Jolin Chan ’25 on Food as Art, Scholarship, and Vocation

Jolin Chan ’25 wears many hats in food and hospitality. By day, she works in social media for a fine dining restaurant in New York City. Beyond that, she develops recipes for brands and businesses and is a rising influencer and blogger behind @jolinfromscratch on Instagram.

Chan’s recipes — including her ice cream flavors alone — showcase a remarkable inventiveness: Think unexpected combinations of cherry with Sichuan peppercorn, and osmanthus with sweet rice wine. Equally impressive is the fact that many inventions are a site for learning. A recipe for apricot kernel cheesecake, for instance, unfolds into one mini-lesson on the chemistry of cyanide poisoning, and another on Mandarin linguistics.

Most intimate, perhaps, is her engagement with food as an art form itself. In a recent post, she transforms Rachel Ruysch’s “Fruit and Insects” into a matcha-soaked, peach-filled mugwort sponge cake with hojicha Swiss meringue buttercream. Presenting her creation on TikTok, she reflects on the social commentary embedded within the painting, saying that Ruysch’s work “should make us question not only how to grapple with the ephemeral, but also the violence behind beauty and abundance in art.”

These explorations are a product of what happens when you give a kitchen and a phone to an academically-trained eye for culture and aesthetics.

“I do love to think of food as art,” she said in an interview with The Crimson.

Her content creation and writing become an outlet for food curiosities, informed by a grounding in food studies — tracing the history of ingredients and grappling with the cultural weight of recipes.

This passion for food began with family. Chan recalls a youthful urge to prepare meals with her mother and grandparents and to be able to “wield a heavy meat cleaver.” It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that she began to break her own ground:

“I guess my outlet ended up being wanting to learn how to cook for my family, and move beyond just helping. So I would be the main person cooking, and I would just experiment with different recipes and different techniques,” she said.

When Chan got to Harvard, her personal and familiar interest in food broadened into an academic path. She explained that Professor Joyce Chaplin’s “American Food: A Global History” GenEd sparked a particular “lightbulb moment” early on:

“Like, oh my gosh, I could study food and this is something that I could actually pursue,” she said.

For the rest of her undergraduate years, she continued to orient her coursework around food across departments, even cross-registering at MIT. In a Harvard History & Literature tutorial, for instance, writing about Asian American culinary figures like Joyce Chen and Grace Zia Chu deepened her grounding in this work and inspired her through the ways in which “they shared their knowledge with readers.”

Her senior thesis is both a dedication to her upbringing and a capstone of her food studies scholarship.

“You [can] write about food in almost any class,” she said.

For her fieldwork, Chan worked a three-month stint in a Chinese mom-and-pop. Combining archival research and oral history interviews, she examined the restaurant as a site for immigrant community building in Los Angeles suburbs — the same communities represented in her recipes, which foreground Asian, particularly Chinese, flavors with inventive multicultural flares.

“I feel very lucky to have grown up in California, where I [had] access to all of these amazing cuisines, and also grew up among immigrant communities,” she said.

Now, Chan brings that food studies lens into her post-graduate life. She bakes for pop-ups and grassroots fundraisers and creates, tests, and writes about her own recipes. Her current role in fine dining feels almost like an ethnography: an immersive research method privileging participant observation, which she treasures from her undergraduate training. It’s something that she’s taken with her as a way of knowing and living.

“Something that one of my professors told me that really helped was that — and this is specific to anthropology, but — was that you don’t have to be in the classroom to be an anthropologist, necessarily,” she said.

Her resolve has already carried her into unexpected opportunities. She holds the title of “head chef” at The Soft Spot, a forthcoming ice cream shop in France. This role began when the founder came across her TikTok series documenting a summer spent creating different ice cream flavors, including one video that amassed over 600,000 views. The collaboration feels like a natural extension of her work, a testament to the organic resonance of her platform.

Still, for all her creative output, Chan resists the label of artist.

“I haven’t called myself an artist. I usually say, like, recipe developer. But I do think food can be such an amazing art form if you just see what everyone’s creating out there, whether it’s fine dining or in your own personal kitchen,” Chan said.

And beyond any single role, she hopes to stay connected to food.

“No matter what job I’m doing, I want to be working with food in whatever capacity — whether that’s in my daily job or outside of it,” she says.

Her platform, she said, is a part of her life she would “love to keep forever.”

It’s a way for her to “keep being that student,” anchoring her life-long commitment to learning in an ongoing curiosity about what we eat and the people behind it.

— In their column “Public Palate,” Ee Jenn Lee ’26 and M. H. Hans Bach-Nguyen ’26-27 discuss how people are shaping communities and culture with food. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].