food museum blog

Fruity Food News--Baby-Shaped Pears in China

Clever entrepreneurial farmer Gao Xianzhang in Hexia, northern China, is making a bundle selling 10,000 pears molded into baby form--selling them for 5 pounds UK each, according to this report in the Daily Mail.  ( Take a look at the mold at the link above.)

From Soup to Song: La Chorale sous les Etoiles

A Frenchman named Pierre Anthian had a notion:

According to a report in the Guardian Weekly, "I already had the idea of starting a choir when I was volunteering in a soup kitchen back home in France. I didn't want to just serve homeless people soup, as if I were a farmer handing out hay to a herd of cattle. I wanted to help them make something of themselves, to live with human dignity. 

Just as the idea was developing, I received my papers to migrate to Canada. I began volunteering in a soup kitchen again as soon as I settled in Montreal, but this time I didn't just ladle soup into the bowls of the homeless who queued up in front of me: I got to know them."

The result? The 12th year of the "homeless choir," in Montreal. Though they started out singing in the Metro, since that beginning they have performed widely, and recorded an album. And Anthian has moved ahead with varied plans for linking up homeless men with employment and educational opportunities.

See his website here.

( Photo by  Nachammai Raman.)

Artful Food

Put your art-buying money where your heart is, into food-themed paintings. We encountered this Seattle-based artist a while back, always on a search for the next Pierre Bonnard... In fact we are always in search of artists depicting food plants, dishes, farming, gardening, and food preparation.

( Bonnard's paintings often featured people eating, or settings in which they were about to eat or had just eaten...)

Patianne Stevenson says she has a passion for "all thing kitchen." Explore her work and see what you think.

NEW INFO added July 27: We emailed Patianne to get more background about what she does and why she does it. ( Among other things, she does art on commission.) Here's her response:

"I am a true  foodie. I love the quote you use on the Museum website from M.F.K. Fisher.  I  actually have it  written on the project board in my studio, along with another favorite quote from Alan Richman:  "Food is life. The rest is parsley."  He is also one of my favorite food writers.  However, I may have to change it to "Food is Life. The rest is art!" I think he will forgive me.

I not only visit restaurants with a camera which usually draws polite "pretending not to notice" stares,  I also create, make and/ or bake my own subjects. After all, that's the way to get the  picture perfect  subject!  I have to admit though,  I purchase some subjects.. for instance petits fours and sushi.  We have Shiro's in Seattle: the most beautiful sushi in the world.  So I leave it to the experts.

My commission clients often immortalize their family recipes and favorite specialties.  These are usually site specific, and live anywhere from above the sink to that little slice of wall space between the counter and the cabinet.  The piece you featured on your site was also featured on a Seattle Interiors TV Magazine, happily living in an Asian inspired kitchen. But I think food is beautiful,  and does not have to be limited to the kitchen.  I have food paintings hanging everywhere in my own home.  Friends always say they leave my house craving.....(fill in the blank!). Anything from cupcakes and sushi to hamburgers and fries, even if they came for dinner."

Expressive Chocolate Statue Draws Ire

Apparently a statue of Christ on the cross made from 200 pounds of chocolate is mightily annoying the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. 

According to today's AP story,  "This is one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever,” said Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League, a watchdog group. “It’s not just the ugliness of the portrayal, but the timing — to choose Holy Week is astounding.”

Dubbed " My Sweet Lord," the piece is the work of Cosimo Cavallaro and is to be put on display this Monday at the Lab Gallery of Manhattan's Roger Smith Hotel. ( You can view the statue well on the artist's website. )

Again, according to AP, " Cavallaro, who was raised in Canada and Italy, is best known for his quirky work with food as art: Past efforts include repainting a Manhattan hotel room in melted mozzarella, spraying 5 tons of pepper jack cheese on a Wyoming home and festooning a four-poster bed with 312 pounds of processed ham."

Wow!

Since the hotel has been besieged by angry phone calls, it's possible the gallery may not go ahead with plans to display the 6 foot tall, anatomically correct chocolate Christ.

Can't help but wonder what will happen to all that chocolate....

Deep-Fried Flags Offend Museum Director

When an art student in Tennessee unfurled his latest project at the Customs House Museum in Clarksville, the museum's director, Ned Crouch, had a hissy fit and nixed it within 18 hours.

According to a report on CNN,  "The exhibit featured three U.S. flags imprinted with phrases such as "Poor people are obese because they eat poorly" and more than 40 smaller flags fried in peanut oil, egg batter, flour and black pepper."

"Art student William Gentry said his piece, "The Fat Is in the Fire," was a commentary on obesity in America. "I deep-fried the flag because I'm concerned about America and about America's health," Gentry said."

So, uh, William, what was in the egg batter?

( Left: An American flag worth eating from http://www.southernconnoisseur.com/desserts.html)

SoFab Finds Home in NOLA ( Huh?)

Congratulations to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum of New Orleans which may finally have secured a permanent home. As their email to us this morning put it,

"Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in New Orleans have reached an agreement in principle that SoFAB will open its permanent location of exhibits celebrating the food, drink and cultural foodways of the American South at the CAC. SoFAB will be opening on the third floor of the CAC and also operating a soda fountain/gift shop on the ground floor. There are still renovations and planning to be completed before SoFAB can open.

"We are extremely excited about this unique opportunity to collaborate with the CAC to promote and preserve the foodways and culture of the South," said SoFab president Elizabeth Williams. SoFAB has been seeking a permanent home for 2 1/2 years. In the meantime, it has been operating as a moveable feast, producing a number of acclaimed exhibits. "

Love those okra floating in their logo--but where's the beverage?

"Eating" ---The Movie

All in the line of duty, I finally watched an overly long flick called Eating. It was made in the early 1990's by Henry Jaglom, an English-born indy director much lauded by some as idiosyncratic. ( Evidently he achieved early fame with a faux food film called Can She Bake A Cherry Pie?)

Eating centers on a Southern California birthday party honoring three women of different ages. Untold numbers of mostly thin, svelte women show up for the event, including a young French filmmaker who is doing a documentary on the California American scene or some such.

The women drift hither and thither, admiring others' bodies, loathing their own, and eventually they go before the French gal's camera and whine about food, sex, men, love, mostly the lack thereof, and so on.  The sole voice of sanity is expressed by Frances Bergen,  astonishingly lovely at 70-something.  ( She's  Candice Bergen's mom.)  She plays the lead character's mother and is repeatedly flabbergasted by the absurd notions these pampered neurotic gals have about good old food.

At one point the guests do dive into a big spread on a buffet table, a scene that inexplicably appears after they have all recoiled in horrific clucks from the obligatory birthday cakes. ( One character, God bless her, chows down throughout the film. )

I started doing whatever you call "fast forwarding" in DVD parlance right away--fortunately, I caught this one line:

" I'm still looking for a man who will excite me as much as a baked potato."

Indian Market Foodie Finds

Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico is an annual event attended by over 1000 native artists from around the States, and a few from beyond, as well as buyers seeking the finest in Indian artwork. And us,  who come for superlative browsing, people-watching,  the breakfast burritos at The Burrito Company, and frybread observation.

Among a few food-related pieces of artwork spotted were two clay figures of Navajo women, one holding the blue enamel coffee pot that has come to symbolize hospitality in Indian Country, another with a bag of Blue Bird Flour, the super refined wheat product that has been the name brand among natives in the Southwest since the 1920's.  The artist is  Navajo Travis Emerson whose trim little figures clearly bely the notion that they eat masses of fry bread.

Creek artist Les Berryhill created beadwork handles for old wooden potato mashers and rolling pins, a new notion for collectors of antique kitchen gear.

Hopi-Choctaw Linda Lomahaftewa's work focuses on "prayer and ceremony." Several pieces featured corn plants, usually in threes, often depicted with dragon flies that symbolize the return of the rains, and thus the renewal of food plants.

Rhonda Holy Bear, a doll artist, displayed a spectacular piece ( three years in the making)  that won Best in the Diverse classification.  It's a mother and child mounted on a horse.  What we noticed  was a tiny detail--a decorative grouping of tin spoons, hanging on the flanks of  the horse. Apparently in the 1850's and 60's natives strung together tin spoons from the U.S. military, liking the tinkling sound they made as their horses moved.

Fianlly, good news on the Indian teen front. The Gallup, NM-based National Indian Youth Leadership Project along with its many outdoor activities for young people, is committed to nutritional change. On its outings, no sugar and no salt are allowed, frybread is made with a mixture of white and whole wheat flour, and the frying oil is not lard.

Which Came First: Bread or Clay Pot "Baking"--Plus! Bread and Art

Here's a question for you--which came first, bread baking or clay pot firing in the oven?  This came up when we met recently with two artists and a baker in Santa Fe to discuss a food happening for the fall to raise awareness about The FOOD Museum's push to recognize food heritage sites. among other things. The baker, Willem Malten, once a Zen monk in San Francisco, runs Cloud Cliff Bakery. The artists, Ana MacArthur and Chrissie Orr, collaborated last year on an all-bread mandala, breads and grains courtesy of Willem. The mandala was constructed outdoors at the State Capitol Building and was part of a wild exhibition on food and art titled : The FOOD Show-- Politics, Pleasure and Pain.

(The idea behind the mandala last winter was for it to slowly deteriorate,  nibbled on by birds, carried off by squirrels, munched from directly by street people, swept clean by wind and snow, and so on.)

Anyway! Ana brought up the question about the oven's first purpose because she and Willem had been discussing the many similarities between dough and clay. A few years back, inspired by pictures of "bread heads" in a 1930's book about the Poilane Bakery in Paris, Willem decided to make his own heads out of bread for the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration in November of 2002. He made gypsum casts of faces and subsequently filled the resulting molds with dough---he baked 70-80 heads, hung them up in his bakery/cafe, and on the night of November 2 gave a lecture there on bread as a medium for sculpture, mentioning the Poilane Bakery's influence on him.

The next morning when Willem walked into his bakery earlier than normal a copy of the New York Times was sitting right on the counter. This was unusual because the paper was always late, and it was never placed in that spot. On the front page was a headline about the accidental death November 2 in France of Lionel Poilane, the famous bakery's owner.

( Pause for a nod to synchronicity.)

Now---- many of you probably know that the Egyptians, and others in the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East first made bread on the hearth, a flat bread. But they also developed a way of making multiple raised breads in pots resembling flower pots that were stacked over the coals of an open hearth. ( Take a look here.)So bread-baking went from the hearth, to the hearth with something to contain the dough as it baked, to an actual oven.

Research in one of our favorite sources, James Trager's The Food Chronology, suggests that fired pottery has been around since at least 6000 BC but that bread baking per se dates from about 2500 BC.  BUT--the earliest clay containers apparently were fired in bonfires rather than in actual ovens or, as those pot people call them, kilns. ( For a look at a Roman-style bread oven, look here.)

Surely someone practical and task-oriented somewhere in those ancient days threw some dough along with a pot needing to be fired into an oven and snatched out the "bread" when it was just  ready to eat--yeasty, hot and perfect?

(Willem's bread head photo courtesy Anita Zednik.)

A Nourishing Journal

If you like your foodie literature short and sweet, neatly contained in a journal suitable for insertion in pockets,  and you'd rather not wait for the New Yorker's special issue on food, Alimentum is for you. The New York-based journal was launched by writer and caterer Paulette Licitra soon after she had the notion that food had not yet been honored by a dedicated lit mag. Her husband, Peter Selgin, a writer, painter, editor, teacher, shares editing duties with Paulette, the publisher. Evidently they are already backlogged on submissions--the first two editions, Winter and Summer, have just emerged--so expect a wait on your poem about the armadillo that refused to cook up tender. Ultimately Alimentum hopes to pay its writers but for the moment the reward is seeing your work in elegant print.

On Sunday Foodie caught the Alimentum crowd at a reading at a restaurant in Brooklyn to note the publication of Summer. (Night and Day in Park Slope hosted the event.) While some material "reads" well and its authors have a gift for same, other does not, alas. We think that the best presenters should take the mike---Foodie assumed, incorrectly, that she would find the authors in the magazine, after the fact. Alas, she does not know the name of the fellow who did a funny riff on the food references missing from Lawrence's Women in Love, nor the young woman who read some poetry with memorable lines like, "the fish in the window are taken already," and "Keep the taste of your sandwich closed, in your mouth," and something about the bottoms of feet, as "flaky as whitefish." Lynn Levin read with delayed amusement about her attempt to eat guinea pig in Peru, and Angus Woodward wondered what the "tomato as a fruit or not" controversy was all about.

Foodie was about to launch into a didactic explanation of the whole affair settled by the Supremes in 1887---the government wanted tomatoes taxed as a veg, the importers wanted it untaxed as a fruit--and of course we all know technically that it is a fruit, botanically...but since this entire explanation would have been utterly unliterary, Foodie shut up and ate her nicely prepared fried baby artichokes.