# Spirit Cooking *Spirit Cooking* is a 2016-cycle American conspiracy theory that emerged from the WikiLeaks release of John Podesta's emails (October–November 2016), specifically from a brief email exchange in which performance-artist Marina Abramović invited Tony Podesta (John Podesta's brother) to a *Spirit Cooking dinner* — referencing a 1996 cookbook and performance-art piece of the same name. The conspiracy-theory framing extracted from the email-exchange the false claim that the Podesta brothers participated in *Satanic ritual practices* coordinated with the Clinton campaign; the framing connected directly to the broader [[Pizzagate]] conspiracy-frame that developed in the same days and weeks, and to the subsequent [[QAnon]] conspiracy-frame that emerged in October 2017. The Spirit Cooking case study is particularly KB-relevant because it documents *how a benign single-line email about a contemporary-art event was rapidly converted into a sustained Satanic-conspiracy narrative through coordinated chan-culture, Infowars, and emerging-alt-right-media infrastructure*, with measurable effects on the 2016 election's final-weeks discourse. The conspiracy-theory frame persists in some QAnon-adjacent communities as of the 2025+ political environment. ## The actual email and the actual performance The content the conspiracy-theory framing was built on: On June 28, 2015 the artist Marina Abramović — a globally-recognized performance-artist whose work has been substantially exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Venice Biennale, and other major institutions — sent an email to Tony Podesta inviting him to a *Spirit Cooking dinner* at her home, with a forwarded note that John Podesta should attend if he was interested. The email's specific content: > *Dear Tony, I am so looking forward to the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place. Do you think you will be able to let me know if your brother is joining? All my love, Marina* The *Spirit Cooking* reference is to Abramović's 1996 cookbook-and-performance-art-piece *Spirit Cooking* — a Limited-edition art book published by Edition Jacob Samuel that contained *evocative instructions for actions or thoughts*, including instructions that mixed culinary recipes with poetic-and-symbolic content (notably *fresh breast milk with fresh sperm milk drink on earthquake nights*). The piece was *performance art* and *artist-book* in the contemporary-art sense — the kind of work routinely produced and discussed in the post-1960s performance-art and Fluxus traditions; it is not an actual culinary recipe and not associated with any religious-ritual practice. Abramović herself has subsequently clarified in multiple interviews that her *Spirit Cooking dinners* are *fundraising dinners with friends*, not ritual practices; that the *Spirit Cooking* reference is to her artist-book; and that the conspiracy-theory framing of the email exchange is *baseless*. The contemporary-art context is not disputed by any non-conspiracy-theory source. ## The conspiracy-theory generation The conspiracy-theory framing emerged in early November 2016 — within days of the WikiLeaks Podesta-email release and approximately one week before the November 8, 2016 presidential election. The framing-generation pattern: 1. **WikiLeaks release** of the Podesta emails (October 7, 2016 begin; continuing across subsequent weeks) 2. **/pol/ chan-board surfacing** of the Abramović email through early November; the chan-board users with no contemporary-art context interpret the *Spirit Cooking* reference as a literal-ritual description 3. **Mike Cernovich amplification** through his Twitter, Periscope, and blog infrastructure; framing the email as evidence of Satanic-practice 4. **Infowars / Alex Jones programming** treating the framing as on multiple program-segments through early November 5. **[[Drudge Report]] headline-feature** linking to Infowars and Cernovich coverage 6. **Mainstream-press fact-checking response** (Snopes, *NYT*, *WaPo*, multiple outlets) within days of the conspiracy-theory emergence; the fact-checking did not significantly reach the conspiracy-believing audience 7. **Integration into broader Pizzagate framing** through November 2016; *Spirit Cooking* becomes one of the *evidence* items in the broader Pizzagate Satanic-pedophilia-ring narrative The conspiracy-theory generation timeline — from email-surfacing to mass-circulation — was approximately 4–7 days. The structural-mechanism the case study documents is the *speed at which* coordinated chan-culture + Infowars + adjacent right-wing-media infrastructure could convert benign-document material into sustained conspiracy-narrative material. ## The Pizzagate / QAnon connection The Spirit Cooking conspiracy-theory is *operationally distinct from* but *conceptually-integrated with* the broader Pizzagate conspiracy-theory that emerged in the same November 2016 period. The relationship: - **Pizzagate** focused on the alleged child-trafficking ring centered at the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington DC; the conspiracy-theory framing of the broader Podesta-emails as containing *coded language* about child-abuse was the central content-claim - **Spirit Cooking** focused on the Abramović email specifically; the framing as Satanic-ritual was the central content-claim - **The two framings were integrated** in the conspiracy-community discourse — *Satanic ritual* and *child trafficking* were treated as the *same* operation by the same alleged perpetrator-network; the *evidence* from both source-strands was cross-cited The December 4, 2016 incident in which Edgar Maddison Welch entered Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle to *self-investigate* the Pizzagate claims was the public-violence inflection point that produced substantial mainstream-press attention to the broader conspiracy-cluster. The Spirit Cooking element was part of the integrated conspiracy-community discourse that produced Welch's mobilization. The October 2017 emergence of QAnon — building on the conceptual infrastructure of Pizzagate and Spirit Cooking — extended the *Satanic ritual + child trafficking + Democratic-establishment-figures* framing into the sustained QAnon community that operated through subsequent years. ## The persistence A specific KB-relevant analytical point: the Spirit Cooking conspiracy-theory has persisted in QAnon-adjacent communities through subsequent years despite substantial mainstream-press debunking, Abramović's own clarifications, and the broader Pizzagate-investigations' empirical conclusions. The persistence-mechanism is documented in the [[Source Amnesia]] / [[Motivated Reasoning]] / [[Cognitive Closure]] entries — once the conspiracy-frame is adopted, audience-side cognitive infrastructure substantially-protects it from subsequent disconfirmation. The Spirit Cooking case study has been substantively-cited in academic analysis (Whitney Phillips; Joan Donovan; multiple disinformation-research publications) as one of the cleanest empirical cases of contemporary conspiracy-theory generation-and-amplification dynamics. The case is taught in graduate-level political-communication coursework as a paradigmatic example. ## KB significance Spirit Cooking matters for the right-wing knowledge base on several registers: 1. **It is one of the cleanest empirical cases** of how the contemporary chan-culture + Infowars + alt-right-media infrastructure converts benign source-material into sustained conspiracy-narrative; the speed (4–7 days) and reach (millions of impressions) document the operational-effectiveness of the infrastructure 2. **It documents the *integration* of multiple conspiracy-frames** — Spirit Cooking + Pizzagate + emerging-QAnon — into a *unified* conspiracy-community discourse that subsequently operated across multiple-cycle timeframes 3. **The mainstream-press fact-checking failure** to reach the conspiracy-believing audience documents the structural-limit of post-hoc correction strategies; the [[Source Amnesia]] and [[Motivated Reasoning]] cognitive infrastructure proved more-operative than the corrective publication infrastructure 4. **The Abramović-targeting** documents how contemporary-art-world figures became targets of contemporary right-wing conspiracy-narrative-construction; the subsequent harassment of Abramović has been and sustained 5. **The persistence into 2025+** documents that conspiracy-narratives originating in single-cycle political-operations can survive across multiple subsequent cycles and become permanent features of the discourse-environment ## See Also - [[Pizzagate]] — the sibling conspiracy-frame that emerged in the same November 2016 period - [[QAnon]] — the subsequent (October 2017) conspiracy-frame that built on the Spirit-Cooking-and-Pizzagate conceptual infrastructure - [[John Podesta]] — recipient of the original email (forwarded from Tony Podesta) - [[Tony Podesta]] — original direct recipient - [[Marina Abramović]] — performance-artist whose email and prior-art-piece were the source-material the conspiracy-theory was built on - [[Mike Cernovich]] — principal amplification figure - [[Alex Jones]] / [[InfoWars]] — principal mass-media amplification infrastructure - [[Hillary Clinton]] — the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate whose campaign the conspiracy-frame attached to - [[Satanic Panic]] — the broader historical-pattern of which Spirit Cooking is a contemporary instance - [[Disinformation Hub]] — Subject hub