Food in the Library

A few weeks ago, I found out about British Photographer Carl Warner and his foodscapes. Those aren’t clouds, they’re cauliflower. Broccoli trees, mountains of bread, and is that polenta paving? Nope, it’s cumin. Warner has fifteen foodscapes on his site, carlwarner.com.

These vivid and fantastic images really struck a chord online, and not just among food bloggers.
Check out the Google Trends Graph Below.
Prior to 2008, he’s nowhere, then in January, the BBC online does a piece on him, digg and technorati pick it up. Cool. I would like to thank my girlfriend’s mother, who goes by the name of RadBarb, for bringing Warner’s culinary craziness to my attention.

So, these images got me thinking about other food imagery that is not primarily commercial, documentary or incidental. I’ll do a whole post on still life images with food at some point, but Carl Warner’s images made me think specifically of 16th century painter Arcimboldo.

Yeah, that guy. I didn’t remember his name either, so I took a trip to the University of Michigan Fine Arts Library and in short order walked away with a couple books on him. Here are the catalog entries for the books; there are several others.

• Arcimboldo the Marvelous, by André Pieyre de Mandiargues
• Arcimboldo, Spring, Federico Zeri, Ed.

Arcimboldo created paintings that are called symbolist, and sometimes pre-surrealist; knockoffs are known as Arcimboldesques. Of about 17 -30 known works, many are composed largely of food. There’s a whole essay…holy crappie. I just found UCSD Professor Peter Moyle’s page of citations of all his publications on fish imagery in art. Naturally this includes an essay on Arcimboldo’s piece, Water, which is part of The Elements series.

Looking at this series, and at The Four Seasons series, it’s interesting how different they are from food porn, which is all about the delicious aesthetic of food. With Arcimboldo, the food isn’t food. I mean, that guy’s symbolism has symbolism. More about that another time.

Film maker Stefan Nadelman used slightly less profound symbolism in what he calls the “viral mini-epic short film about war called Food Fight”. Over 1.75 Million views on YouTube. Some might say Food Fight is in poor taste, given the details he manages to convey through sound effects and the fast foods of the world. But Nadelman’s striking use of food to represent war between nations is not only more graphic than I would have thought possible, but also a more successful representation than I would have thought possible.

The Oceanside Museum of Art will be hosting a Culinary Cinema Series. The Union Tribune says they’ll be featuring menus too.

• May 3: “Big Night”
• Aug. 9: “Eat, Drink, Man, Woman”
• Sept. 27: “Babette’s Feast”
• Dec. 6: “Like Water for Chocolate”

Nice Choices. But for those who can’t make it to California, or won’t feel sated after four feature films, I’ve put together a small list of books about movies about food!

Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study
James R. Keller, 2006

Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication
Jane Ferry, 2003

Food in the Movies
Steve Zimmerman and Ken Weiss, 2005

Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film
Anne Bower, 2004

Reel Meals, Set Meals
Gaye Poole, 1999

I’ve looked at the books by Zimmerman and Bower I don’t really know how the rest are. I just remember browsing the stacks at the Van Pelt library and being amazed that there were multiple books about food movies. I had a vague idea that I might spend a year watching only food movies, but I have not yet made that happen.

Thanks to engineer & photographer Jasper Nance for her high speed image “egg drop”.

This started out as a post about Edith Poston. But the internet kept steering me toward other work people have created with and about eggs. I think Mrs. Poston would have approved.

Mrs. Poston collected eggs for more than 30 years. After her death in 2005, she left over 300 eggs to the Gaston County Museum, near her home in North Carolina. The collection includes eggs from at least three continents. 19th century Bristol glass eggs, ostrich eggs, Russian Fabergé-style eggs, porcelain, metal, and more.

On February 5th, the Gaston County Museum opened the first of three annual exhibits from the Poston egg collection. I spoke with the museum’s curator, Aimee Russell, to learn a bit more about the collection. But I found that I was even more interested in this woman who spent 30 years collecting eggs. I wish I knew more about her. And I wish she had a presence online; she’s a great example of why the internet is great. For any interest, there exists a community of interest. I feel confident that if Mrs. Poston had been online, she’d have found a lot of people that shared her interest in eggs.
Next year’s exhibit will be on the cultural significance of eggs, a subject on which Mrs. Poston lectured. (Ms. Russell is checking on possibly getting me access to the unpublished manuscript from that talk).

Thinking about eggs reminded me of other works about eggs. I thought about Eggs, the poem by Susan Wood I read in high school. Somehow I didn’t remember that it’s a really intense, turbulent poem.

I also thought about One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs, a book published by Alexander Filippini, the chef at Delmonico’s in 1892. I remember seeing this book at the Clements Library. The Schlesinger Library’s copy has been scanned, and it’s available in full text.

One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs By Alexander Filippini
For some primary source material on Delmonico’s, check out menus from the NYPL Buttolph Menu Collection.

And finally, I’d like to mention Hervé This. A mutual friend of science and mine sent a Make Magazine Blog Post on Hervé This entitled the Man Who Unboiled an Egg. I thought I had better mention him in this post too.

That’s about all the thoughts about eggs I can muster. I trust you’re appropriately grateful that I summoned the strength to forgo comments about hatching ideas, things that are eggcellent, etc.

Perhaps you will enjoy the Iron Chef Egg battle, while it’s still up on YouTube.

Update: This event will soon be available on demand at the AADL Streaming Video Collection

I was very glad I went to From the Farm to Your Fork. The panelists represented a fascinating array of backgrounds, the farmer, the chef, the dietitian, the scientist. Their talks were thought provoking and inspiring.
During the Q&A, it became apparent that I was not alone in wanting to be convinced that small-scale, local farms are better for our health, communities, and environment, with effects from local to global and for people of every demographic. Although the audience was literally a Pollan-waving bunch, (you’ll see) there were undoubtedly a lot of university types. (I mean, it’s Ann Arbor, throw a rock hit a post-doc. At one point I wanted to test that hypothesis, but I couldn’t get it through IRB) I think a lot of people who are sympathetic to this cause crave evidence, research, data. Thoughts?

From the Farm to Your Fork – Why Local Food Can Make Us Healthier, Happier and More Secure
Monday February 18, 2008:
7:00 pm to 8:30 pm –
Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

The Ann Arbor District Library is bringing together an incredible panel to discuss eating local.

• Alex Young, Chef at Zingerman’s Roadhouse and 2007 James Beard Foundation Nominee for Best Chef : Great Lakes. (No, that’s not him in the picture. That’s the windy city’s molecular gastronomic golden boy, Grant Achatz. Here, here’s Kitchen Chick’s great piece on Chef Alex Young.
• Professor Catherine Badgley. A biologist, she teaches Food, Land and Society at the University of Michigan and lists agriculture and biodiversity among her chief research interests. I can’t wait to see her, she sounds totally awesome.
• Annie Elder & Paul Bantle, local farmers who run a biodynamic farm, which, i think means that the farm is ethical enough to win the approval of Al Gore, Captain Planet and St. Francis of Assisi.
• Ruth Blackburn, a nutritionist who has been working to educate people about food, health and community as a nutrition specialist for the University of Michigan. Here’s an article she wrote for Cooperative Grocer on the importance of co-op staff knowing nutrition.

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Got Food? Creating a Hunger Free Community
- March 28 2008
Worcester Historical Museum

The exhibit chronicles three hundred years of hunger relief efforts in Central Massachusetts. It sounds like quite an experience, according to this Worcester Telegram article.
Marking the 25th anniversary of the food bank, the exhibit takes a broad look at poverty and hunger in Massachussetts through legislation, institutions and attitudes. For example, Worcester no longer auctions off the poor for indentured servitude, as was once the case. Really a cool collaborative effort and a terrific way of inspiring reflection on and participation in an ongoing problem.

Western Kentucky mixes it up with a…with a…ok, did everyone catch that? Mixes it up…Mixes! You see, I said mixes, like cake mix, for which Duncan Hines is famous! Whew. Anyway, the library’s exhibit, Recommended by Duncan Hines, tells the story of Hines’ life and career. It’s too bad they didn’t put more exhibit content online, because folks who live far from Bowling Green are less likely to know about Hines’ fascinating career as a salesman, restaurant reviewer and author. But they did put an ad on YouTube.

UPDATE : There is a site to go with this exhibit! www.duncanhinesmuseum.com Thank you to Marissa from visitbgky.com letting me know!

Food for thought is the name of the exhibition at Jundt Museum’s Arcade Gallery
at Gonzaga University. (There’s gotta be a less clumsy way to say that.) The exhibit complements the school’s discussion theme of food, eating and agriculture. You’ve got another month to see it; it’s up November 30 2007 – March 8 2008.

They organized a pretty cool lecture series around the topic, including…

Brother David Andrews (whose bio reads like Cesar Chavez with a JD and a clerical collar) delivered the lecture Eating as a Moral Act. He also gave that talk to the 2004 Food and Society Conference, which is a Kellogg Foundation program. (I look forward to devoting a post to the Kellogg foundation, about which I know very little, except that they’ve given huge money to the School of Information at Michigan), which runs the programs in library and archives, HCI and policy. Thanks Kellogg Foundation! OK, back on track…Here’s Brother Andrews’ comments on the conference Feeding a Hungry World: The Moral Imperative of Biotechnology.

Professor Maccarone gave a talk called The Post-Industrial Eater: Aligning Ethical Values and Food Choices. I know what you’re thinking, Professor Emanuele Maccarone? The eminent Italian food chemist from the University of Catania? Author of From China to Brussels; the long path of the red oranges and Distribution of fatty acids and phytosterols as a criterion to discriminate geographic origin of pistachio seeds?! No no no, Ellen Maccarone, Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga and author of Impartiality in moral and political philosophy. (Thanks to ISI Web of Science for making this paragraph possible.)

Zaga also screened Broken Limbs: Apples, Agriculture, and the New American Farmer Link goes to an incredible website connected with the film, with information for educators, farmers and anyone else interested. How cool!(Hey Mom, look! It’s distributed through Bullfrog Films!)

Patty Martin, Director of Washington based NGO Safe Food and Fertilizer lectured on…well, you can probably guess, and Mark Graham, author of Sustainable Agriculture: A Christian Ethic of Gratitude spoke on theology, ethics and agriculture.

The University of Pennsylvania also chose food as the subject of university-wide discussion. They picked Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma for the Penn Reading Project.
Here’s a Cool UPenn Library page with scholarly and popular resources on The Omnivore’s Dilemma and its subject matter.

I’d like to know what other schools are talking about food…

So Karl Longstreth and the crew at the University of Michigan’s Map Library take the third Thursday of the month to show off their collection, and December 2007’s exhibit was all food maps! There were dozens of maps, from local to international and from awesome to ridiculous.

I hesitate to say which I liked best; there was a stunning series of Italian regional maps. Have a look at the color in this map of Sicily! Also, check out the citrus inland and seafood around the coast. My favorite is what I’ll call trident toting cardinal mermaid (no, merman, merman!) off the southern coast. I feel like that fellow is probably some mythical symbol of whom I know nothing, but regardless, I like the cut of his jib.

Here, have a closer look at Cardinal Merman

There were wine maps and cheese maps and agriculture maps and demersal maps (kinda like this crazy demersal fish map from NASA!?!) The maps of these sea floor-hugging fish caught my eye since I’ve been reading Mark Kurlansky’s Cod.

I even made the current header for this blog from an image from this exhibit, a map of Agricultural Regions of the United States.  And a real standout among all the maps from A Cartographic Feast was the Google Maps printout Karl made that shows a major drawback of living in this part of the country, the hundreds and hundreds of miles between us and the nearest In-N-Out Burger.

The Rosenbach was awesome. I’ve been meaning to get there for a while now, because they have Joyce’s Ulysses manuscript. But I bailed on the Bloomsday shindig last time I was in Philadelphia on June 16. So before going to three of my favorite Center City Philadelphia bars, I hiked out to 20th & Delancey and took a tour. They’ve got a small Maurice Sendak exhibit up, with a much larger one going up in May. (They’re being loaned nearly 10,000 pieces of of Sendak stuff from the man himself, who has a strong relationship with the institution.)

The current exhibit is Really Rosie, and it’s great. It features the largest piece ever done by Sendak, (a wall sized drawing done for a 1980 New York Times Magazine cover), beautiful watercolor and ink pieces (rrrreally wish i had been allowed to photograph the cases), and an original score by Carole King. Really Rosie, the animated musical, is projected in the gallery. I had forgotten about Chicken Soup with Rice, but here in the Rosenbach was this amazing exhibit with paintings and songs and stories about soup!

Anyway, the Rosenbach has an incredible collection, and I love that they still function a library, and make their materials accessible to researchers. I wish I had images to show of Sir John Tenniel’s (he illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) sketch that features oysters…I also wish I had some oysters right now <sigh>.

Bought a book of recipes selected from the Rosenbach Museum and Library 1982 exhibit “Cook’s Choice: Rare and Important Cookbooks from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century”. My favorite recipe? Pesca in Gelatina, from De Honesta Voluptate et Valetudine, printed in 1475. Don’t think I’ll be using the next striped bass I catch to try it. Mostly what I like about aspic is that it makes me think of that line from Psycho, the tough detective to Norman Bates… something like, “if it doesn’t gel, it isn’t aspic. and this ain’t gellin”

Left the Rosenbach, went to three center city bars I really like; Monk’s, the Nodding Head and Ludwigs. Here’s a map of the places I went that day.