A recipe for privacy: artists’ books and the role of culinary exchange in the leaked recipes cookbook

Following their investigation into the Enron accounting scandal in 2001, the US government released over 500,000 of the company’s emails to the public. In addition to insight into the professional and personal lives of former Enron employees, these leaked correspondences also include the occasional sharing of recipes. In her artist’s book The Leaked Recipes Cookbook (2022), artist and human rights researcher Demetria Glace collects over fifty recipes from the released Enron data as well as other publicly available, leaked email databases. Artists’ books as a genre are often associated with politically motivated activity, with the book format acting as the medium for the dissemination of ideas (Burkhart 2007, 25; Drucker 2004, 287). Accordingly, I argue, The Leaked Recipes Cookbook adopts the medium of the artist’s cookbook to provide social commentary on the topics of privacy, gender and food culture. In this paper, I examine the role of the compiled cookbook as both a unifying and humanising force in a context of corruption and loss of privacy, and as an agent of feminist critique in a world of gendered food culture. To achieve this, I analyse selected excerpts from The Leaked Recipes Cookbook within the context of their respective recipe exchange, through the lens of the artist’s book genre as an artistic vehicle of social commentary.