Explorations that use umami as a lens on culture and human experience. Each project is driven by a question explored through taste — in language, memory, art, or heritage — and unfolds through research, collaboration, and public participation.
AN INDEPENDENT CITIZEN-LED INITIATIVE
TASTE MEMORIES
Food memories outlast languages, borders, and generations — yet they often go unrecorded, carried quietly through ordinary lives. Taste
Memories exists to keep them from disappearing: a living archive of food memories from across Europe, shaped not by institutions but by the people who choose to remember and share.
A meal eaten decades ago. A smell that brings back a person no longer here. A taste that carries the weight of a whole childhood.
Everyone has a taste they have never forgotten.
What is yours?
Future Plans: Selected memories may be featured in future research, essays, public talks, exhibitions, or a growing digital archive.
USING UMAMI AS A LENS TO EXPLORE CULTURE AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE
UMAMI CROSSING
A growing cross-disciplinary series tracing how food and taste have shaped human life across cultures and time. Each crossing pairs umami with a different field—where the two meet, both reveal something they could not show alone.
- Umami x History
- Umami x Art
- Umami x Wellbeing…
The Taste That Had No Word — Letterenhuis, Antwerp, October 2026 — opens the series.