Drum & Kernel Popcorn

In Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942), the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard notes of cooking sugar, that “it is fun to stir it with a wooden spoon”. Was this throwaway comment, from a philosopher of materials and the imagination, enough to provoke me to start a street food business, making and selling kettle corn? Absolutely not.

Nevertheless, running this little food business for well over a decade, has stirred plenty of thoughts about craft, materials, community, the workshop as a site of social production, real economy, and just what makes for the correct balance of sweet and salt.