The Oatmeal Squares Project is a prototype website I put together a few years ago, as an experiment in intertextuality and digital ethnographic methods. The idea was to look at how we might capture practices from everyday life, using a combination of visual and narrative techniques, in ways that expose the commonalities and differences of these practices as they are experienced by different people at different times.
I set up a webcam near the ceiling in each of three kitchens, attached to a laptop computer programmed to take an image every second. Then I asked the kitchen owner to make a batch of oatmeal squares. Afterwards we reviewed the images and discussed various aspects of the production process: why did they make the oatmeal squares in this particular way? What was the significance of oatmeal squares to them?
As I point out in the “curator’s essay”, oatmeal squares are personally significant to me because we used to eat a lot of them in our childhood. Our mother always gave them out at Halloween, and made them for potlucks and bake sales. The oatmeal square is something that doesn’t come in a box, but that is rooted in our own everyday practices: we made squares at home, shared the recipe, tried different pans and types of oats; the production was at least as important as the consumption.
This is a simple prototype based on my own experience, but one that has informed the design of my subsequent work in Mongolia, which similarly uses digital media to explore food production and domestic relations among pastoralists. (More on that later!)
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter or margarine
- 2 cups packed brown sugar
- 4 cups rolled oats
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 350°F.
- Combine all ingredients in a large mixing bowl.
- Press the oatmeal mixture firmly into a rimmed cookie sheet.
- Bake for 15–20 minutes.
- Cut into squares with a kitchen knife, then leave to cool in the pan.