Hi, I'm Kay

I am Kay Aryamehr, a Statistics and Data Science major at UCSB, originally from Iran. I grew up around real Persian cooking, the slow stews, the rice ceremonies, the breakfasts with no grill in sight. When I tell people I am Persian, the first response is usually the kebab place, and this site is my long answer to that. Everything here comes from one quarter of work in WRIT 105M. The image project made the argument in a single frame. The video set made it with a full table in motion. My research Padlet holds the sources behind all of it.

Kebab is real Persian food. It is one dish out of hundreds, and it is the only one most Americans ever meet. That gap is the whole reason this site exists.

I learned more from the revisions than from the first drafts. My first image tried to label every part of the dish and it explained too much. Cutting it to one line, this isn't kebab, made it land. The video started as a vertical phone reel and became a full landscape film .

Almost every photo and video on this site I shot myself, at my parents' home, on my phone.

Ask a Persian person what their family eats for breakfast. You will not hear the word kebab.