In David S. Kirk and Abigail Sellen’s 2010 article “On Human Remains” an article on home archiving for Microsoft Research UK, Kirk and Sellen argue for home personal archives, including recipes. Abigail Sellen, who was also a contributor to a previous article, “Technology Heirlooms” for Microsoft Corporation has a clear understanding of how recipes keep us tied to the past, and keep the memories of our past loved ones alive. In “On Human Remains” Kirk and Sellen give an overview of a woman participating in their study on Computer and Human interaction. The woman is particularly fond of a book of jam recipes that her grandmother has given to her. The woman in the study feels closer to her deceased grandmother, and she enjoys reading through the comments on the pages, and seeing her grandmother’s handwriting correcting certain recipes and techniques (p. 20, fig. 12), and feels compelled to add her own writing to the pages, and add her own recipes, continuing the dialogue (par. 4).
Kirk and Sellen point out that it isn’t the object itself that carries such a deep meaning, but rather the connection the reader feels with the personal touches left by past family members because “In this way and in conjunction with the ready access to objects of common association… such materials were used to foster a connection amongst family members to a shared family history…such objects may in fact have no connection to events in the past that anyone in the household can actually remember. Yet they symbolize a heritage and history of things that must have been, creating a new shared awareness of their importance in the present.” (p. 20-21)
Beyond the personal, familial and social history that recipes that recipes often entail, there is a significant cultural history attached as well. Fortunately, people often feel compelled to keep and maintain a family’s personal artifacts after the person maintaining it passes. Kirk and Sellen point out that families often have an informal point person that is tasked with family archiving, but even in the cases where this point person does not exist, that people feel a duty to preserve family history for others citing that “for many people (those responsible in family homes for the construction and maintenance of the archive) there is a sense in which we understand that artifacts which might me important need to be dealt with in some meaningful way” (p. 26).
There is another aspect to this family record keeping that is intensely more worrisome in Kirk and Sellen’s opinion, and that is the idea of “Forgetting” (p.27). This “underlying motivation” as Kirk and Sellen call it, is what compels us as humans to persevere, even when maintaining, or altering personal family archives seems daunting. Posing the question of “WHY” we are saving certain contents, Kirk and Sellen believe that there is a truly palpable sense of connection and honesty in remembering properly (p. 28-29). Even when we keep the recipes that didn’t work, or were terrible; it speaks to the person themselves.
In one instance during Kirk and Sellen’s project, they account of a person who removed an apple tart that her mother made before moving her mother to an assisted living facility. The person moved the apple tart from her mother’s freezer, and into her home freezer, where it stayed until her mother died. She didn’t get rid of It because it would have made her feel guilty p. 28). According to Kirk and Sellen, we have no version of this action or instance in the digital realm- where “artefacts (sic) were kept but deliberately hidden.” This speaks to the truly personal nature of food, and recipes, and points out a fracture between digital and tangible artifacts like recipes.
Kirk, D. S., & Sellen, A. (2010). On human remains. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 17(3), 1-43. doi: 10.1145/1806923.1806924
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