Experimental Food Society

I have always believed that good food was an art form but I had never really considered that food could be a form of good art. I’ve seen beautiful food before, but I have never really seen food used as a creative medium in such wonderful ways: not only had things been moulded out of chocolate or icing sugar; there were also sculptures that used things in their own shapes as building blocks – there was an Eiffel tower built out of curly whirlies, and train tracks made of kit-kat bars, a mobile that looked like a cake had exploded and whilst admiring the talent I wonder if I can be a consumer of their art without being able to consume it.

In one of the exhibition halls we came across a demonstration by a ‘food adventurer’. I don’t know what that is, but I think of myself as an adventurous foodie so we bought the accompanying lunch boxes and sat ourselves near the front. Stefan Gates, Gastronaut, began to talk us through the contents of our packs. The bum sandwich that lay on top of the pack said (in a rather Alice and Wonderland fashion) ‘please sit on me’. So we did. And I made sure mine was good and squashed by kneading it with my bottom. The point of this, Stefan explained, is to press the oil that he had used instead of butter into the bread; to crush the herbs so they release their flavour; to warm the sandwich so that you taste more in your nose (or rather you smell it more and taste and smell work simultaneously), and because it is quite fun.

Under the bum sandwich there were other things like lambs testicles – difficult to eat without childish amusement and very soft to bite into – gold and silver leafed sausages and jellyfish with noodles. Gold leaf has no nutritional value but it looks pretty, and the taste of jellyfish is unidentifiable but they are in absolute abundance and the texture is quite surprising. A lot of the food that we ate that lunch was for enjoyment not nutrition: the point was to learn again that you should play with your food and engage with it by making it interesting and fun.

We ate crispy dried worms with yoghurt and ‘bee vomit’: now this was just a bizarre name for something familiar. Honey is nectar that bees have partially digested and then regurgitated, but it is a trick kind of like saying you eat cereal with cow juice, and quite rightly makes you think about how it is and seeing if it makes people think about what it actually is and how it got to being on your plate. We whistled through a carrot and watched crushed cochineal bugs turn water in to wine (turn it crimson – and tried to point out how it had done the same to pink marshmallows, which failed a little as he tried to use my marshmallows to illustrate his point and I had eaten them already and without realising the significance of the colour tried to subtly replace them with white ones) and I found myself engrossed by the talk, until little film canisters popping with lemon and bicarbonate of soda signalled the end of his demonstration.

We tried to digest the experience, whilst devouring Ginger’s Comfort Emporium’s Camel milk ice cream. Art made from perishable material: sculptures out of butter or chocolate, cake that might crumble and vegetables that might rot. Maybe that is its appeal? After today I think I have rather a taste for it, I think this is the kind of art I could get my teeth into.