Too Awesome to Eat: Food As Art

A good meal can be considered to be a work of art unto itself. Food is a vital necessity for all consumers to live, but human beings have a way to harness their thinking abilities and skills of agility to heighten culinary experiences. Taste buds have a practical use as being a way to determine if a certain food is spoiled or rotten before we actually ingest or swallow the bad food which would make us sick. However, they can provide a very uplifting experience on their own by being provoked in just the right way according to our own personal tastes. Chefs around the world have worked for centuries to please the mouths of those who paid for their services. Countless cookbooks and online recipes in addition to specialty food magazines are all in place to help regular people to achieve the perfect euphoria that is associated with a food combination or complete meal which makes their taste buds sing in delight and yearn for more even when their stomach is totally stuffed and cannot hold another bite. The interesting aspect comes along when our visual senses get involved. Every good chef will tell you that presentation is truly half of any good food. Recently though the food world has taken presentations a step further to create “food art.” Chefs and artists come together and cross sides to make awesome pieces of edible art that look too amazing to eat. The only issue is that while they look too incredible to eat some of them are not edible as the creation takes inedible objects like glue, pins, or nails. Some of these food artists also make money from the aesthetic beauty of their works by taking photos of their finished masterpieces and selling the photographs as individual works of art to live on after the food has rotted away or at least starts to attract flies.

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The single portion take out or home packed meals common in Japanese cuisine known as bento is one of the favorite ways to play with food before eating it. A traditional bento pack consists of fish or meat with rice and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables held in a box shaped container. Popular culture is reflected in these little masterpieces with edible art featuring characters from movies, video games, celebrities, historical figures, or even past works of art. They are a super fun way to enjoy a quickie lunch or dinner as the bentos can be a matter of pride for some people who try to make the boxed art themselves rather than pay extra for them at a market or shop by a professional bento artist. These bento creations are also something fun to show off to friends or coworkers before chowing down on. Pictures taken of them are a nice way to “have your cake and eat it too” by saving the creative piece of art before having your meal.

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The collaborative team of Joost Elffers and Saxton Freymann are some of the most infamous artistic chefs as they have worked together to write over a dozen books that show you easy ways to create amazingly cute animals and several human like kid favorite characters out of everyday fruits and vegetables. This duo want to make eating healthy foods fun for kid consumers by turning them into toys that children can play with while they get a nutritional boost. Their creations are meant for all ages and can be used for daily snacks and sides for meals or as special munchies for a sleepover or party with a healthier twist than soda and potato chips!

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The Chinese artist Ju Duoqi first started working with vegetables (and eventually tofu also) as an art medium in the summer of 2006 when she hulled several kilograms of peas for two days to create what she called Pea Beauty Pageant—a collection of peas strung on a wire frame to look like a skirt, top, headdress, and scepter. Over the next several years she frequented her local vegetable market to experiment with the different colors and textures that she could use and manipulate (boiling, frying, pickling, drying, or even letting them wilt and rot) to the point where her art no longer required props or models. All she needed was a decent supply of vegetables! She plans extensively before starting so that she can compose the pieces in stages with the quickest rotting vegetables put into place last with toothpicks like the rest of the vegetables which were arranged first. Ju Duoqi then started to focus on the recreation of classic masterpieces to become famous for her artful food, including the works of Vincent Van Gogh, Leonardo DaVinci, and Pablo Picasso. Original photographs of her creations certainly pay the bills though (at least afford this food artist a modest living) as they are currently selling from between $1,500 to $2,000 (US) per individual picture. Ju Duoqi has also started a new branch of food art that focuses on freshly picked crop vegetables (cabbages, onions, and so forth) more so than the fun snacks or nibbles of other artists to create original works of art in addition to her replicas. Many people have started to term them “crop art” for these rustic food masterpieces by Ju Duoqi.

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The husband and wife team of Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle work together to create micro sculptures of food which they preserve in a series of diptych (conjoined two fold) photographs. These pictures create their own micro universe through the use of micro sculptures that seem to be reminiscent of the Candyland board game. Yet, this collection of currently 60 photographs are more along the lines of “dessertland” or quite plainly “foodland” where the collaborative couple compose a variety of scenes. The food pictures show environments of work, leisure, and sports. Some of them even go more in depth with war-related scenes. These special universes make use of all different types of foods to show the versatility of food as an artistic medium.

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Similar in the ways of Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle, Carl Warner creates amazing food landscapes (also simply called “foodscapes”) with a variety of foods that he can scrounge around from his kitchen. Carl Warner actually began as a photographer and slowly branched off into food art as a way to create truly unique photographs with his own amazing creations. Rather than focusing on the foreground like Ida and Javelle though, Warner goes all out to make all out landscapes from vegetables, fruits, and all other kinds of foods. In fact, if you are unaware of the fact that his work is food art to begin with you might not even guess it because of the extensive detail he puts into his scenes. Yet, the intense detail requires extra help. Warner uses a lot of needles, support pins, and glue to create his landscapes, making the eating of his masterpieces once he takes the photographs to save the artwork quite difficult if not completely ill advised.

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Author: Brooke Windsor — Copyrighted © roadtickle.com