Category Archives: Art and Food

Tension in the Art of Cooking

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Art and Food, General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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edible artThe art of cooking is peculiar. Cooking, because it supplies us with energy and  nutrition, must fit into the rhythms of daily life. It is constrained by practicalities of all sorts—money, time, personal preferences–that limit what can be done. Within those constraints of course there is ample opportunity for a cook to be creative by playing with ingredients, modifying recipes or trying new techniques all with the aim of making the food taste good.

But that’s not art; that’s life.

Art, by contrast, is the realm of consciously-developed form. Edible art, like any type of art, must have meaning, emotional resonance, and distinctive pattern. To make edible art it is not enough that the food taste good. The flavors must be organized into patterns that allow us to mentally grasp the work and understand it. Art isn’t the realm of pure freedom where creativity goes on a wild bender. Creativity is constrained by the demands or form just as for a novelist an elaborate, subtle plot limits the way characters can be developed.

So for the artistic chef, cooking is not just a matter of making food taste good but of giving the food significant form by displaying flavors in meaningful patterns that provoke a reaction. Art occupies the tensive border between ordinary life and something that transcends the ordinary, and if cooking is an art it too must embody that tension.

I think that is a challenge for cooks or chefs who are accustomed to providing only comfort.

Pépin on the Art of Food

04 Wednesday May 2016

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A few weeks ago when explaining why winemaking is sometimes more like an art than a craft, I made a distinction between objects that are created from a preconceived plan vs. those that take on a life of their own as they are being created. Unlike a craftsman who works from a preconceived plan, an artist typically has only a vague idea of what the final product will look or sound like and she is using skill to explore and discover how the work should develop. The end only emerges in the process and often surprises the artist.

Famed chef Jacques Pépin makes a similar point about cooking:

When writing a recipe, one records a moment in time which can never be duplicated exactly again. The paradox is that the recipe tells the reader, this must be done this way, when, in fact, to get the result you’re looking for, the recipe has to be modified each time.

The exact reproduction of a taste, which is what the making of a dish is, only works when the processes, timing, and ingredients are adjusted and changed to fit each particular situation.

Pépin is talking about the execution of a dish rather than its conception. But it is an interesting point  nevertheless—the chef has to be constantly adapting to circumstances and the proper execution of a dish is not about strict adherence to a recipe but making modifications on the fly much like a jazz musician improvising around a theme.

Shameless Self-Promotion

28 Monday Mar 2016

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micSeveral media appearances devoted to American Foodie have recently gone live:

The food culture website I8tonite has a front page feature article with photos, a recipe and interview questions.

News site examiner.com published a very nice review of the book last week.

The Pittsburgh-based food show “On the Menu” has posted the podcast of their interview with me. Here is the podcast of my portion of the show.

And Marilu Henner (yes that Marilu Henner from the TV show Taxi) interviewed me for her syndicated radio show. The podcast of my segment is below.

 

The Year of Weird Ingredients

16 Wednesday Mar 2016

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weird foodAnneli Rufus has decided this is the year of weird ingredients.

Based on what I’ve seen these last few weeks at the Fancy Food Show, Good Food Awards Mercantile and Food Fete in San Francisco, plus what this city’s trendy restaurants are serving, food-makers are battling it out to see who can use the most obscure, incongruous, virtuous, freaky and/or allegedly life-saving components. I’ve seen Oreo Cookie-flavored popcorn. Coffee-leaf tea. Sriracha-brined salmon. Calendula-flower kraut. Energy bars made from spent beer grain. Toasted, sugar-coated, chile-lime and chocolate-covered mealworms (“farmed and raised with a natural diet of bran and carrots,” reads the maker’s website). Not one but two brands of chips made from ground-up crickets. Ghost-pepper chocolate. Seawater beer.

Mmmm. Cricket chips. She then asks several pertinent questions:

Is hot-cocoa mix containing “wildcrafted shilajit” — aka mineral pitch, which I have also tried — a pinnacle? Or is it desperation, difference for the sake of difference in a jaded, I’ve-tried-everything-already world?

I vote for desperation.

Regarding the “grilled-bone gelée, Dungeness crabshell gelée or duck-liver toffee crowned with bubbly foam” served at top San Francisco restaurants, she asks:

Is the new übermensch he or she who can speak of such foods straight-faced afterwards without a trace of shock?

No. That is a bit of a come down for übermenschen I would think, who are after all charged with standing athwart history resisting the tide of nihilism. (Is Hillary Clinton an übermensch?)

And then we get to the real pressing question:

…are culinary arts at last on par with painting, theater and dance, attaining unprecedented subjectivity? If so, is mealworm candy the equivalent of butoh?

I think the answer is yes, finally. The U.S. took flavor for granted for so long. Now that we’ve discovered how fascinatingly rich the world of flavor is, we are like the proverbial kid in the candy store shoving anything into our mouths we can imagine.

But there is one difference between the art world and the food world. The art world has had several centuries to make decisions about what counts as a good painting or masterful work of literature. The art world may seem chaotic, and indeed artists wildly experiment with new forms that seem bizarre to the uninitiated. But art movements come and go, the bad stuff is eventually ignored, the old masterpieces continue to inspire us for good reason,  the works that survive eventually yield standards of judgment that we use to bring some order to the process of canon formation.

The food world has yet to develop those standards. But I suspect we will in time. In any case, the rampant experimentation is better than the conventional orthodoxies that used to characterize fine dining in the U.S.

That is a world well lost.

The Taste of Umami

07 Monday Mar 2016

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umami-ingredientsUmami is a mysterious taste. Discovered by a Japanese chemist in 1908, it took Western scientists decades to confirm it is indeed a basic taste. And although it has been enhancing our food experiences for centuries, focused attention is necessary in order to discover its distinctive character. I explore this fascinating flavor at Mindful Eating 2.

Mindful Eating 2: The Blog

04 Thursday Feb 2016

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mindful-eating-logoI have a new blog entitled Mindful Eating2 : The Way of Aesthetics.

This new blog is a deep dive into the aesthetics of individual dishes and ingredients. I have long thought that food deserves the kind of focused, thoughtful attention we give to painting or music. Yet we lack a vocabulary or the aesthetic concepts that enable us to grasp and articulate the aesthetic values expressed in what we eat. We have music theories and theories of painting and highly developed critical vocabularies for both, but no fully developed theory of gastronomy.

Mindful Eating2 attempts to remedy that.

Although we have a lot of interesting science devoted to understanding flavor, and we have flavor pairing theory or network theory that try to explain what flavors “go together”, we don’t really know what “go together” means and lack an account of the various ways foods “go together” and why. In short, we have no account of the reasons behind judgments of beauty in the domain of food and beverages. “Tastes good” is not an analysis.

And so I’ve launched this new blog with the ultimate aim of developing such a theory.

Mindful eating has become the rage not only among people who seek to lose weight but also among people who simply want to get more enjoyment out of food. Our fast paced, distracted style of eating leads us to overeat but also to miss the subtle complexities of food flavors and textures. I will leave the weight loss programs to others. But Mindful eating is the perfect vehicle for exploring the aesthetics of food. After all, eating mindfully is not unlike the focused attention of art lovers who spend hours gazing intently at a painting or raptly immersed in a symphony. Eating mindfully is essential to grasping food in its full dimension.

Furthermore, as I argue in American Foodie, eating mindfully can help each of us acquire our own sense of taste and resist the blandishments of the food industry’s attempt to push flavorless, homogeneous pabulum on distracted consumers.

I have dubbed this project Mindful Eating2 because my version goes beyond the “live in moment” intuition of conventional mindfulness which often takes a dim view of rational thought. Mindful Eating2 requires an awareness of where food comes from, the historical context in which we consume it, and attention to how we can use this awareness to enhance future experience. It also involves developing the capacity for critical aesthetic judgment which takes us well beyond conventional mindfulness.

My first project is Italian Tomato Sauce. I look at the aesthetic principles behind marinara, sugo di pomodoro, and slow-cooked gravy.

Enjoy!

Release Day!

21 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Art and Food, Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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american Foodie2It has finally arrived. My book American Foodie: Taste, Art and the Cultural Revolution goes on sale today.

Americans no longer eat to live; we live to eat. Food has achieved fine art status, a preoccupation as significant as the music we listen to or the books we read. Why has this dramatic change in our interest in food come to pass and what does it mean? I answer those questions in the book. But the thumbnail sketch is that our interest in food is an attempt to achieve control, authenticity, and playful creativity in a public world that increasingly threatens those values.

Whether you are a chef, a home cook, a culinarian, or you just love to eat, this book will explain why taste is a significant part of our lives. Reading it might even make your food taste better!

You don’t have to be a fan of sophisticated food to enjoy this often entertaining illuminating lecture on America’s current taste revolution….Simply Terrific.
— Publishers Weekly

Aww. Gee. Thanks Publisher’s Weekly. (The rest of the review is here.)

Available in hardback and ebook.

The Art of Food Comes to the Getty

09 Wednesday Dec 2015

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salad garden performanceThe art of food, not paintings of food but the art of food preparation, is beginning to find its way into art museums.

If the Getty Center in Los Angeles is going to treat salad as art, then you can bet iceberg lettuce is not part of the equation. And indeed, from now through January 11, the Salad Garden performance art stage features artists making salads from more than 50 exquisite heirloom herbs, vegetables and edible flowers. Part of the spectacle is also the artists devouring their salads on site.

The work is the brainchild of photographer and writer Julia Sherman who recruited several several additional artists to participate in the fine art of salad making at the Getty.

“Every salad is a new take, especially when the prompt is to make something based off of what we’re growing here,” Sherman says. “We have some familiar plants, but a lot of these plants people have never had before. Even if artists come with a plan which we develop ahead of time, there’s a certain element of chance and improvisation that necessarily happens on site.”

But the idea of treating food preparation as an art is controversial. The comments section of NPR’s story about Sherman’s project featured the usual grumbling about something as lowly as food achieving the status of art:

More evidence, not that we needed it, that performance art is a joke.”

“Dear NPR, How about articles about…you know…ART!”

“Who pays these rich people to do such nonsense?”

“Julia Sherman may be a fair photographer, at least technically proficient, but to label this project “Art”, Performance or otherwise is quite a stretch.”

and so on…

So Jean Francois MIllet’s painting Woman Baking Bread is a work of art but a performance of a woman baking bread is not? Is the issue that performance art cannot be genuine art? millet oven cooking

I thought that controversy had been laid to rest decades ago.

It seems to me that Sherman’s salad making is a representation of people assembling materials for living. Why is that not a fit subject of artistic representation? Fans of Bruegel or Van Gogh would be surprised to hear it.

Resistance to food preparation being an art really seems to border on the irrational.

Why are philistines reading NPR’s art coverage?