Breaking Bread

May 2025

Breaking Bread explores how design can nourish empathy, expand accessibility, and stir cultural exchange through food as a shared medium. Growing up in a predominantly White suburb, I had little opportunity to understand my Asian heritage. This changed when I was 12 and discovered Cooking with Dog, a Japanese YouTube home-cooking show that introduced me to new flavors and sparked a desire to cook. YouTube became an accessible archive and community of culinary knowledge, one I consumed, translated, and adapted to my own evolving palate and skillset. My curiosity about this new arena of flavor transformed food into a creative playground, a way to question my own cultural assumptions, and a medium for bringing people together.

As a designer, I now blend my love for food with my practice, treating it as a vessel for dialogue and deeper understanding. Breaking Bread seeks to cultivate community, challenge assumptions, and bridge cultural divides, just as Cooking with Dog began to do for me. Through a recipe zine workshop that welcomes participants and cuisines of all backgrounds, Breaking Bread offers a communal table where food’s cultural legacies and social impact are explored. My thesis culminates in a set of zine featuring recipes, reflections, and artwork from workshop participants, as well as interactive printed ephemera. By emphasizing inclusivity, this thesis invites participant into a “discomfort zone” where they engage with unfamiliar flavors, narratives, and experiences. Breaking Bread harnesses food’s emotional and cultural ties to foreground empathy and build more open, inclusive spaces for social awareness and personal growth.

My process and final deliverables are documented in my thesis book, Breaking Bread, and were on view at Boston University’s 2025 BFA Thesis Show in 808 Gallery from April 29—May 10, 2025.

PROJECTS
︎︎︎ Workshop
︎︎︎ Collective Cookbook
︎︎︎ Reflections
︎︎︎ What Does Breaking Bread Mean to You?

︎︎︎Thesis Book

︎︎︎Thesis Show