In an age of industrialisation and mass production, things have become so readily available and disposable that we no longer find it necessary to make them ourselves.



Gone are the days when many would take time to knit a sweater for family members or to create personal gifts for friends. Nowadays, whenever we are hungry or need to grab a birthday gift, we look no further than our neighbourhood food joint or go online and place an order for a present.



Even when we bother to cook, we spend very little time in whipping up a meal. It’s getting harder to justify the amount of time, cost and effort needed in preparing a meal, especially when we can easily pop a pre-cooked TV meal into the microwave oven and have it ready in three minutes’ time.



Soup For Thought, my final project of my MA Critical Practice course in Goldsmiths, is thus conceived out of these concerns.



The purpose of the project is to create, step by step, a simple bowl of tomato soup and its accompanying utensils. This entails growing the ingredients and making the utensils from scratch.



With this project, I hope to get in touch with the process of making things with hands. I wish to know more about the ingredients and materials and appreciate the value of simple pleasure. The entire process of my cooking will be documented as an informative narrative.



So, what goes into making a simple bowl of tomato soup and what insights can one glean from it? Read on to find out.