reach, and it's one of those moments that a little bit revise how you think about working with other people and how you 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 feel 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 cut you on the next one.