The Critical Cooking Show is a digital programme of films, lectures and performances that reimagine the kitchen as a space central to design thinking and production.

Cooking shows are a popular television format featuring food preparation, often involving celebrity chefs and personalities, usually highly produced. During the 2020 quarantine, people turned to social media as a space to share recipes and ideas more informally, from the intimacy of their own kitchens. Inspired by the richness of this evolving genre, the Critical Cooking Show offers a diverse range of styles and tones, from food demonstrations to fictional stories or home-made documentaries. Hosted by art, design and architecture practitioners and thinkers; the Critical Cooking Show explores how food exchange, preparation and consumption relates to urgent ecological, economic and geopolitical conditions impacting contemporary culture today. 

The episodes explore diverse perspectives on food, from the microbes that populate the kitchen, to the landscapes transformed by agriculture; from individual hand gestures, to collective spaces of commensality; and from superstitions and ritual, to the rich histories of mundane kitchen tools. Drawn predominantly from our open call for The Kitchen programme, this series offers complex, multi-scalar perspectives on modes of kinship with other species through food as an expanded form of design.