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What’s In Your Bag Illustration Series by Lea (CCL) Reframes Taiwanese Food Culture as a Migration Story

Food illustration rarely makes you feel homesick on someone else’s behalf. But Lea’s What’s In Your Bag illustration series does exactly that — and it does it through a shopping bag. Chia-Chun Li, the Taiwan-born illustrator and graphic designer known as CCL, created this project as both a visual record and an honest reckoning with what it means to cook from memory in a country that doesn’t carry the right ingredients. The result is a 26-page illustrated recipe book that quietly dismantles everything you thought you knew about authenticity in food and identity in design.

This isn’t a trend piece about cottagecore or aestheticized grocery hauls. Instead, it’s a serious piece of editorial illustration that treats the supermarket as a site of cultural negotiation. And right now, that framing feels more necessary than ever.

What Does a Shopping Bag Actually Tell Us About Identity?

Think about the last time you walked through a supermarket in a foreign country. The products are different. The packaging fonts are different. Even the lighting feels slightly off. For millions of people living abroad, that disorientation isn’t a travel anecdote—it’s a weekly reality.

Lea’s What’s In Your Bag illustration project begins there, in that gap between craving and availability. Based between the UK and Taiwan, she found herself asking a deceptively simple question in British supermarkets: how do you recreate a dish when the core ingredient simply doesn’t exist on the shelf in front of you?

That question, it turns out, is not really about cooking. It’s about identity, adaptation, and the quiet grief of displacement. Lea turns it into a visual language that anyone who has ever lived far from home will recognize immediately.

Furthermore, the project frames each illustrated bag as a kind of cultural artifact. Every ingredient selection carries weight. Every substitution tells a story about what gets preserved and what gets lost when you move across borders.

Substitution Poetics: A New Framework for Reading Diaspora Food Illustration

To understand what makes this project so formally precise, we need to introduce a concept: Substitution Poetics. This framework describes the creative practice of rebuilding culturally specific dishes through locally available ingredients, where the act of substitution itself carries narrative meaning.

In most food media, substitution is treated as a failure state — the thing you do when you can’t get the real thing. Lea flips that entirely. Within the What’s In Your Bag illustration series, substitution becomes the point. It is the creative act. It proves that cultural memory is not fixed to an exact ingredient list but is instead something you carry and rebuild continuously.

Consider braised pork rice, one of Taiwan’s most beloved comfort dishes. You need specific cuts of pork belly, specific soy sauce ratios, and specific aromatics. In a British supermarket, those specifics simply aren’t there in the same form. So what do you reach for instead? Lea illustrates that negotiation in real time. Consequently, each bag becomes a document of a particular cultural compromise—thoughtful, pragmatic, and quietly emotional.

Similarly, popcorn chicken and danzai noodles appear throughout the series, each reimagined through the lens of what UK supermarket shelves actually offer. The compositions are clean, structured, and editorially sharp. Yet underneath the visual precision runs a current of longing that the design never overstates.

Why “Authenticity” Is the Wrong Standard

The What’s In Your Bag illustration project makes an implicit argument that most food media refuses to make: authenticity is a myth that migrant communities have always had to live with and work around.

Lea’s work rejects the purity test entirely. Instead, it proposes something more interesting — a creative act of survival. Home, as the project website states directly, is not a fixed memory. It’s something you reassemble from what’s available. That’s a genuinely radical position in a food culture still obsessed with origin stories and regional specificity.

Moreover, this refusal to fetishize authenticity is what gives the project its cross-cultural resonance. You don’t have to be Taiwanese to feel the logic of it. Any person who has ever tried to reconstruct a grandmother’s recipe in a different country knows exactly what Lea is describing.

Grocery Cartography and the Diaspora Pantry Aesthetic

The second framework this project introduces—intentionally or not—is what we might call “Grocery Cartography”: the practice of mapping cultural identity through the specific contents of a shopping bag. Each illustrated bag in Lea’s series functions as a territory. It has borders, a logic, and a kind of internal hierarchy.

The compositions use what we can define as the “Diaspora Pantry Aesthetic”—a visual and editorial language that emerges when immigrant food culture intersects with host-country supermarket reality. The resulting imagery is neither fully Taiwanese nor fully British. Instead, it occupies its own precise visual zone, and that specificity is exactly where its authority comes from.

Lea’s training across illustration, graphic design, and visual storytelling is evident in how she structures these compositions. The bags don’t look like recipe cards, and they don’t look like grocery lists. They look like carefully edited editorial spreads—structured, considered, and deliberately paced. Each element earns its place in the frame.

Additionally, the wirebound book format reinforces this editorial sensibility. At 26 pages and priced at £12 with free UK delivery, the physical object mirrors its own subject matter. It’s modest, functional, and utterly considered—the design equivalent of a meal that doesn’t announce itself but stays with you afterward.

Adaptive Taste Memory: How Lea Illustrates the Psychology of Displacement

There is a third concept embedded in the What’s In Your Bag illustration series that deserves naming: Adaptive Taste Memory. This describes the psychological and sensory process by which displaced individuals reconstruct flavor experiences through available substitutes—not to replicate the original, but to approximate the feeling it carried.

Neuroscience backs this up. Taste is one of the most emotionally encoded senses. A close approximation of a familiar flavor can activate the same comfort response as the original. Lea’s project works with this instinct rather than against it. She doesn’t ask you to accept a worse version of something. She asks you to accept a different version that still carries meaning.

That distinction matters enormously. The project doesn’t romanticize struggle. It simply documents it with precision and warmth. And because the illustrations combine both analytical composition and genuine emotional texture, they succeed at something most food illustrations fail at: they make you think and feel simultaneously.

How the What’s In Your Bag Illustration Series Sits Within Contemporary Food Visual Culture

Food illustration as a genre has experienced significant growth over the past decade. Social media platforms have turned it into a thriving visual category, with artists ranging from playful to hyper-realistic. Most, however, illustrate food as an object—beautiful, desirable, and inert.

Lea’s work operates in a fundamentally different register. Her illustrated bags are not aspirational. They are documentaries. Consequently, the series aligns more closely with editorial illustration traditions than with decorative food art. It belongs in the same conversation as zine culture, immigrant narratives, and the growing body of work that uses everyday material culture as a lens for examining larger structural realities.

Furthermore, the project’s position between illustration, graphic design, and visual storytelling makes it genuinely difficult to categorize—and that’s a strength. In an era when creative disciplines routinely blur, Lea’s refusal to stay in one lane gives the work its particular energy. The What’s In Your Bag illustration series functions simultaneously as artwork, recipe reference, cultural commentary, and personal memoir.

Why This Project Deserves More Attention Than It’s Getting

Here’s my honest take: the What’s In Your Bag illustration project is the kind of work that gets quietly influential before anyone notices. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t perform. It simply presents a rigorous, emotionally intelligent framework for thinking about food, migration, and cultural adaptation—and then backs that framework up with genuinely accomplished visual work.

The timing also feels significant. As conversations around diaspora identity, food sovereignty, and the politics of cultural preservation intensify globally, a project that treats the British supermarket as a site of cultural negotiation is doing more meaningful work than it might initially appear to be doing.

Moreover, Lea’s practice — rooted in both Taiwanese and British visual culture, sitting between multiple disciplines — represents something genuinely valuable: a bilingual visual intelligence that doesn’t flatten difference but works directly inside it. That’s increasingly rare, and increasingly important.

So pick up the wirebound edition. Cook through the bags. Ask yourself what you’d reach for if your go-to ingredients simply weren’t there. The answer, it turns out, tells you a great deal about who you are.

You can explore the What’s In Your Bag illustration series and purchase the wirebound edition at whatsinyourbag.chiachunli.com. Browse more of Lea’s work at chiachunli.com. In addition, feel free to take a look at WE AND THE COLOR’s Illustration category.

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22 intricate pen and ink #illustrations that invite you to look closer: https://zorz.it/YlhdI

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