Exploring the Intersection of Food and Art

Study materials, translations, notes and author essays

Compilation, preparation and translation of source materials: Andrei Gritskov



The complete text is arranged in 16 chapters, based on the supplied 172-page material. Study essays, translations, analyses and marked gaps have been retained. Illustrations from the original PDF are not reproduced in this text edition; bibliographical and factual clarifications remain part of editorial preparation.

English working translation of the edited Russian text. Quoted passages have been rendered from the supplied Russian and have not been checked against published English editions. This translation preserves source attribution, the two explicitly marked missing endings, and the factual uncertainties of the working Russian edition. It is not an independent verification of the historical, scientific or statistical claims in those materials.



EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF FOOD AND ART
Study materials, translations, notes and author essays
Compilation and preparation of materials: Andrei Gritskov

COMPLETE WORKING TEXTUAL EDITION
Prepared on 25 October 2026 from the supplied 172-page PDF.

This independent compilation explores food in painting, literature, photography, cinema and contemporary art. The compiler’s reflections and study analyses appear alongside translated and quoted sources. The contribution to preparing, compiling and translating the materials was confirmed by the author in the conversation; authorship of the cited works and research remains with their respective authors. The words “I” and “we” within marked translated passages do not describe the compiler’s biography or empirical research.

Working exchanges and obvious repeated versions have been removed, and line breaks caused by the physical page layout have been joined. Each chapter includes the corresponding page range in the original PDF. Illustrations remain in that PDF: this edition contains the text and descriptions of five separate illustration pages, rather than reproducing the print layout. The author’s own passages and literary excerpts have not been rewritten in the Russian editorial version.

Historical information, statistics, titles and quotations requiring verification are listed in a separate editorial checklist. Questionable passages have not been corrected by conjecture. Two missing endings are marked directly in the text. This is the complete working text of the study for further editorial preparation, rather than a final verified publication or a recipe collection.

Chapter 1. Art, Attention and Education

Original source pages: 1–5



‘The purpose of art is to wash the dust of daily life off our souls.’

— Pablo Picasso

Picasso is not talking about art as ‘beautiful things on a wall’. He is talking about its function. About why we need it at all.

Daily life accumulates fatigue. Routine. Noise. Irritation. Small compromises. This is the ‘dust’. It does not kill us, but it slowly dulls our senses. We begin to live on autopilot.

Art works like water.

Music, a painting, a film, the taste of a dish, even a well-told story — suddenly something clicks inside. You feel again. Look more closely. Breathe more deeply.

There is a deeper meaning here.

1. Art is not a luxury.

It is not an ornament to life, but hygiene for the soul. Like washing your hands, only on the inside.

2. It does not have to be ‘understandable’.

Its task is not to explain, but to cleanse. Sometimes through delight. Sometimes through pain. Sometimes through silence.

3. It is about returning you to yourself.

Not becoming ‘better’. Becoming alive again.

Put this into the language of food.

Good food is art too.

It does more than satisfy hunger. It can restore memories, slow down time and remind you that you are a person, not a function between meetings. Bad food feeds the body. Good food washes dust from the soul.

1. Art as an ‘antidote to autopilot’

Much of life passes in functional mode.

Wake up. Get things done. Reply. Decide. Rush on.

The problem is not the workload. The problem is that sensitivity wears away. We stop noticing nuances. And without nuances, life becomes as flat as a reheated ready meal.

Art interrupts this mode.

A painting makes you stop. Music makes you slow down. A flavour makes you listen. A good text makes you think beyond the instructions.

This is what ‘washing away the dust’ means.

A return from ‘using’ to ‘experiencing’.

2. Why Picasso speaks of dust, rather than dirt

Dust is an important word. Dirt suggests something extreme.

Dust appears by itself. Quietly. Imperceptibly. Even in a clean house.

The same happens to the soul.

Nobody plans to become cynical, tired or indifferent. It is a side effect of ordinary life without pauses.

Art does not heal trauma.

It keeps us from becoming hardened.

Gastronomy is not alongside this. It is part of it

To be honest, gastronomy is one of the most powerful arts, because:

• it works with the body, memory and emotions at the same time;

• it cannot be ‘consumed in the background’ — bad food can, good food cannot;

• it requires presence in the here and now.

A real dish says: ‘Stop. Feel. Do not hurry.’

This is not about ingredients.

It is about attuned attention.

Like music played live and the same tune coming from a loudspeaker in a shopping centre. Formally, they are the same. In essence, they are different worlds.

Education as art — and this is where it gets most interesting

Good education does the same thing as art:

• restores a taste for thinking;

• teaches us to see connections, rather than instructions;

• clears away the templates of ‘that is how it is done’.

Bad education is dust squared.

It adds layer after layer: terminology, tests, regulations. A soul in a spacesuit.

A real teacher is not a transmitter of knowledge.

A real teacher is someone who washes the dust from thinking.

And the main, less obvious conclusion

Art does not make life more comfortable.

It makes life more sensitive.

And sensitivity is a dangerous thing.

Yet without it, everything else loses its flavour.

Like food without salt.

Like a conversation without pauses.

Like a life without ‘why’.

Andrei Gritskov’s educational philosophy

‘Education as clearing the mind’

The purpose of education is to wash the dust of habits, templates and false certainty from a person’s thinking.

Not to fill.

Not to train through drills.

Not to certify. To clear.

What I clear from thinking

Not ignorance. This matters.

I work with people who often have too much knowledge. But that knowledge:

• has become outdated,

• is disconnected,

• has turned into dogma,

• prevents them from seeing reality.

My audience includes:

• chefs who have ‘always done it that way’;

• managers who use the right words without substance;

• teachers who are tired of their own teaching manuals.

I do not add information for them.

I remove the coating.

Just as a good chef first cleans an ingredient and only then cooks it.

The key principle: slow down, rather than speed up

Most educational systems do one thing:

speed up the consumption of knowledge.

I do the opposite.

I create a pause.

A moment when a person suddenly realises: ‘Wait. Why do I think this in the first place?’

That is rare. And that is precisely why it is valuable.

My educational approach is not a stream.

It is a stop.

Like a tasting, rather than a buffet.

The teacher’s role in this model

In this model, the teacher is not:

• an expert looking down from above,

• a motivator,

• ‘the holder of the right answer’.

The teacher is a catalyst for attention.

Someone who:

• asks uncomfortable questions;

• breaks down false clarity;

• is not afraid of silence in the classroom.

This is closer to being a sommelier of thought than a lecturer.

Mistakes as an essential tool

In my philosophy, a mistake is not a system failure.

A mistake is a moment of clearing.

When someone makes a mistake consciously, examines it and feels no shame:

• illusions fall away,

• real understanding emerges,

• respect for the process returns.

I teach people not to ‘do it right’, but to see why something is wrong.

As in gastronomy: you ruined a sauce — excellent. Now you understand where the boundary lies.

Why art and food matter in my work

Because they:

• bring the body back into thinking;

• do not tolerate falseness;

• reveal the result immediately.

I teach people not to ‘know’, but to feel the difference.

The difference between:

• a genuine taste and an imitation;

• a thought and a quotation;

• experience and an account of experience.

This is education for adults, not for reporting purposes.

The ethics of my educational position

Here is the central point.

I do not promise comfort.

I promise:

• clarity,

• honesty,

• a renewed taste for one’s profession and for life.

A short manifesto

I work in education not to provide answers. I create conditions in which false answers disappear.

Education is not the accumulation of knowledge.

It is clearing the dust of habit from thinking.

My task is to restore a person’s sensitivity, because without it neither professional work nor life has any flavour.

Education as clearing the mind

We live in an age of excessive knowledge.

There are many courses. Even more experts.

And ever less clarity. I increasingly meet intelligent, experienced adults who know too much and yet see poorly. Not because they are stupid. Because, over time, thinking becomes covered in dust. Dust is dangerous.

It does not frighten us.

It accumulates quietly.

Habits. Templates. Professional overconfidence. Words that we repeat automatically and stopped testing against reality long ago. This is how automatic behaviour develops.

It is convenient.

It saves effort.

And it slowly kills sensitivity.

We begin to confuse experience with repetition.

Decisions with reactions.

Knowledge with understanding.

And at some point I always ask the same question: why does an adult need education at all?

Not to learn yet more.

And not for diplomas.

There is already enough of that today.

Real education does something else.

It washes the dust from thinking. Like art. Like good food. Like an honest conversation that leaves you uncomfortable — and clear. It does not accelerate. It slows things down.

It creates a pause in which a person suddenly hears themselves.

Why do I think this way?

Is this my decision or a familiar script?

Am I seeing reality or recognising a familiar shape?

I do not work with a lack of knowledge.

I work with its excess.

My task is not to give the right answers.

My task is to remove what is unnecessary. To create a space where people can doubt without weakness, make mistakes without shame and honestly acknowledge that their old certainty no longer works. I do not promise comfort. I promise clarity.

And clarity is rarely gentle.

In gastronomy, this is understood without theory.

Bad food simply feeds us.

Good food restores taste. To the body. To memory. To life.

Education is the same.

You can fill a person with knowledge.

Or you can restore their sensitivity — to their profession, to their decisions, to themselves. Knowledge ages quickly. Methods age even faster.

The ability to see nuances hardly ages at all.

That is why I do not teach people to know. I teach them to see.

And if, after learning, a person leaves with more precise questions rather than ready-made answers, the work has been done.

The dust has been washed away. Responsibility begins from there.





Chapter 2. Can Food Be Art?

Original source pages: 6–10



Exploring the Intersection of Food and Art

The course concept and analytical approach

The course is presented as a joint project by a food practitioner and an art historian. They share one goal: to understand the significance of food in the art of different historical periods and artistic forms. The teaching approach is clearly identified as comparative and evidence-based. Participants will examine outstanding examples of artworks featuring food and compare these visual images with the historical reality of culinary practices in the relevant time and place: how people cooked, served and ate. This method helps reveal where an artist reflects everyday experience and where they deliberately depart from it to achieve a particular emotional or artistic effect. Continually comparing images with documented gastronomic traditions maintains a factual foundation while remaining attentive to artistic intention. Together, these elements provide a coherent framework for understanding the presence and significance of food in art, setting a high standard of interpretative depth and methodological precision.

The artistic status of food: a philosophical debate

This monologue explores a difficult question: can food be considered a form of art? It begins with a general definition of art. It then considers a historical philosophical argument against culinary art, arising from the fact that food is consumed. Finally, it offers a contemporary counterargument in which food is understood as a reproducible and expressive experience comparable to other art forms.

Defining art and its boundaries

The discussion begins by attempting to outline a basic understanding of art. Its starting point is an abstract definition by the German artist Gerhard Richter: ‘Art is the highest form of hope.’ More concretely, art is described as an expression of human creativity and imagination that has existed throughout human history, producing works intended to offer beauty and emotional impact.

This broad definition encompasses objects, ideas and activities. Painting, music, literature, dance. All are considered something special, carrying a message that an audience can interpret and experience.

An important distinction is also drawn here between an artist and an artisan. Although the word ‘artisan’ derives from ‘art’, their products differ in function. The result of an artisan’s work is primarily utilitarian. An artist’s work generally is not. This distinction leads to the central, and sometimes confusing, question of the monologue: can the preparation and consumption of food be considered art?

The argument against food as art: the problem of consumption

The main historical argument against recognising food as art concerns the so-called ‘problem of consumption’. This philosophical proposition, developed by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Hegel, maintains that food cannot be genuine art because it is fleeting. From this perspective, true works of art, such as painting, sculpture or architecture, are timeless. They do not change, perish or get consumed. Food, by its nature, is created to be eaten and digested. At the moment of consumption, it disappears.

As a result, its quality is said to be assessed in a biased and subjective way. Food also has an obvious utilitarian function: nourishment. This contradicts the traditional idea that art should serve no practical purpose beyond the aesthetic.

The counterargument: culinary works as contemporary performative art

The classical demand for permanence in art is challenged from a contemporary perspective. The monologue notes that contemporary art frequently uses perishable objects. A banana taped to a wall is given as an example. This case clearly demonstrates that an artwork can be destroyed or even eaten while being exhibited.

Such an approach undermines the idea that impermanence automatically excludes food from the realm of art. An intriguing parallel is then drawn between culinary dishes and musical works. Like a symphony, a dish has a formal structure recorded in a recipe.

A recipe allows the dish to be recreated repeatedly while preserving its meaning. In much the same way, musical notation makes it possible to perform a composition again. From this perspective, a culinary creation, like any other artwork, is more than the sum of its ingredients.

The concluding position: aesthetic intention and experience

The closing discussion addresses one of the most difficult questions: must art be exclusively aesthetic, or can it also be useful? This debate remains open in the art world.

The author ultimately concludes that the decisive factor is the way a person engages with food. Sometimes we eat simply to satisfy hunger. Often, however, we seek an experience that nourishes more than the stomach.

If we approach preparing or eating food from an aesthetic perspective, looking for creativity, expression and beauty in the result, food can acquire artistic meaning. It is precisely this expectation of a deeper experience that opens up the possibility of treating food as a fully fledged medium of artistic expression.

The author and researcher in anthropology and art Ellen Dissanayake, in her book What Is Art For?, defines art through the following:

• the product of conscious intention

• an intrinsically rewarding activity

• a tendency to bring unlike things together

• an interest in change and variety

• aesthetic play with the familiar and the unexpected

• aesthetic play with tension and release

• bringing order to chaos

• creating illusions

• delighting in sensuality

• demonstrating skill

• a desire to communicate meanings

• immersion in fantasy

• glorifying oneself or others

• illustrating

• intensifying the sense of being fully alive

• revelation

• personal adornment or embellishment

• therapy

• giving life meaning

• creating an experience without self-consciousness — without ‘self-observation’

• offering models of order and/or disorder

• training the perception of reality

[Illustration in the source PDF: the cover of Ellen Dissanayake’s What Is Art For? This text edition does not reproduce the cover image.]

[TRANSLATED / QUOTED SOURCE. The author of this passage is not identified in the manuscript. The first-person account, the visit to the Frick Collection and the watercolour project belong to the source narrator; they must not be treated as biographical information about the compiler.]

There is a strange and rather foolish confusion that nobody can quite resolve. People confuse art and design, art and non-art. It bewilders them. Almost everyone wants to be an artist, because in any culture it is hard to imagine a higher status. Art is not an ornament to life, but one of the mechanisms through which a culture survives. That is why, in primitive societies, people capable of making art were held in special esteem. The same occurs in complex, developed cultures, only in a more veiled form. To put it plainly, art has only one function. It is the most powerful instrument of survival. It is so persistently present in every culture precisely because it helps cultures survive. And the reason, I think, is this: at its highest level, art makes us attentive. Looking at an artwork, we seem to return to reality anew. We begin to see the difference between how things appeared to us and how they actually are. This is why art is a mechanism for the survival of the species. And this is why it is rooted so deeply in human consciousness. There is another important confusion. We very often mistake beauty for art. But beauty is only a means. We all have a genetic need to experience beauty, an ability to respond to it. Yet beauty is not the ultimate justification for art. It is merely a tool that leads us towards attentiveness.

All this is difficult, of course. I have been thinking about it for most of my life, and only now do I feel able to draw a clear line between what is art and what is not. My definition is extremely simple. If something makes you attentive, it is art. If it does not, it is something else. It is interesting to compare the so-called art world with the real world. The art world is primarily concerned with money and status. This has to do with the human need to elevate oneself while investing in things that promise a good financial return. Of course, this is not the criterion by which people who are truly interested in art assess it.

The term ‘fine art’ has always amused me. For a long time, I did not understand what ‘fine’ meant, until I looked in a dictionary and discovered that it was a metallurgical term. It means heating metal to a temperature at which the impurities burn away. From this perspective, much falls into place. A simple question arises: what are the impurities in art? I am convinced that the impurities are everything that does not serve its principal function, everything that does not lead towards attentiveness. Above all, they are status and money. One need only look at what is most often discussed in the art world. Almost invariably, it is price.

The main news in the art world is how much a Bonnard sold for. Forty million dollars. A record. Delight. But what does that have to do with art? Nothing. This is one of those very impurities. Yet today it is becoming the central subject of art in our culture.

I have had many powerful encounters with art in my life, but one in particular has stayed with me. A friend took me to the Frick Collection. I was eighteen. He showed me the first painting by Piero della Francesca I had ever seen. I literally fainted. That was the beginning of a lifelong journey. I travelled around the world looking for Piero’s works, trying to understand him. Eventually, I managed to see almost all his paintings. Fortunately, he did not paint very many. Later, I made a series of watercolours and drawings inspired by his work. The project was supported by the Italian government, and a few years ago it was exhibited in Piero’s home town, Sansepolcro.

[END OF SOURCE PASSAGE.]





Chapter 3. Taste, Presence and the Language of Bread

Original source pages: 11–17



Original:

“The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure no slight pleasure.” Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Translation of the quotation as presented in the manuscript:

‘The art of eating well is no small art, and the pleasure is no small pleasure.’

Andrei Gritskov’s free adaptation:

‘The art of eating well —

is no minor art.

And the pleasure here is no trifle.’

“Cooking is an art, but you can eat it too.” Marcella Hazan

Translation of the quotation as presented in the manuscript:

‘Cooking is art.

But you can eat it.’

Free adaptation:

‘Cooking is art.

It simply disappears into taste.’

Taste as a state of attention
Andrei Gritskov

I increasingly think of taste not as a result, but as a state. Tasty or not tasty is too simple a question. It belongs to the ‘liked it / did not like it’ category. Convenient, but superficial. The real question is different: were you attentive at that moment?

Montaigne wrote that the art of eating well is no small art. He said this long before gastronomic rankings, celebrity chefs and beautiful presentation. He was not talking about food. He was talking about the quality of presence.

Marcella Hazan put it even more precisely: cooking is art that you can eat. That ‘can’ contains an important thought. Genuine gastronomic art disappears. It does not seek to remain. It works in the moment. Food art does not begin with the plate.

And certainly not with the price.

It begins with a pause.

With silence before the first bite.

With a sense of the difference between what you expected and what is actually happening. When food makes you more attentive, it stops being merely food. It brings you back to reality. To the body. To the feeling of ‘here and now’. And it is at this very moment that art begins.

Everything else — presentation, technique, complexity, rare ingredients — may matter. But it is secondary. Like the frame around a painting. A good frame does not prevent you from seeing what matters. A bad one distracts you.

For me, the criterion is simple.

If taste restores attention, it is food art.

If it does not, it is simply food. Even if it is very beautiful.

The symbolism of food and wine in painting

In art, symbolism is not the only key to understanding, but it is usually where the discussion begins. A painting is read slowly: object by object, sign by sign, until the image begins to speak.

To understand painting, you need to know its language. What the depicted things mean, where their meanings originated and how the artist used them to construct a narrative. For a painter, food and objects are what metaphors are for a writer. They do not explain directly; they suggest, deepen and enrich the story.

Fruit

Fresh fruit in painting signifies life, youth, energy and fertility. The apple is one of the most heavily charged symbols. In the Christian tradition, it is associated with knowledge, temptation, the Fall and seduction. It is no coincidence that the Latin malum means both ‘apple’ and ‘evil’. In this way, the fruit became an image of forbidden knowledge and human vulnerability.

In other cultures, the meaning changes. In China, the apple is a sign of peace, while in a number of traditions it symbolises joy and wisdom.

The fig evokes the Garden of Eden and the first experience of shame, but in antiquity it is associated with Dionysus — wine, ecstasy and loss of control — and with Priapus, a symbol of unrestrained desire.

Grapes carry a double meaning. They represent both the blood of Christ and Bacchic intoxication, festivity tipping into excess.

The pomegranate is the fruit of Venus, a sign of desire and fertility. The quince also belongs to this circle of symbols, embodying the feminine principle and abundance.

Spoiled, rotting fruit, by contrast, reminds us of the inevitability of the end. Of the fact that everything living is subject to time.

In Carlo Crivelli’s painting, the Madonna and Child hold an apple. Beside them are a cucumber as a sign of the Resurrection, and a carnation and cherries as foreshadowings of the Passion of Christ. There are no accidental details here. Each fruit is a word. Each detail is a meaning.

‘What man cannot do, bread can.’

Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, 1942

Bread is the quintessence of human food.

Its history underlies a significant part of human history: it is perhaps the simplest, yet most fundamental, element of everyday life and nourishment. Bread connects people with culture, tradition and religion.

For centuries, bread was a powerful political and economic ‘weapon’. From Ancient Rome onwards, those in power closely monitored its availability. Roman bakers, for example, were strictly regulated and controlled by the state. The Roman state went as far as nationalising the baking industry.

In France, more than fifteen hundred years later, recurrent famines became one of the factors leading to the French Revolution.

In the Old Testament, wheat and bread symbolise abundance and fertility. In the New Testament, bread becomes a symbol of God’s supreme gift to humanity: eternal life, the body of Christ in the Eucharist:

‘Take and eat, for this is my body.’

This realist panel painting demonstrates Dalí’s mastery of traditional painting before his turn towards Surrealism. Bread is a foundation of Catalan life. By suffusing objects with mysterious light, the artist turns the composition into an object of deep contemplation. Think of Vermeer and his still lifes: the same virtuosity of realism can be seen here. A simple composition of bread in a straw basket on a cloth stands out dramatically against a dark background. Dalí followed the Spanish still-life tradition in which a domestic scene becomes an occasion for spiritual reflection.

The Basket of Bread, Salvador Dalí, 1926, oil on wood panel.

Dalí painted another Basket of Bread in 1945. This is how he explained the difference:

‘Bread has always been one of the oldest themes of fetishism and obsession in my work — the first, and the one to which I have remained most faithful. I painted this same subject 19 years ago. If you compare the two paintings very closely, you can study the entire history of painting right here: from the linear charm of primitivism to stereoscopic hyper-aestheticism.’

The Basket of Bread, Salvador Dalí, 1945, oil on panel, 13 × 17 cm (3 × 4 inches).

Meaning:

1) Bread is not food. Bread is a ‘nexus of civilisation’

The text presents bread as a connection between ‘culture–power–religion–survival’. It is literally about the life of society: where there is bread, there is order. Where there is no bread, storms begin — Rome, France.

2) In religion, bread = life, gift, sacrifice

The Old Testament: abundance and fertility.

The New Testament: no longer simply nourishment, but a symbol of the supreme gift and Eucharistic meaning — the body of Christ. Bread thus becomes a sign not of the stomach, but of metaphysics.

3) For Dalí, bread is a personal ‘obsession’ and an instrument for discussing art

Dalí makes the simplest object into an object of contemplation.

More subtly still, when comparing the two paintings — 1926 and 1945 — he speaks less about bread than about the evolution of the language of painting: from simplicity of form towards ‘hyper-aesthetics’, an almost optical effect of presence.

4) The principal conclusion for contemporary gastronomy and food art

To be honest, this is a direct warning:

symbols on a plate work only through attentiveness.

Bread can be served as a ‘side dish’, and it will remain silent.

Or it can be served as a sign of home, memory, survival, faith and labour, and it will begin to speak.

‘Bread as language’

Andrei Gritskov. Bread is one of the few foods that it is almost impossible to serve ‘just like that’. It says something anyway. Even when it is silent.

In this sense, bread is a language. An ancient, uncompromising and very honest language. It connects people with home, work and tradition. With things repeated from generation to generation. But bread is also about power. The history of bread is a history of control. Whoever holds the bread holds the peace. It is no coincidence that states regulated bakers in antiquity, or that bread shortages triggered revolutions. People rarely rebel over philosophy. Over bread, however, they do so regularly.

There is a third layer too: religion. Here bread ceases to be ‘food’ and becomes a symbol of life, gift and meaning. At a certain point, it begins to speak about what matters most, without unnecessary words.

Dalí particularly captivates me in this respect. He once wrote:

‘What man cannot do, bread can.’

This is not about cooking. It is about bread’s ability to do something we have forgotten how to do: connect the simple with the eternal.

For food art, this is a good test of honesty.

Bread is an ideal indicator.

If you serve bread as a backdrop, a backdrop is what it will be.

If you understand exactly what you are saying through it — home, memory, work, scarcity, abundance, faith, care — it becomes a statement.

Bread does not like posturing. It cannot be ‘sold’ through presentation.

It works only through meaning and attention. Perhaps that is its strength.





Chapter 4. Still Life: From Ancient Images to Modernism

Original source pages: 18–30



[Illustration page in the source PDF: images of the Tomb of Menna, a Pompeian still life and a medieval harvest, with English explanations. The Russian account follows in the source.]

Still life has accounted for a large proportion of depictions of food in art over many centuries, from Roman frescoes to contemporary art. A still life, also known by the French term nature morte, is a work depicting an arrangement of inanimate objects, such as fruit, flowers or household items.

The earliest known still lifes were created by the Egyptians in the fifteenth century BC. Funerary paintings depicting food, including grains, fish and meat, have been found in ancient tombs. The most famous ancient Egyptian still life was discovered in the Tomb of Menna, whose walls are decorated with exceptionally detailed scenes of everyday life.

Still life from the Tomb of Menna.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans also created similar images of inanimate objects. Although they most often reserved still life for mosaics, they also used it in frescoes, such as Still Life with a Glass Bowl of Fruit and Vases, a first-century wall painting from Pompeii.

Still Life with a Glass Bowl of Fruit and Vases (AD 63–79). In the Middle Ages, artists adapted still life to religious purposes in order to convey moral messages. They also depicted food in scenes of everyday agricultural work, harvests and feasts.

Harvest scene, attributed to the illuminator Andrea da Bologna, before 1340. Tempera, gold and ink on parchment, 14.4 × 7.6 cm (5 11/16 × 3 inches).

1. Still life is not ‘about beautiful food’. It is about what food means to society. For the Egyptians, this was literally life after life: food as ‘provision’ for eternity.

For the Greeks and Romans, it was order, domestic life, prosperity and material culture. In the Middle Ages, it was morality, religious meaning, labour and the ‘proper’ way of life.

2. Food in art is a document of civilisation.

Such images allow us to read an era: what people feared, believed in and valued, and how they lived.

3. A direct bridge to contemporary gastronomy and food art.

Today, a plate is also an ‘arrangement of objects’. There is one question: is it simply form, or is it a statement?

Still life reminds us that once an ingredient enters the frame — or the plate — it already carries meaning. Even if you ‘just put it there’.

Still life as the ancestor of food art

It is sometimes useful to remember that food art was not invented yesterday. It is not a hundred years old. Nor even five hundred. Its direct ancestor is still life.

Still life was never simply ‘beautifully arranged food’. Fruit, game, bread and vessels did not appear in the image merely to beautify an interior. They were traces of life. Signs of human presence.

In Egypt, images of food guaranteed the continuation of life after death. In Rome, they signified order and domestic culture. In the Middle Ages, they carried a moral message that viewers could read without a caption.

In Renaissance painting, food became a language of symbols.

Contemporary gastronomy does exactly the same. A plate replaces the canvas. Taste, texture and temperature replace paint. A person eating here and now replaces the museum viewer.

A plate is the same kind of still life. Only for a minute.

Yet we often confuse food art with striking presentation. Presentation without attention to meaning is an empty form. Like a still life from which the soul has been removed. Beautiful, but mute.

Still life teaches gastronomy a rigorous discipline: there are no accidental objects in the frame.

Nor should there be any in a meaningful dish. If you add an ingredient ‘because it looks beautiful’, that is decoration. If you add it ‘because it is a phrase’, that is language.

Once an ingredient is on the plate, it is already speaking. The only question is whether the person eating hears it.

Food art lives in the pause. In the second between expectation and reality. In the moment when a person stops merely consuming calories and begins to be present.

When attention appears, food stops being merely food. It becomes a statement.

A quiet one. But a precise one.

[Illustration page in the source PDF: European still lifes and English explanations; the Russian account follows in the source.]

Still life became established as a genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its name derives from the Dutch word stilleven, literally ‘quiet life’.

Early examples contained religious symbols. The idea was to show a ‘slice of life’. Yet this ‘slice’ was often embellished with exotic objects — parrots on the table, for example, alongside different foods, luxurious fabrics or glassware.

The still-life genre flourished in the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.

In particular, Dutch and Flemish masters of the seventeenth century, during the Dutch Golden Age, painted lavish scenes displaying many different foods together. In these paintings, the meaning of each individual food is less important. The effect is achieved through the composition as a whole. The idea is to express abundance and a privileged way of life through elaborate ‘displays’ of food: game, poultry, lobsters, shellfish, exotic citrus fruit or precious grapes. Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Still Life with Ham, Lobster and Fruit, around 1653.

Vermeer and the hidden message of still life — vanitas

In his famous painting The Milkmaid, the artist used expensive pigments, rich colours and exceptional lighting to depict the most ordinary foods: milk and bread.

The hidden message of still lifes from this period is the transience of life, the futility of pleasures and the inevitability of death.

A particular type of still life exists at this time: vanitas.

The word vanitas is explained here as ‘emptiness’, suggesting futility and vacancy. This represents a Christian view of earthly goods and aspirations. In some paintings, it is expressed directly through objects such as skulls, rotting fruit and clocks. The Milkmaid, Johannes Vermeer, around 1660, oil on canvas, 45.5 × 41 cm.

Southern Europe: Spain and Italy — bodegones and Caravaggio

In Southern Europe, in Spain and Italy, fewer artists concentrated on this genre.

Spanish still lifes are called bodegones. They are austere: dead animals still awaiting butchery, raw fruit and vegetables, and sombre backgrounds. In Italy, one of the leading figures in the genre was Caravaggio, with his naturalistic style. His Basket of Fruit, showing imperfect fruit placed at eye level, is an excellent example.

Basket of Fruit, Caravaggio, around 1599, oil on canvas, 46 × 64.5 cm.

Still life is not ‘about food’, but about a model of the world

Food becomes a way of showing:

• abundance and status — Dutch luxury;

• austerity and truthful texture — Spanish restraint;

• transience and limits — vanitas: pleasure does not cancel time.

In Northern Europe, a ‘theatre of abundance’; in the South, an ‘austere document’

• The Netherlands: an effect created by the whole composition, a ‘display of the world’, wealth and expansiveness.

• Spain/Italy: fewer words, more truth. Darkness, raw ingredients, the wait for butchery. Reality rather than celebration.

Vanitas is a moral ‘whisper’ within beauty

Its meaning is this: yes, it is beautiful. Yes, it tastes good. But time still passes. Skulls, clocks and rotting fruit are therefore not horror, but reminders of the price of pleasure.

How this applies directly to contemporary gastronomy and food art

Translated into the language of the kitchen, it gives us three schools:

1. Dutch: ‘composition matters more than the ingredient’. This concerns large set-piece presentations, generous arrangements and ‘abundance as a gesture’.

2. Spanish/Caravaggesque: ‘the truth of the ingredient matters more than decoration’. This concerns honest simplicity, raw materials, quietness and texture. And the courage to show imperfection.

3. Vanitas: ‘pleasure + the meaning of time’. This is the level at which a dish says not ‘delicious’, but ‘remember’. For example: seasonality as finitude, fermentation as time, leftovers as traces.

‘Vanitas and gastronomy: why a beautiful dish should remember time’

In the seventeenth century, still lifes had a quiet underlying tension.

They could look luxurious: fruit, wine, lobsters, glass, fabric. Yet a whisper often lived within this beauty: everything passes.

This type of still life was called vanitas.

Its meaning is straightforward: futility, emptiness, transience. That is why artists placed a clock, a skull or a partly rotten fruit beside the abundance. Not to frighten the viewer. To bring them back to reality.

I think contemporary gastronomy sometimes needs the same reminder. We have learnt to make things beautiful.

Sometimes even too beautiful.

But beauty without a memory of time quickly becomes decoration.

And cooking is literally an art of time.

Fermentation. Ageing. Infusion. Proving. Slow cooking.

Even ordinary bread is about patience. About waiting. About a process that cannot be accelerated without losing its meaning.

Vanitas in gastronomy is not about gloom.

It is about honesty.

About the fact that pleasure does not cancel finitude.

About the fact that seasonality is a law of nature, not marketing.

About the fact that ingredients age. Taste changes. The moment passes.

And if a dish can say this — quietly, without slogans — it becomes deeper. Sometimes a single detail is enough.

A slight ‘imperfection’. A trace of time.

A suggestion that the beauty here is living rather than eternal.

Food art begins where the plate stops being a display and becomes a thought. And a thought almost always begins with a question: what does time do to this taste — and to me?

Still life: the eighteenth century

By the eighteenth century, the religious and allegorical connotations of still-life painting had, in many cases, been discarded.

‘Kitchen’ pictures of tables evolved into carefully considered depictions of varied colours and forms, showing everyday food. The French aristocracy commissioned artists to create paintings of abundance and extravagance. Rococo intensified the interest in trompe-l’œil. Trompe-l’œil, French for ‘deceive the eye’, is a specialised form of still life in which viewers are led to believe that the image is real. The French artist Jean-Antoine Watteau revitalised the waning Baroque style, shifting it towards something less severe, more naturalistic and less formally classical: Rococo. Watteau is credited with inventing the genre of fêtes galantes, idyllic scenes with a theatrical quality. He influenced Rococo painters such as the Austrian artist Franz Christoph Janneck.

Here Janneck depicts the still life on the table in great detail. These details emphasise the brevity of life and the importance of pleasure, unlike the Dutch masters, who suggested the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures. At the end of the eighteenth century and after the fall of the French monarchy, European academies, particularly the Académie Française, played a central role in academic art. According to the academy, there was a hierarchy of genres, and still life stood at the very bottom. Historical, biblical or mythological subjects were considered more artistically significant. Still life began to fall out of fashion. Painting caption: Elegant Company Feasting on a Terrace, Franz Christoph Janneck, oil on copper, unframed, 16.26 × 20.51 inches (41.3 × 52.1 cm).

By the 1830s

By the 1830s, genre and portrait painting had become the focus of the Realist and Romantic artistic revolutions. The idea was to convey a strong emotional mood without being concerned with precision. Richness was expressed through fluid brushwork and shimmering light. During this period, we see the work of Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne and Van Gogh. They reinterpreted nature through their own colour harmonies.

Painting caption:

Luncheon of the Boating Party, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1880–1881, oil on canvas, 69.13 × 51.25 inches.

By the eighteenth century, still life gradually takes off its ‘ecclesiastical robes’ and moves into the kitchen. Not in the sense of becoming simpler. Rather, it matures and becomes domestic, yet calculated: colour, form, texture, light. Just as on a good plate, where simple food suddenly begins to resonate because it has been intelligently composed.

Rococo takes the next step. The French aristocracy commissions images of abundance, because abundance too needs to be displayed skilfully. A love of trompe-l’œil, ‘deceiving the eye’, emerges. You look and almost believe you can reach out and take something. To be honest, this is deeply gastronomic: how often has contemporary cooking played the game of ‘this is not what it seems’? Today, it is called an ‘illusion’, a ‘presentation trick’, or ‘and now for a surprise’. Watteau and his circle translate Baroque into a lighter language: less stern solemnity, more air, more pleasure. What matters here is that pleasure stops being a sin and becomes culture. Almost as in a good restaurant, where enjoyment is cultivated rather than noisy.

Then the academy arrives and says: ‘We have a ranking of genres.’ Still life is placed at the bottom. Historical and mythological subjects are at the top, while food and tables are supposedly too mundane. It is amusing that gastronomy has followed the same path in different eras: first ‘cooking for servants’, then ‘haute cuisine’, then a return to simplicity, this time as a conscious choice.

By the 1830s, the focus changes once again. Mood becomes more important to artists than precision. Brushwork comes alive, light begins to shimmer, and the world is no longer ‘copied’ but ‘experienced’. This is a direct relative of contemporary experiential gastronomy, where value lies not in the perfect geometry of the dish but in the feeling of the moment. Taste as emotion. Light as atmosphere. The table as a stage. Reduced to a single gastronomic formula, it looks like this: the eighteenth century teaches composition; Rococo teaches illusion and pleasure; the academy teaches hierarchy — and snobbery; and the nineteenth century teaches mood. All of this, in a useful sense, still underlies the way we ‘build’ taste on a plate.

Still life: the twentieth century

The first four decades of the twentieth century formed an exceptional period of artistic revolution. Avant-garde movements developed rapidly and overlapped as they moved towards complete abstraction. Still life, like the other visual arts, continued to develop and adapt until the middle of the century, when complete abstraction, as exemplified by Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, eliminated all recognisable subject matter.

Still Life with Aubergines, Henri Matisse. Matisse further reduced the depiction of still-life objects until they became little more than bold, flat outlines filled with bright colours. He also simplified perspective and introduced multicoloured backgrounds. In some of his still lifes, such as Still Life with Aubergines, the table and its objects almost disappear among the other coloured patterns filling the room.

Paul Cézanne explored geometrical spatial organisation and the elements of colour, shape and line. This was a major step towards abstract art.

Cézanne’s experiments can also be seen as leading directly to the development of Cubist still life in the early twentieth century.

Still Life with Fruit Dish, Paul Cézanne, 1879, oil on canvas, 46.4 × 54.6 cm (18 1/4 × 21 1/2 inches).

The Cubists / Picasso

Adapting Cézanne’s shifts of planes and axes, the Cubists instead concentrated on breaking objects down into pure geometrical shapes and planes. Between 1910 and 1920, Cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso painted many still lifes, often including musical instruments, bringing still life to the forefront of artistic innovation almost for the first time. This painting refers to Cézanne’s large still life Apples and Oranges by borrowing favourite motifs — a patterned curtain, a laden fruit bowl, crumpled white linen, fruit and a rustic table — imitating formal devices — the horizontal arrangement of objects across the tabletop, inconsistencies of viewpoint, tilted perspective and variations in paint handling from dense impasto to barely covered canvas — and echoing Paul Cézanne’s innate sense of ceremony.

Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, Pablo Picasso, 1909.

‘When food became form’

At a certain point, artists stopped ‘painting food’ and began thinking through it. The twentieth century did to still life what contemporary gastronomy did to the plate: removed unnecessary words and left the structure.

Matisse is about taste as colour.

He simplifies objects into flat silhouettes and makes the background louder than the food itself. As in a dish where the ingredient is not ‘described’, but illuminated through colour, contrast and rhythm. Sometimes food even ‘disappears’ into the pattern, like an ingredient that does not shout on its own but sustains the whole chord.

Cézanne is about taste as geometry.

His apples are not apples ‘for beauty’. They are weight, volume, balance, an axis. He is like a chef who constructs a plate through discipline: where the centre is, where the pause is, where the tension lies. Construction rather than decoration.

The Cubists — Picasso and company — go further: they take the ingredient apart into planes and reassemble it.

This already resembles the contemporary approach of ‘deconstruction’: bread becomes a line, fruit a patch of colour, fabric a rhythm. But the point is not the trick.

The point is that we begin to see the ingredient as a language of form.

Here is my gastronomic conclusion: food art does not begin with striking presentation. It begins with understanding the shape of taste. Sweetness is roundness and softness.

Acidity is a sharp angle.

Bitterness is a dark depth.

Salt is sharpness and a boundary.

Texture is punctuation itself: crunch places a full stop, cream makes a comma, fermentation adds ‘subtext’. If you can hear this, you stop ‘decorating food’. You begin speaking through the ingredient.





Chapter 5. The Ingredient, Cultural Code and Commodity Image

Original source pages: 31–39



Dada, Miró’s poetic improvisations on reality, and Morandi

Rejecting the Cubists’ ‘flattening’ of space, Marcel Duchamp and other members of the Dada movement took a radically different direction, creating three-dimensional still-life sculptures as ‘readymades’ — existing objects.

Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy?, Marcel Duchamp, 1921, replica 1964, Tate.

As part of a return of symbolic meaning to still life, the Futurists and Surrealists placed recognisable still-life objects within their ‘dream landscapes’. In Joan Miró’s still lifes, objects appear weightless, floating in a lightly suggested two-dimensional space, while even mountains are drawn as simple lines. Miró transformed his subjects through fanciful colour and free play with form. Potato is a characteristic example of Miró’s poetic improvisations on reality: the subject is a giant female figure with arms spread wide. She is placed against a blue sky and above a patch of earth, perhaps a potato field. The figure’s swollen white form is attached to a red post at the centre of the composition, like a scarecrow on a pole. She has one brown-and-black breast that ‘shoots’ a long, winding black thread. On the left, a red-and-yellow ‘butterfly-woman’ takes off from her brown, banana-like nose, while other creatures climb a ladder, one of Miró’s favourite motifs.

The painting’s title seems to derive from the depiction of a real, recognisable potato: a small brown oval object with three ‘feelers’ is set into the woman’s forehead. Potato, Joan Miró, 1928.

Morandi. Still Life, Giorgio Morandi, 1946.

In Italy at this time, Giorgio Morandi was a leading master of still life, exploring a wide range of approaches to everyday bottles and kitchen utensils. With great sensitivity to tone, colour and compositional balance, he depicted the same familiar bottles and vases repeatedly in paintings remarkable for their simplicity. Morandi became an important precursor of Minimalism. Duchamp: the ‘readymade’ as an ancestor of conceptual presentation. Duchamp makes a gesture that gastronomy understands very well today:

you do not necessarily have to ‘cook’ to create a statement.

He takes an existing object and changes its context, and suddenly it is no longer a ‘thing’, but a meaning. Food art works in the same way: sometimes the strongest effect lies not in complex technique, but in how you position an ingredient, what frame you give it and what question you ask the guest.

Miró: the ingredient as a dream, and the potato as a symbol. The Surrealists restore symbolism to still life: food objects enter a dream space, becoming light, strange and free of ‘correct’ perspective. This closely resembles contemporary creativity on the plate, where an ingredient stops being a ‘side dish’ and becomes an image: a potato may be not ‘mash’, but ‘a field’, ‘memory’, ‘childhood’, ‘the earth’, ‘poverty and luxury at once’. Yes, that sounds bold — but this is precisely how an individual culinary voice is born.

Morandi: Minimalism as respect for things, and for the ingredient. Morandi represents a discipline of attention. He paints the same bottles again and again until only the essentials remain: tone, pause and balance.

In gastronomy, this is exactly what I call ‘the honest silence of an ingredient’: you remove the ‘show’, and the ingredient finally speaks for itself.

Minimalism here is not a style. It is courtesy.

‘Twentieth-century American artists 1’

When twentieth-century American artists encountered European Modernism, they began interpreting still life by combining American Realism with abstraction derived from Cubism.

Typical American still lifes from this period include, for example, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the photographs of Edward Weston.

Cabbage Leaf, Edward Weston, 1931.

Frida Kahlo. In Mexico, from the 1930s onwards, Frida Kahlo and other artists developed their own version of Surrealism, incorporating local foods and cultural motifs into their still lifes.

Still Life with Parrot and Flag, Frida Kahlo, 1951, oil on canvas.

Pop Art / Warhol. In the 1930s, Abstract Expressionism radically reduced still life to a ‘raw’ depiction of shape and colour; by the 1950s, complete abstraction had come to dominate the art world.

However, the Pop Art of the 1960s and 1970s reversed the trend and created a new form of still life.

Many Pop Art works, such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, draw upon the still-life genre, but their real subject is usually not the physical still-life object. It is the commodity image of the commercial product shown in the work.

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962.

Still life as the ancestor of food art: from ingredient to code, from code to commodity. There is a genre that quietly and stubbornly taught humanity its most important gastronomic skill. Not frying. Not salting. Not serving.

Looking. Still life is the forebear of food art. It does something simple: takes an ingredient and turns it into meaning. Then the magic begins — and sometimes the marketing. America: the ingredient as form. When twentieth-century American artists encountered European Modernism, still life stopped being ‘about the table’. It became ‘about the gaze’. Realism remained — it is in Americans’ blood — but Cubist logic entered: break the object into forms and put it back together.

Then Edward Weston appears with his cabbage leaf. It is no longer a vegetable. It is relief, a fold, a sculpture.

As in the kitchen: the same ingredient, but a different cut, and the meaning changes. The gastronomic conclusion: a product is not merely an ingredient. It is cultural material, if you know how to look.

Mexico: the ingredient as a cultural code. Mexican Surrealism was not ‘imported’ from Europe. It was grown from the soil. Frida Kahlo weaves local foods and symbols into still life so that food becomes a passport: who you are, where you come from and what memory stands behind your taste. This is what people today often try to imitate with the word ‘authentic’. With Frida, it is simpler: the ingredient is not decoration. It is a sign. It is a voice. The gastronomic conclusion: taste is more than receptors. It is the language of a people. Pop Art: the product as a commodity image. Then comes a turn that still occasionally makes contemporary gastronomy wince.

Pop Art brings still life back — but not into the kitchen. Into the shop window. Warhol’s Campbell’s is not about soup. It is about the commodity as a new icon. About packaging beginning to live a separate life. About how we ‘eat with our eyes’ before we have even tasted.

The gastronomic conclusion: today, taste can be prepared, but the image of taste is often sold separately.

‘Tell me how you look at an ingredient, and I will tell you what kind of cuisine you have: craft, culture — or simply packaging.’ — Andrei Gritskov

Still life as a product: from colour to brand, from display to experience

We are accustomed to thinking of still life as ‘fruit on a table’. But in the twentieth century, the table suddenly became a display. And a display is no longer about food. It is about the meaning of food.

Lichtenstein performs a trick with still life familiar to any chef: he changes the language of presentation.

Pure colour — like precisely judged salt — comes from Matisse.

The Pop icon — like a label that sells a taste before the first sip — comes from Warhol. The result is a still life in which what matters is not the ‘vase’, but the way we recognise a product with our eyes. Wayne Thiebaud goes further still: he paints not dessert, but a dessert production line. Cakes, pies and sandwiches stand in rows, like a promise of stability: identical, plentiful, understandable.

It is a portrait of an age in which taste became a habit, and habit became a commodity. Mass-produced food is culture too. Its cultural code is simply repetition.

Then, unexpectedly, a Russian inflection appears: Maya Kopitseva. Her bananas are not a ‘celebration of the exotic’, but a quiet scene of attention. A thing becomes worthy of being seen not because it is rare, but because it is real.

This is almost a gastronomic ethic: an ingredient matters through its presence, not its status. Photorealism arrives next and says: ‘You want something real? Here it is.’ Yet this ‘reality’ already contains Pop Art’s diagnosis: object, image and commercial product have long since fused. We choose with our eyes. We remember with our eyes. Sometimes we even ‘eat’ more with our eyes than with our mouths.

In the twenty-first century, still life finally steps outside the frame.

It becomes video, installation, a room. Most precisely: the viewer no longer looks at the plate. The viewer is inside the plate.

‘Today, still life is not “what is on the table”, but “what is in the mind”: the product has long since become a cultural code of taste.’

— Andrei Gritskov

Digital technologies have only intensified this: still life can now be constructed rather than painted, like a flavour assembled from sour, sweet, bitter and umami. Hyperrealism here is not about precision. It is about the fact that we sometimes believe the image more strongly than the product.

Twenty-first-century still life: when the plate became a medium.

There is a simple thought that many dislike because it is too precise. In the twenty-first century, still life no longer lives ‘on the table’.

It lives in space. In video. In installation. In performance. In a digital image. On social media.

And yes, in our heads, where taste has long consisted partly of vision, memory and expectation.

Still life used to answer the question: what is lying in front of you? Today, it answers another: why do you want it?

From painting to stage: still life as space.

Contemporary still life is often built rather than painted. Like a theatre set: light, sound, objects, emptiness, the viewer’s distance. The important shift is that the viewer no longer ‘looks’. The viewer participates. You enter a room that is a still life and become part of the composition. Like a restaurant guest who suddenly realises that dinner is also a production, and that they are one of its actors.

The product has stopped being a thing. It has become an image.

In the twenty-first century, a product lives in three layers simultaneously:

• the thing — real food: an apple, bread, salt, wine

• the image — photography, advertising, packaging, content

• the brand — story, status, myth. Contemporary still life often works not with the apple as an apple, but with the apple as a promise: ‘this is health’, ‘this is childhood’, ‘this is premium’, ‘this is ecological’, ‘this is you’. We do not buy taste. We buy a script for taste.

Digital technology and hyperrealism: when ‘delicious’ matters more than ‘edible’.

Digital technologies have radically expanded still life.

An object can now be made perfect: its texture, highlight, droplet, steam, grain of salt. And often it looks more delicious than real food.

The paradox of the twenty-first century: the most ‘appetising’ thing is not necessarily edible. This is no longer cooking; it is the visual engineering of desire.

Found objects: food as evidence of time.

Contemporary still life loves ‘found objects’: packaging, a receipt, a plastic fork, a tin, a delivery, a torn piece of label.

What used to be considered rubbish becomes an archaeology of habits.





Chapter 6. How to Analyse Food in Art: Method and Completed Assignments

Original source pages: 40–47



It is as though the artist is saying: ‘If you want to understand an era, do not look at its kings. Look inside its fridge.’

This is deeply gastronomic. Food is the best document of everyday life.

Performance: a still life that disappears.

Classical still life had an eternal dream: to stop time. Twenty-first-century still life offers the opposite kind of honesty: showing that everything will disappear. Food spoils, melts, darkens, ferments and breaks down.

This is not ‘decoration’. It is meaning.

Here the principal bridge to gastronomic art emerges: taste is an art of time. You cannot ‘hang’ a taste on the wall. It lives in the moment. And it dies beautifully.

Social media: a new museum, a new frame.

Today, still life most often enters the world through a screen rather than a gallery. The screen has its own rules: vertical orientation, movement, attention within 2 seconds. A new profession emerges from this: not simply ‘chef’, but director of the plate. Light, angle, texture, contrast and ‘wow’ become part of the recipe. A restaurant today competes through more than taste.

It competes through the language in which that taste is told.

And yet, what does this have to do with culture?

If taste is a cultural code, the twenty-first century has made that code public. Taste used to be intimate: the home kitchen, the family table, tradition. Now taste is communication: ‘this is who I am’, ‘this is who we are’, ‘this is what we choose’. Twenty-first-century still life is therefore not about ‘beautifully arranged fruit’. It is about identity.

About how we choose products to affirm, to ourselves and to the world, who we are, what we believe in and what we consider worthy.

22 January — Lecture: the foundations of art analysis and food in art

Date and time: 2026-01-22 17:28:29. Summary. The lecture revisits the basic concepts of art analysis, introduces the idea of ‘code in art’ and discusses whether activities such as preparing and eating food can be considered art. It examines the role of food in still life across different periods: how such images changed and how they were perceived. The emphasis is on assessing a work through form, content and context, and on the way research into the artist and their historical and social environment deepens understanding. At the end, the lecturer compares developing a taste for art to wine tasting: the more you learn, the more you see and appreciate. The group is told that it is ready to begin its historical journey through ‘Food in Art’.

Key knowledge

— What art is, and ‘code in art’

Definitions and boundaries of art

The lecture invites reflection on what art is and what function it performs. It raises the question of broad criteria: can an everyday practice, particularly cooking and eating, be a form of artistic expression? The goal is to learn to form a reasoned opinion about works from any period: to look closely at details and relate them to broader ideas about art.

‘Code in art’

The concept of ‘code’ is introduced: works may contain embedded systems, structures or conventions — codes — that influence meaning and interpretation. Although the lecture text gives no technical examples, the idea encourages students to seek the hidden ‘rules of the game’: symbolic languages, stylistic norms and cultural conventions. — Food as art and food in art

Cooking and consumption as art

The question is raised: can the process of preparing and eating food itself be considered art? The suggestion is to assess these activities through the same ‘lenses’ as traditional artworks.

The point is that aesthetic experience, cultural practice and artistic intention can overlap. Cooking can be perceived as an artistic field if appropriate criteria are used to assess it.

Food in still life across different periods

Food is identified as a central element of still life. The historical development of depictions of food is discussed.

It is also noted that perceptions of food objects in still lifes changed over time, together with symbolism, cultural values and artistic techniques. This leads towards the forthcoming ‘journey through time’ on the subject of ‘Food in Art’. — The assessment framework: form, content, context. — Form comprises visual and material characteristics: composition, material/technique, colour, line and so on.

Attention to form helps explain how a work operates and what effects it produces, regardless of its period. — Content comprises subject, narrative, ideas, symbols and meanings.

For example, food in still lifes may carry several layers of meaning that vary according to time and culture. — Context comprises the artist’s biography and the historical, social and cultural conditions in which the work was made.

The importance of researching the artist and their time is emphasised: knowledge of context substantially improves the accuracy and depth of interpretation. — A method for interpreting art

Observation and the formation of an opinion

Close attention to detail makes it possible to analyse any work and construct a reasoned opinion — a skill transferable across periods and styles.

Understanding through research

Studying the artist and their society helps connect formal observations with broader meanings.

Practice and the development of expertise

The comparison with wine tasting: the more time you devote to learning, the more understanding and pleasure you gain. The skill develops gradually through regular practice and comparison. — Where the course is heading: a ‘journey through time’ exploring ‘Food in Art’

At the end of the session, the group is told that it is ready to move on to a historical study of ‘Food in Art’, probably a chronological or thematic survey of artworks featuring food. This establishes an expectation: to apply the ‘form–content–context’ framework to specific historical cases and trace changes in depictions and meanings.

Assignments

1. Apply the ‘form–content–context’ framework to a chosen food still life: record observations about form, interpret the content and research the context — artist, date and cultural setting.

2. Write a short analysis arguing ‘for’ or ‘against’ the idea that a particular culinary practice, such as a tasting menu or ceremonial meal, is art, explicitly drawing on assessment criteria.

3. Produce a short timeline of food still lifes covering at least 3 periods, noting changes in methods of depiction and presumed meanings.

4. Prepare for the ‘journey through time’ exploring ‘Food in Art’: select one work for in-depth study and outline preliminary questions and research sources.

What is art? Where are its boundaries?

Art is not simply ‘beautiful’ or ‘expensive’. More simply: it is a human-created experience, object or action that works through meaning, emotion, an idea or a way of seeing the world. Art’s boundaries are fluid because the following change:

• the criteria of an era — what was considered ‘proper’ or ‘high’;

• institutions — museums, criticism, the market;

• the languages and codes of culture.

How to test ‘is this art or not?’ without philosophical fog. Ask 3 questions:

1. Is there intention — did the maker want to express something, communicate something or create an experience?

2. Is there form — structure, a choice of means, composition, technique?

3. Is there a context that makes it readable as an artistic gesture — temporal, cultural, social?

If the answer to all three is ‘yes’, it already looks very much like art.

Example:

A child’s porridge on a plate is not art.

A restaurant ‘tasting menu’, where the chef constructs a dramaturgy of taste like a script, makes presentation part of the meaning and works with cultural references, may well be art.

What is ‘code in art’?

A code is a set of rules and conventions that helps us ‘read’ a work. As with road signs:

• the ‘brick’ sign — the colloquial Russian name for the no-entry sign — does not look like a brick, but everyone understands its meaning if they know the code.

Codes in art can be:

• symbolic — a skull = memento mori; grapes = abundance/the Eucharist in a Christian context;

• genre-based — what a still life ‘must contain’ and ‘how to look at it’;

• stylistic — Baroque favours drama and contrasts; Classicism favours order;

• social — what may be depicted, how, and for whom.

Why this matters. Without knowing the code, you see ‘fruit on a table’.

With the code, you see status, morality, religious meanings, the politics of time and the taste of an era.

Can preparing and eating food be considered art?

Yes. But not automatically.

When ‘food’ becomes art. When an artistic logic emerges:

• there is an intention — what do I want to say?

• there is form — composition, rhythm, contrast, textures, ‘accents’;

• there is context — traditions, culture, place, an idea.

A comparison:

Cooking as a craft is like ‘competent writing’.

Cooking as art is like ‘literature’. The letters are the same, but an authorial world appears. Examples of ‘food as art’:

• Omakase: the chef leads you through a narrative, as a director leads a film.

• Fermentation: not simply a technique, but work with time, as in sculpture, where form matters but the process matters even more.

• A themed menu: ‘childhood’, ‘the North’, ‘a maritime expedition’, where taste and presentation function as a language.

Why is food so important in still life?

Because food is an ideal ‘carrier of meaning’. It:

• spoils quickly — time, death, transience;

• demonstrates prosperity — status;

• is connected with religion — fasting, the Eucharist;

• is connected with domestic life — culture, family;

• appeals to the senses — colour, texture, shine, juiciness. How the meaning of food in still lifes changed. Broadly speaking:

• in earlier periods, food was often about morality and symbols — ‘everything will pass’;

• later, it increasingly concerned pleasure, everyday life, taste, aesthetics and materiality;

• in contemporary art, it sometimes concerns a critique of consumption, ecology, identity and the politics of the body.

Not ‘better/worse’, but a different set of questions for the artist and the viewer.

How to analyse a work properly: form, content, context.

This is your ‘clear-headed triangle’, which saves you from empty impressions at the level of ‘I like it/I do not like it’. Form — how it is made. Look at:

• composition — what is where, and why;

• light and colour;

• textures and material;

• rhythm, accents and balance;

• technique.

Example: the grapes are painted so that you can almost feel moisture on their skins. This is a formal device that intensifies sensory perception. Content — what it means. Here belong the subject, idea and symbols.

• What is depicted literally?

• What can be read metaphorically?

• What meanings ‘wink’ at the viewer?

Example: a cut lemon may be simply a lemon, or it may symbolise a contrast: ‘beautiful in appearance, sour in taste’.

Context — why this way, and why then:

• who the artist is;

• when and for whom it was made;

• what mattered in society;

• what cultural norms applied.

Example: a luxurious table in seventeenth-century Holland is not only about ‘living well’, but also about morality, trade, colonial commodities and religious discipline.

Why study the artist and the period if you can ‘just look’?

You can ‘just look’. But it is like listening to music without distinguishing the instruments. Context makes you a viewer with ‘additional lenses’. You begin to see:

• why this particular object was chosen;

• why the composition is arranged in this way;

• why a subject was particularly ‘pointed’ at that moment.

And yes, the pleasure becomes deeper. This was the point of the comparison with wine: over time, you perceive more notes, rather than merely ‘a little sour/a little sweet’.

How to apply this now: a short template for analysing a food still life

Take any still life, even from an online museum. Answer in writing:

1. Form:

o Where is the main emphasis?

o What does the light do?

o Which textures receive the strongest treatment?

2. Content:

o Which foods are depicted, and why these particular ones?

o Are there hints of time/transience — wilted leaves, insects, spilled wine?

3. Context:

o What period and country?

o Who bought such paintings?

o Which symbols were ‘common knowledge’ at the time?

Food in art: assignments based on the lecture

Author: Andrei Gritskov
Date: 23 January 2026

Assignment 1. Analysis of a food still life — form, content, context

Selected work: Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Turkey Pie, 1627, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Form

• The composition: ‘the table as a stage’. Objects are arranged so that the eye travels across the surface like a long menu: from the glass to the pie, from the oysters to the tableware.

• Textures and ‘tasting with the eyes’. Metal, glass, the moist surfaces of food and the tablecloth are painted so that you can almost feel them with your fingers.

• Light and tone. A muted palette and precise highlights make the painting quiet, expensive-looking and composed. Without shouting. Like a good restaurant dining room where everything is in place.

Content

• On the most immediate level, this is festive food and signs of prosperity: turkey pie, oysters, wine and expensive tableware.

• But the meaning is broader: it is a story about status and ‘the world on the table’. The museum’s description highlights objects and foods from different parts of the world — oysters, Chinese porcelain, a nautilus, pepper from India; the turkey comes from North America.

• There is also an uncomfortable layer: the description mentions that nutmeg from the Moluccas was grown through the labour of enslaved people. This makes us look differently at the ‘beauty’ of luxury.

Context

• The seventeenth-century Netherlands was an age of trade and imports, when goods from distant places became symbols of success. Here, food and objects function as a display of opportunity and influence.

• The lecture’s ‘form–content–context’ approach helps us move beyond ‘how beautifully it is painted’ to understand what this beauty normalises and reveals.

Assignment 2. Thesis: is a tasting menu art? Position: ‘yes, under certain conditions’

I believe that a tasting menu can be art when it has clear intention, a language of its own and an honest relationship with context. The lecture leads directly to the idea that cooking and eating can be considered through the same criteria as art.

Form.

A tasting menu has a composition: the rhythm of courses, contrasts, pauses, and work with textures and temperature. It is like a musical set. One hit is not yet a concert; a considered sequence creates an experience.

Content.

Content is the subject and meaning. For example: ‘terroir and season’, ‘childhood memory’, ‘the city market’, ‘fermentation as culture’. Food stops being merely ‘tasty/not tasty’ and becomes a statement.

Context.

Context includes the origin of ingredients, labour ethics, cultural codes and seasonal logic. If a restaurant talks ‘about locality’, while its key ingredients are flown halfway around the world without a reason, the meaning begins to come apart at the seams. As in a painting: form declares one thing, while context reveals another.

One more point. A tasting menu is close to theatre. You cannot take the performance home, but you take the experience with you. Taste, like the way we look at art, is trained through practice. The lecture compares this to wine tasting: the more you learn, the more you see.

Assignment 3. A short timeline: food still life — 3+ periods

1) Late sixteenth to early seventeenth century: observation and ‘the truth of the thing’

Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit, around 1599.

Food becomes an occasion to show reality without embellishment. The theme of fragility and transience appears: what is fresh inevitably withers.

2) Seventeenth century — the Dutch Golden Age: status, trade and moral undercurrents

Pieter Claesz, Still Life with a Turkey Pie, 1627.

On the table are imports, rarities and expensive objects. Food becomes a language of success and influence. Contemporary museum interpretation also reveals the ‘price’ of this abundance: colonial labour and supply chains.

3) Eighteenth century — France: the kitchen and the material honesty of everyday life

Chardin, La Raie — The Ray, 1728, Louvre.

Food and fish are everyday life rather than a ceremonial display. Yet they are painted so powerfully that the scene feels almost like a small drama. And yes, this is a still life capable of arguing with the viewer.

4) Twentieth century: food as a commodity image and a display of desire

Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes, 1963, National Gallery of Art.

Food acquires an ‘advertising’ atmosphere, becomes serial, and speaks of consumption and display.

Assignment 4. Preparing for in-depth study — choosing a work, questions and sources

Selected work for further study:

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, La Raie — The Ray, 1728, Louvre.

Why I choose it

This is an example in which food is not an embellishment of the composition, but a way of speaking about everyday life, the body, labour and looking. It also offers excellent material for examining ‘code’: what was considered appropriate/inappropriate, beautiful/ugly, and how the artist manages this.

Research questions

1. Form: how is the composition constructed, and why is it so tense — the central ‘vertical’ of the fish, the balance of objects, the light?

2. Content: why is the scene perceived almost as a drama, although it is a still life? What do the cat and the oysters ‘do’, and how is the fish motif read?

3. Context: how does this relate to French domestic life in the 1720s and the influence of Dutch still lifes?

4. Codes and perception: which cultural codes did viewers read then, and what do we read now?

5. Effect: why does the work simultaneously attract us and ‘catch’ us through discomfort?

Initial sources

• The work’s page in the Louvre collection.

• A reference analysis/overview of the work — composition and key details.

• An additional analytical text as a second opinion, for comparing interpretations.

Conclusion — briefly

The ‘form–content–context’ framework helps us see that food in art is more than ‘beautiful and appetising’. It is a language about status, morality, labour, global connections and cultural codes. Culinary practices can become art when they work consciously and honestly with these same levels.

Andrei Gritskov





Chapter 7. The Ancient Near East and Egypt

Original source pages: 48–58



‘There is no god like one’s own stomach: we must make sacrifices to it every day.’

‘Man’s chief god is his stomach. And service to this god is daily.’ — the Yoruba song Hunger

Meaning — through a gastronomic lens, as a cultural code:

• This is not directly about religion. It is about the primacy of need. Before philosophy, art and even morality comes a basic truth: we have to eat every day.

• ‘Sacrifice’ here is not a bloody metaphor, but a very earthly one: the time, work, money and attention we give to food each day.

• In gastronomy, this sounds like a reminder to chef and guest: taste does not exist outside reality. The ingredient, hunger, availability, season and market are all part of a dish’s ‘story’.

• As a bridge to food art: if art concerns meaning, food gives meaning its driving force. Hunger is the most honest curator: it immediately reveals what is real and what is decoration.

Prehistoric periods and dates:

• Bronze Age — 3500–100 BC

• Archaic period — 600–480 BC

• Classical period — 480–323 BC

• Hellenistic period — 323–31 BC

• Roman Empire — 27 BC–AD 330

We shall focus on:

The Assyrian Empire — the twenty-fifth century BC to 612 BC, under King Ashurbanipal, who ruled in the late seventh century BC; Ancient Egypt — 3100–30 BC, where Cleopatra, 69–30 BC, was Egypt’s last active pharaoh before it became a Roman province; the Hellenistic period; and the Roman Empire. Information about food cultures recorded in texts and images begins in Mesopotamia with the Assyrians.

The oldest art in which we see food consists of Bronze Age rock paintings.

However, we have little information about the meaning of rock art. The animals in these images may have symbolised food, fertility or worship. Beyond rock paintings, people of the time left signs and symbols on objects such as horns and jawbones. These may have been a form of artistic expression, or they may have been tools, ornaments or ritual objects. It is impossible to know for certain whether any of these animals were cooked and eaten. For such a remote period, neither the images nor other finds provide enough information.

‘As we move forward in time, art becomes more sophisticated, and we have more information about the period because we know how these communities settled, how they farmed, what they ate and how they stored food. There is more evidence with which to connect images to real life. This does not always mean that the images reflected real life. Symbolism is therefore always present; our task is to read it.’

[Illustration page in the source PDF: Çatalhöyük, horns and a wall painting of an aurochs; the captions give the dates 7500–5700 BC.]

The further we go into the depths of time, the fewer ‘fantasies’ there are and the more everyday life can be read as the menu of an era. People no longer simply draw an animal. They leave traces of how they obtained food, how they grew it and how they stored it. But there is an important nuance: even when domestic life becomes more intelligible, an image still need not be a ‘photograph of reality’. It more often functions as a label of meaning. For ancient people, this was honest packaging: showing not the object, but what it meant.

Look at the horns at Çatalhöyük. They are not ‘decoration’. They are a sign of resources. The horns are incorporated into the space as a reminder: the community has strength, reserves and a claim to tomorrow. Translated into the language of a product, it is like a logo on a façade: we know how to obtain, store and share.

Then the aurochs appears. In images, it is often larger, fiercer and more frightening than its ‘official description’. An aurochs is not simply meat. It is meat that must still be earned. It is simultaneously food and threat, a festive table and the risk of never returning. Red works here as antiquity’s universal seasoning: blood, danger, life. All in one taste, without separation into ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

This is where genuine gastronomic anthropology begins: such drawings are not about aesthetics for their own sake. They concern ritual around food. Respect for the source of protein. Fear and gratitude mixed in a single gesture. Today we would call it ‘the ingredient’s story’. Then it was shorter and more honest: if food gives life, it demands meaning.

Ancient Assyria

Written records appear in this period, and evidence about food begins to occur in literature, poetry, hymns and palace accounts, helping specialists connect the dots. Studies of pottery fragments reveal what was cooked in them. The Assyrians hunted for food as well as for sport. They ate a variety of foods and also offered food to the gods. Lion hunting is a very typical subject in reliefs. In the background of these hunting reliefs are trees, gardens, rivers full of fish, vines, grazing animals, field kitchens and preparations for a hunting picnic.

A field kitchen is depicted in a relief from the ninth century BC.

People recorded agricultural events and activities for accounting purposes, but also to appease the gods — to make them less angry. These gods were responsible for storms, floods and drought, so bribing and pacifying them mattered greatly. The gods liked food and drink. These were taken to temples as offerings, after which they were taken for the king and temple staff.

Clay seals tell us a great deal about everyday life in detail: offerings of livestock, groups of men feasting or drinking, and gods and heroes fighting animals. Seals were decorative and served as magical amulets to ward off evil. For example, this seal showing beer being drunk through a straw:

Cylinder seal, left, and modern impression, right, showing beer being drunk through long reed straws. Early Dynastic period, around 2600–2350 BC. Khafajeh, Iraq.

This seal shows how people drank beer that had sediment at the bottom and debris or particles floating on top. Beer was made from toasted bread and grains, usually barley, sweetened with dates and flavoured with herbs and plants. Beer drinking was very important in the Assyrian Empire. Assyrian texts contain many songs and legends about beer. Beer was already the national drink in the third millennium BC, whereas wine grown in northern Mesopotamia was expensive and available only to the royal household or the very wealthy.

Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, feasts with his queen. He reclines, a position later adopted by the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans.

His wife, by contrast, does not recline. He is on a higher level than she is, indicating hierarchy.

Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome. The oldest cookbooks in the world.

Assyrian cuisine is the oldest cuisine for which written recipes survive. Two clay tablets in the Babylonian Collection, currently at Yale University, written in Akkadian, contain the oldest known cooking recipes.

They date from around 1750 BC, the time of Hammurabi, known for his famous code of laws. The cuneiform writing system was complex, and generally only scribes who had studied for years could read and write. These cookbooks are therefore unlikely to have been intended for an ordinary cook or chef. Instead, they were written to document culinary practices. The recipes are complex and often require rare ingredients. It can be inferred that they represent Mesopotamian ‘haute cuisine’ intended for a royal palace or temple. From thousands of tablets recording food deliveries and supplies, vocabulary lists of different foods, and records of payments to workers and soldiers, specialists can obtain a fairly accurate picture of the standard Mesopotamian diet. Various grains, vegetables and fruits such as dates, apples, figs, pomegranates and grapes were integral to the ancient Near Eastern diet. Meat included beef, mutton, goat, pork, venison and domestic or wild birds; birds supplied both meat and eggs. Fish were eaten alongside turtles and shellfish. Roots, bulbs, truffles and mushrooms were gathered. Salt and various herbs added flavour to food. Honey, dates, grape juice and raisins were used as sweeteners. Milk, clarified butter, animal fats and vegetable oils — sesame, linseed and olive — were used in cooking. The texts mention many kinds of bread, from barley bread issued to workers as rations to sweetened and spiced cakes or pastries baked in decorative moulds in palace kitchens.

In 2018, New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and its Department of Nutrition and Food Studies held an event called An Appetite for the Past. They interpreted recipes recorded on one of the two cuneiform tablets. This was undertaken by Harvard University team member Gojko Barjamovic, and the recipes were cooked and repeatedly tested in the Harvard Science and Cooking Lab by food chemist Pia Sörensen and Patricia González of the Basque Culinary Center. The project is highly distinctive because it connected the study of ancient texts with the culinary arts. The Yale–Harvard team prepared three recipes, all from one tablet: two lamb stews — one with beetroot and another with milk and grain flatbreads or cakes — and a vegetarian recipe enriched with ‘beer bread’.

This tablet contains 25 stew recipes: 21 meat stews and 4 vegetable stews. The recipes list the ingredients and the order in which to add them, but give no quantities or cooking times. Old Babylonian period, around 1750 BC.

This matters because it gives us a sense of how difficult it is to assess something from the past using our present-day perspectives and tools. These recipes were, in a sense, interpreted and translated; above all, their ingredients had to be matched to what can be found today. There are holes in the tablets, so not all the text is available, and we do not know how the dishes were supposed to taste or look.

Nevertheless, this approximation offers an idea of what people ate 4000 years ago and how it comforted them.

There is a beautiful thought: recipes are memory. But in the oldest recipes on Earth, memory is austere. Assyrian cuisine reached us not through a grandmother’s notebook, but through cuneiform on clay. Nor was it written for the ‘home cook’. It was written by those who could read and record reality. In other words, the elite.

This is an important turn: food becomes a document. Not simply ‘what tastes good’, but ‘how the world is organised’. Supply lists, payments to workers and soldiers, temple records, palace kitchens. All of this forms a single picture: diet as the bookkeeping of life. The menu as a map of civilisation. Reading the list of foods feels like opening an ancient pantry. Grains, vegetables, dates, figs, pomegranates, grapes. Different meats. Fish, turtles, shellfish. Roots and bulbs. Mushrooms and truffles. Salt and herbs. Honey, dates, grape juice and raisins as sweeteners. Oils: sesame, linseed, olive. Here taste works as a cultural code. Not ‘sweet and sour’, but ‘who you are’. Even bread is not a single thing. There is the worker’s barley bread — a ration, fuel for the body. And there are sweet, spiced products baked in decorative moulds: status, ritual, a display of the ability to ‘play’ with an ingredient. At this moment, the ingredient becomes a language: calories for some, symbols for others.

Why an ancient recipe is always a little like a dream. The most honest thing about these tablets is that they contain ingredients and their order, but no grams or minutes. Not because someone forgot. Because cooking then was not ‘precision’, but tradition, the hand’s habit and knowledge of the environment. Salt ‘from memory’. Fire ‘by ear’.

When a modern team attempts to reconstruct these dishes, it has to translate not only the words, but the era. More difficult still, the tablets have holes. Literally. The flavour is unfinished. The appearance is not described. We do not know what it should ideally be like.

The final, forceful thought: the oldest recipes teach a simple lesson. Taste is not an ornament to life. It is the way life is organised. If you can read food, you can read civilisation.

‘What can ancient art give us?’

The foundations of ancient art and the reconstruction of Roman cooking

Summary

The lecture emphasises that ancient art is a foundation of Western culture and art. It helps us understand human creativity, the evolution of thinking, and aesthetic and historical connections with the present. The discussion then moves to ancient culinary practices: written sources and images allow eating habits to be reconstructed, while contemporary initiatives — food blogs, historical events, cookery workshops and museum programmes — attempt to recreate ancient recipes in order to understand the tastes and experiences of the past more fully. Examples mentioned include an event at Yale centred on cuneiform tablets and an Italian cookery workshop in Verona. Dishes reconstructed from the Roman period included conditum paradoxum, a sweet spiced wine; sala catabia, a bread-based dish resembling bruschetta; minuta, a pork-and-apricot stew; and conchiglie, a pea purée. It is noted that exact reconstruction is impossible because conditions, ingredients, equipment and taste preferences differ. The purpose of such attempts, however, is to approach ancient life imaginatively, which closely matches art’s purpose: to set the imagination in motion.

Key points:

1) The importance of ancient art to Western culture

Ancient art as a foundation

• Ancient art underlies Western art and culture; later traditions developed from it.

• Understanding ancient art helps establish aesthetic and historical connections with the present, linking the ‘language’ of the past to contemporary interpretations.

Studying art as a way to understand humanity

• Art history is presented as a route to understanding the development of the human mind and creativity, and thus to answering ‘what does it mean to be human?’ in different periods.

• This is not simply a ‘catalogue of objects’, but a discussion of the cognitive and cultural processes behind the creation and perception of art.

2) Ancient cooking and contemporary reconstructions

Sources on food in antiquity

• Written texts and other works, including images, provide information about recipes, ingredients and the social contexts of food.

Contemporary attempts to recreate ancient recipes

• Reconstructions take the form of blogs, historical events, workshops and museum programmes.

• Their aim is to understand flavour profiles and cooking methods; this is both an educational and an experiential practice for food historians and gastronomes.

Examples

• An event at Yale devoted to cuneiform tablets and ancient culinary texts.

• A workshop in Verona on Italian cuisine from different periods, organised by the speaker.

Roman dishes that were reconstructed

• Conditum paradoxum: sweet spiced wine, reflecting the Romans’ love of seasoned and sweet drinks.

• Sala catabia: a bread dish somewhat reminiscent of bruschetta.

• Minuta: a pork-and-apricot stew, an example of combining meat and fruit in a savoury dish.

• Conchiglie: pea purée, an example of a pulse-based dish.

• According to the speaker, all of these were not only edible, but ‘quite tasty’.

The limitations of reconstruction and the meaning of such experiments

• Exact repetition is impossible: the conditions, ingredients, technologies and modern palate are different.

• The main aim is to imagine what life might have been like thousands of years ago; this creates a ‘bridge’ to the past and engages the imagination, just as art does.

Learning assignment: reconstructing ancient dishes

1. Review written sources on ancient cooking, such as cuneiform tablets and Roman texts, and select at least 3 recipes suitable for contemporary reconstruction.

2. Plan a small cookery workshop on Roman dishes — conditum paradoxum, sala catabia, minuta and conchiglie — specifying ingredient substitutions and adaptations of equipment.

3. Record sensory observations — taste, texture and aroma — and compare them with interpretations from historical sources.

4. Prepare a short reflection on how reconstructing dishes helps deepen our understanding of ancient art and culture, with an emphasis on the role of imagination. Ancient Egypt was a prosperous country situated on the Nile’s fertile floodplain, which provided the ruling classes with abundant food. Tomb paintings on the walls of burial chambers are the most interesting source showing what the rich and powerful ate. Food was needed on the journey to the afterlife and beyond it.

Beer and bread formed the basis of the everyday diet. Images and small models were placed in burial chambers, together with ingredients and servants, so that everything needed for the journey could be prepared.

Ancient texts, such as the Book of the Dead, explain what was offered to the gods and what the deceased was expected to enjoy.

In tomb paintings, fish and birds symbolised rebirth and renewal. Hunting in Ancient Egypt was a leisure activity, so fishing and hunting scenes in tombs celebrate fertility, abundance and the enjoyment of prosperity. Tomb art also depicts workers tending fields and gathering harvests. Agriculture and animal husbandry were the principal sources of livelihood. Some adornments occur whose meaning we do not understand. A necklace of celery leaves, for example, may have been merely decorative or may have served as an insect repellent. Egyptian tombs also depicted servants at work in kitchens, including scenes of bread baking and beer brewing. Interestingly, these are not step-by-step instructions, but they convey the process and the ‘sense of activity’ very well.

As food historians explain, there was no need to illustrate instructions: workers already knew how to do their jobs, while instructions were of little importance to the elite. Such images therefore conveyed the essence and atmosphere instead, rather like mid-nineteenth-century Impressionist paintings of cafés in the Parisian belle époque. Assembling all this information requires both archaeological finds — vessels and food residues in excavated kitchens — and written records. A tomb relief shows workers engaged in agricultural activities: threshing, a granary, reaping with sickles, digging, felling trees and ploughing, from the Tomb of Nakht, Thebes, Eighteenth Dynasty.





Chapter 8. Food and Hospitality in Greece and Rome

Original source pages: 59–68



Ancient Greece

Greek mythology is an excellent ‘lens’ through which to understand how the Greeks viewed food and agriculture.

Relationships between the gods, and between gods and humans, were used to explain natural phenomena, including access to food.

For example, according to Greek myth, Prometheus — an equivalent of Adam within the Greek mythological world — stole fire from heaven and brought humans the necessity of farming. The vengeful Zeus ‘hid’ the seed in the ground, and only through agriculture could it be turned into edible plants. Agriculture thus became a punishment imposed upon humanity, with a grain-based diet replacing divine nectar, a kind of ‘Eden’. Demeter was one of Zeus’s wives and the goddess responsible for harvests and agriculture.

Another example is the myth of the Abduction of Persephone, which explains the changing seasons and nature’s cycle of fertility. Persephone was one of the daughters of Demeter and Zeus. Hades abducted her into the underworld after obtaining permission from her father, Zeus, to marry her. Demeter searched endlessly, consumed by loss and grief. The seasons stopped: living things ceased to grow and began to die. When the earth stood on the brink of the destruction of all life, Zeus sent Hermes to the underworld to bring Persephone back. Hades agreed to release her if she had eaten nothing in his realm, but Persephone had eaten several pomegranate seeds. Zeus had to find a compromise between Demeter and Hades. He arranged for Persephone to spend four months with Hades as queen — one for each pomegranate seed eaten — and to return to her mother for the other eight months. Demeter continued to ‘allow the crops to die’ while Persephone was with Hades.

The Greeks believed that gods could walk among humans in disguise. Any guest had to be treated as potentially a disguised deity. A person was therefore obliged to show hospitality to a stranger, a xenos, who might turn out to be a god in disguise. Zeus is sometimes called Zeus Xenios in his role as protector of travellers. He embodied the religious duty of hospitality towards strangers.

The concept of hospitality, called xenia, obliged host and guest to respect one another. The host had to welcome the guest, provide food and drink and, where necessary, an opportunity to wash. In return, the guest had to be polite and avoid becoming a burden. Although the origins of hospitality traditions were connected with the divine, xenia gradually became ordinary practice and was firmly embedded in Greek customs and etiquette throughout a long stretch of their history. Xenia is therefore a Greek concept that beautifully connects food, art and hospitality. The rituals of hospitality also involved gifts for guests. We see the continuation of this tradition in Roman times: offerings, or xenia, in the form of baskets of food were depicted on dining-room walls in Pompeian villas and elsewhere in the Roman Empire.

[Illustration page in the source PDF: a scene of hospitality on an Ancient Greek vase; the English caption reads Hospitality scene on an Ancient Greek Vase.]

Another important tradition of food and everyday life: drinking wine

Wine was widespread in the ancient world. It was probably brownish and oxidised, given the uncontrolled methods of fermentation and the various ‘breathing’ vessels — clay, wood, leather — in which it was stored or transported. We do not know exactly how that wine tasted, but sources suggest that it was diluted with water and flavoured with spices and honey. The Greeks mixed wine with water in different proportions, depending on the evening’s guests and how intoxicated they wanted, or were able, to become.

Wine was drunk after the meal at a gathering called a symposium. At these ‘drinking parties’, particularly in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, participants played kottabos: the aim was to throw wine lees at a target in the centre of the room. Such scenes are depicted on red-figure vases of the time.

In Ancient Greek literature, poets such as Homer wrote extensively about wine. References to kottabos among writers of the Roman and Alexandrian periods show that the fashion had faded. It is almost entirely unknown in Latin literature.

A kottabos player. Interior painting of an Attic red-figure kylix, around 510 BC. Greece.

Food in Ancient Rome

Roman cuisine has come down to us mainly through archaeology and cookbooks, rather than through art.

Bread was the most important food for all social classes in Ancient Rome. The Romans raised pigs, sheep, goats and cattle. They grew pulses — chickpeas, peas, beans — and vegetables — broccoli, cabbage, kale, kohlrabi, onions, garlic, asparagus, leeks and artichokes. Important agricultural writers, such as Cato, provide the clearest picture of Roman food. He was a censor, an honorary position for a former public official, and the first to write history in Latin. His recipe for sweet cakes, known as placenta, for example, was an early version of ‘lasagne’, without tomatoes, of course.

It is important to distinguish the Roman Republic from the Roman Empire:

• The Roman Republic was the period between 509 BC and 27 BC, including the time when Cato wrote about food, during which the states within the Republic retained sovereignty.

• The Empire, which emerged later, was governed by a single authority. During this period, more ingredients arrived from across the empire, and new culinary habits and cooking methods were adopted. As the Empire grew, the dietary differences between rich and poor became greater. The structure of a meal in Rome was not very far removed from that of modern Italy.

• An aperitif was served at the start of the meal, such as mulsum, a warm spiced wine.

• Delicacies might include patina, a baked mixture ‘like a casserole/pudding’, containing meat, chicken or fish, herbs, olive oil, nuts and wine.

• A sweet version might also be served, made with pears, eggs, honey and spices.

• Main dishes: beef, mutton, lamb, game, poultry, seafood and pork.

• The use of spices — cumin, coriander, saffron, cinnamon, pepper — was a marker of wealth. Garum, a fermented fish sauce, was added to many dishes.

Roman cuisine has come down to us mainly through archaeology and cookbooks, rather than through art.

Pompeii is the most informative archaeological site for understanding how the Romans lived before the city was buried beneath volcanic ash from Vesuvius in AD 79. It was there, for example, that we learnt about food outlets with recessed openings in their counters for displaying dishes, shown in the photograph on the right.

The Romans were highly conscious of class distinctions, and the wealthy ate differently from the poor. A Roman entrepreneur held feasts for business associates at his villa. Villas stood near estates producing grains, pulses, vegetables and dairy products. The table carried fruit, particularly grapes, apples, pomegranates and, when obtainable, figs, together with nuts and honey.

Guests were received in the triclinium, the formal dining room. The walls of these rooms were painted with images of food, tableware and tables. Many such examples have been found at Pompeii. A common feature of Roman food mosaics is that artists ‘built up’ the scene to create an image of wealth, abundance and luxury. Many objects are usually shown close together, as though everything has been piled into a single ‘display’. This food was a mixture of local products and goods brought from distant lands. Interestingly, Roman frescoes and mosaics show meals and feasts, but almost never kitchens.

Feasts were reserved for the elite. In Rome, women could sit with men in the triclinium, unlike at the Ancient Greek symposium, which admitted only men. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans drank with their food. At a feast, slaves ladled wine from a krater, a large mixing vessel, into a skyphos, a drinking vessel with two handles, after which the wine was diluted with water. When entertaining, the villa’s owner usually served wine from his own vineyards. If he could afford wine from more prestigious places, however, such as Falernian wine from Latium and Campania, it made a stronger impression. In the later Empire, wealth was so abundant that luxurious eating sometimes got out of control, until the Empire began to weaken economically after approximately AD 300.

The Roman recipe book De re coquinaria vividly shows what the Roman elite ate, both in Italy and in the provinces. The recipes are believed to have been recorded by the Roman gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius, who lived around the first century AD. The recipes sometimes appear ‘wild’, but when prepared they prove delicate and tasty. This does not, of course, apply to recipes calling for the most exotic ingredients, such as parrot brains or flamingo tongues.

Apicius may have described elite dishes with complex sauces, but the food of the poor was by no means dull. They used parsley, thyme, coriander, basil, sage, rosemary, lovage — a plant whose appearance and taste resemble a mixture of celery and parsley — fennel, rue — a shrub with a slightly bitter taste — coriander and other wild herbs. Anise, mustard, fennel and coriander were inexpensive. Most Romans ate grains and pulses. Both wheat and spelt were used for bread, which was baked on the hearth. Rome’s poor did not always have cooking facilities, so they bought street food: sausages, bread, cooked pulses and vegetables from stalls.

Ancient Rome: fruit and bread

Fruit. The remarkable depictions of food in frescoes and mosaics in Roman villas show early traditions of naturalism. In these paintings, we see the fruits of the empire — apples, pears, quinces, pomegranates, cherries, cornelian cherries and strawberry-tree fruit — as well as pigeons, doves and songbirds.

Image captions:

• Quinces and plums in a glass bowl. Villa of Poppaea, Pompeii, approximately 90–25 BC.

• A basket of figs. Villa of Poppaea, Pompeii.

First century AD, Villa of Livia at Prima Porta, near Rome.

Bread. Charred examples of whole loaves of this bread were found at Pompeii. This wall painting from a Pompeian bakery depicts typical Roman bread. Image captions:

• Bread being sold at a market stall. Roman fresco from the property of Julia Felix, before AD 79, Pompeii.

• A charred loaf of Ancient Roman bread from Pompeii.

Ancient Rome: fresh fish and other delicacies

Mosaics in Pompeii show that fresh fish was highly prized at the time.

Fresh fish was expensive. People mainly ate salted fish. Migratory fish, such as tuna, were spotted from watchtowers and driven into traps for slaughter, rather like the modern mattanza in Sicily. The catch was then salted and sent to different parts of Italy.

Fish mosaic from Pompeii, first century AD.

Other ‘specialities’ included pigs’ trotters, wombs, vulvas and udders. Sausage-making was considered a demanding craft. According to the Roman cookbook De re coquinaria, the best sausages were made in Lucania in the south.

Ancient Rome: ‘luxury vegetables’

Succulent cultivated asparagus shoots were a delicacy for the wealthy.

In his encyclopaedic Naturalis Historia — Natural History — Pliny the Elder wrote about the thick asparagus stalks from Ravenna. The fertile valley of the River Po was ideal for growing asparagus.

A still life in a second-century mosaic: fish, poultry, dates and asparagus. Villa Marancia near Rome.

Painting of asparagus and ricotta from the House of the Vettii, Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii.

This painting of ricotta and asparagus on a windowsill or ledge conveys a simple ‘rustic charm’, while the shepherd’s crook suggests that the food has just been brought in fresh. The woven reed baskets are the ancestors of the plastic baskets in which fresh ricotta is sold today.

Images are sometimes misinterpreted, and the resulting misinformation then survives for years because it is simply repeated.

For example, the artichoke was unknown to the Graeco-Roman world. It is an ‘exotic’ vegetable that has been used as a decorative motif throughout history.

Artichokes were most likely domesticated during the Arab presence in Sicily, approximately in the ninth to eleventh centuries.

Some mosaics most probably depict a cardoon rather than an artichoke. A cardoon resembles an artichoke, but it is a thistle in the Asteraceae family, a relative of the sunflower, and only the inner white stalks are considered edible.

Detail of a Roman mosaic from Utica, Tunisia, depicting a cardoon.

A painting comprising two still-life panels, including dead game birds and a glass bowl filled with fruit. It is now in the Archaeological Museum of Naples.

Paintings with a ‘veil/covering’ are interpreted as xenia: ‘bags/baskets of food gifts’ for guests on arrival or departure. This continues the Greek tradition of hospitality.

Unlike the Greeks, however, the Romans wanted to impress their guests and used such images as signs of status.

Some interpret these paintings as symbols of wealth. Others think they are offerings to household gods. Others again suggest that Pompeii’s urban residents missed ‘rural’ life and fresh produce and therefore commissioned such subjects for their villas.

We cannot fully understand the intention behind these paintings without knowing the beliefs and obligations of the artists and their patrons.

Overall, the artists emphasised realism and effectively stood at the origins of still life. Yet in some xenia, the range of fruit is spread so widely across the seasons that it clearly does not represent reality — chestnuts beside cherries and grapes, for example. We shall see similar seasonal ‘inconsistencies’ in Renaissance painting, for example in Vincenzo Campi’s The Fruit Seller, around 1580.





Chapter 9. The Middle Ages: Faith, Social Estate, Hunger and Feasting

Original source pages: 69–87



Mark Twain says something like this: stop living ‘correctly’ according to other people’s rules. Eat what appeals to you, and do not turn every mouthful into an examination in morality and dietetics. The body is wiser than many advisers. It will work out for itself what suits it and what does not — sometimes, admittedly, through a small lesson.

This is not about mindlessly ‘eating everything’. It is about freedom of taste and peace of mind. Success in life is more often obstructed by an endless war with oneself than by food. As for the food, let it ‘argue’ inside and sort everything out.

Medieval Europe: food, art and society — from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance

Summary

This lecture concerns the European Middle Ages, the period from the division of the Roman Empire into East and West, approximately in the fourth century, to the first signs of the Renaissance. It examines social, cultural and dietary conditions after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, a period often called the Dark Ages. Its characteristics include population decline, food shortages, a decline in education and culture, a colder climate, the return of forests to cultivated land and continual warfare.

The lecture analyses food’s complex role in medieval society: on the one hand, it was essential to life; on the other, it could be perceived as a source of sin. Guilt about the pleasure of eating and beliefs about food’s effects on health significantly influenced medieval art.

Three key factors shaping society and artistic culture are identified:

1. The Catholic Church

2. Class distinctions

3. Dietetics — medieval ideas about nutrition and medicine

The planned study includes artworks — paintings, mosaics and illuminated manuscripts — from the High and Late Middle Ages, including the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a handbook of health and well-being that helps us understand practices of food cultivation, cooking and serving.

Key knowledge

1) The historical context of the Middle Ages

The division of the Roman Empire and the chronological framework

• The Middle Ages are considered as a period of more than a thousand years, from the division of the Empire into East and West in the fourth century to the beginning of the Renaissance.

• This approach presents the Middle Ages as a bridge between Late Antiquity and the early modern period.

The Dark Ages after the fall of the Western Roman Empire

• After the collapse of the Western Empire, Europe entered a period known as the Dark Ages.

• Principal characteristics:

o population decline; o food shortages; o a decline in education and cultural production; o a colder climate; o the return of many areas to woodland; o continual warfare

• Cultural decline is evident even in the sources: cookbooks are almost absent between 600 and 1000, with the exception of a dietary book written by a Greek physician for Theodore.

2) Food in medieval society

The complexity and moral dimension of food

• Food was a complex phenomenon:

o hunger was a constant threat, so food = necessity; o food also gave pleasure, and pleasure could be considered sinful

• The tension between survival and moral restrictions influenced social norms and everyday life.

Expectations of health and feelings of guilt

• Food was believed capable of bringing either health or illness.

• Guilt associated with the desire to eat well, and expectations about ‘proper nutrition’, became foundations of medieval art, both as a theme and as a system of imagery.

3) What influenced medieval society and art

Three principal influences

1. The Catholic Church

It shaped values, artistic subjects and moral frameworks, including attitudes towards pleasure, sin and food.

2. Class distinctions

Social hierarchy determined:

o access to foods; o methods of preparation; o forms of presentation; o how all of these were depicted in art

3. Dietetics. The medical and dietary theories of the time established ideas:

o about the properties of foods; o about what was ‘beneficial/harmful’

o about how and what different people should eat. This influenced both actual practice and artistic imagery.

Reflections in art

• Food’s connections with necessity, pleasure, sin and health were reflected in visual culture.

• Art recorded and commented on society’s anxieties and norms.

4) Sources and methods for studying medieval food culture

Art as historical evidence

• The proposed sources are:

o paintings; o mosaics; o illuminated manuscripts, used as ‘documents’ to understand:

o what was grown; o how people cooked; o how food was served

Tacuinum Sanitatis

• A handbook of health and well-being.

• It provides information about cultivation, cooking and serving, linking dietary ideas with practical images and recommendations.

Assignments

1. Examine selected works — paintings, mosaics and manuscripts — from the High and Late Middle Ages, and find depictions of:

• food cultivation

• cooking

• serving food

2. Analyse sections of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, identify its dietary principles and compare them with visual depictions of food.

3. Select examples showing how the Church, class distinctions and dietetics influenced depictions of food and meals.

4. Investigate the dietary book written by a Greek physician for Theodore, within the period 600–1000, to understand medieval dietetics more fully against the background of scarce culinary sources.

The Middle Ages — AD 500–1400

The Middle Ages lasted from the fall of Ancient Rome in AD 476 to the beginning of the fifteenth century.

• Early Middle Ages — the Dark Ages: 500–1000

• High Middle Ages: 1000–1250

• Late Middle Ages: 1250–1400

It was a time of wars, ignorance, hunger and pandemics such as the Black Death. This is why the period, particularly before 1000, is often called the ‘Dark Ages’. Europeans made few conspicuous advances in science and art. Interest in Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and scholarship was comparatively weak. Life revolved around survival, and art reflected this: painting frequently focused on religion, morality and health.

In painting, the Middle Ages are a period with numerous narrative, figurative scenes. Paintings reflected the past: biblical stories and the ways of life of the time. Three principal themes can be identified: biblical scenes, depictions of everyday life and medieval feasts.

The Byzantine Empire — 330–1453

Let us consider the Byzantine Empire separately: it deserves particular attention.

While much of Europe lived through the ‘Dark Ages’, Byzantium in the east continued to flourish, with its own culture and food. Surviving religious icons and manuscript illustrations reveal some of the diversity of Byzantine food culture.

The Byzantine Empire existed from 330 to 1453 and extended from Albania to Syria, and from Italy to Turkey. Its capital, Constantinople, today Istanbul, was a trading centre and a city of active cultural exchange. Ancient traditions of art and learning continued there throughout the Middle Ages. Icon: The Hospitality of Abraham, late 1300s, Constantinople. Tempera on wood with gold leaf, 14 3/16 × 24 1/2 inches.

Food in medieval Constantinople

Food in medieval Constantinople combined Ancient Roman, Greek and Anatolian culinary practices. It was also influenced by the rules of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

What did they eat?

• Constantinople had access to a great variety of foods from nearby fertile lands and the sea, as well as through active trading routes to the east.

• The Byzantines ate meat — pork, mutton, poultry, gazelles and donkeys — and fish.

• They continued the Ancient Roman tradition of seasoning almost everything with garum, a fish sauce.

• They used many herbs and vegetables, as well as exotic spices such as ginger and nutmeg.

• Much of their everyday diet was regulated by the Eastern Christian Church.

In this picture, we see some of the earliest evidence for the use of forks, although these were simple two-pronged versions, resembling a modern carving fork.

‘Elegant dining with forks’: a detail of the portrait of Alexios III Komnenos in the Romance of Alexander the Great, 1300s. Made in Trebizond, Turkey. Tempera, gold and ink, 12 5/8 × 9 7/16 inches.

Christian art of this period frequently depicts certain biblical stories: Original Sin, the Garden of Eden, the Last Supper, the Wedding at Cana, the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes and the Supper at Emmaus, to name only a few.

In this section, we shall examine some of the most frequently painted biblical scenes because of their symbolic significance in artistic iconography.

Original Sin

The story of Original Sin is one of the most frequently depicted biblical subjects. According to the creation myth in the Abrahamic religions, Adam and Eve were the first man and woman. They are central to the doctrine of the Fall of Man and Original Sin, which is important to Christianity, although it is not generally accepted in Judaism and Islam. This Old Testament episode is one of the most common subjects in both painting and sculpture from the Middle Ages onwards.

When God created the world and humanity, he placed the man in the Garden of Eden, where many trees grew laden with delicious fruit. Two trees stood in the middle of the garden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. God allowed Adam to eat any fruit except that of the Tree of Knowledge. He then created a woman as the man’s companion. The serpent told Eve that God was afraid that, if they ate this fruit, they would gain knowledge of good and evil and become like God. Eve yielded, tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, found it delicious and gave some to Adam. God then clothed the naked man and woman, who had become ‘like God’ in knowing good and evil, and expelled them from the garden to prevent them from eating the fruit of the second tree, the Tree of Life, and living for ever.

This is the first mention of food in the Old Testament, and food here is associated with sin. At the same time, the act of eating can be seen as an act of awareness. The fact that humanity’s fall occurred through food and eating can be understood as a metaphor for acquiring knowledge, giving the theme of food enormous cultural significance.

The Last Supper

The Last Supper is the final meal that, according to the Gospel accounts, Jesus shared with his apostles in Jerusalem before the Crucifixion. During the meal, Jesus predicts that one of the apostles present will betray him, and that before the next morning Peter will deny knowing him three times. The Last Supper provides the biblical foundation for the sacrament of the Eucharist, also known as Holy Communion.

The symbolism of food is especially powerful here. It represents Christ’s sacrifice for humanity. Wine is his blood, and bread his body.

The most interesting aspect of the Last Supper is that different depictions show different foods and table objects, according to the period and country in which the painting was made. The iconography extends beyond the biblical narrative, telling us what people ate and how sacrifice, betrayal and Christ’s body were represented in art. Early depictions corresponded more closely to the Jewish Passover tradition: participants reclined on low couches around low tables, or without tables at all. The Evangelists explicitly mention that they reclined at this meal.

This sixth-century mosaic in Ravenna depicts a scene of reclining in a triclinium, an arrangement of places typical of Roman custom. Christ and the disciples recline together during a communal meal; fish and wine are on the table. Christ is the only figure shown with a halo.

Food is served in a shared dish into which participants dip bread or from which they eat with their hands. The fish was a common symbol of Christ: the initial letters of the Greek words ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’ form the word ichthus, ‘fish’. An apple is sometimes shown on the table. It signifies Christ as the new Adam, who repairs humanity’s Fall from Paradise.

Sometimes a lamb appears on a dish before Jesus, likening Christ to the sacrificial lamb.

Another example is a prayer book from Regensburg, Germany, approximately 1000 years old, with an expressive scene of the Last Supper.

Christ sits with the apostles at a semicircular table and blesses them. Some followers take knives to eat the bread, fish and even a pretzel laid before them.

The two figures closest to Christ raise food towards their mouths but do not actually eat. Only one apostle eats the bread: Christ’s betrayer Judas, who sits separately on the side of the table nearest the viewer.

In the biblical text, Christ identifies the ‘unrighteous’ apostle through the act of eating: ‘Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me — the one who is eating with me’ (Mark 14:18).

The ominous black bird ‘flying’ from Judas’s mouth in the image marks not only his sinful act of betrayal, but also his eating alone. The iconography of food in such works reflects biblical lessons about sins, particularly gluttony and the hoarding of food at the expense of the poor. One example is The Feast of Dives.

The Last Supper in a benedictional, Regensburg, around 1030–1040. J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig VII 1, fol. 38.

The Feast of Dives

This biblical parable tells the story of a rich man, Dives, who refuses to help a beggar, Lazarus, despite the latter humbly asking for even the scraps of food.

Instead of helping, the rich man sets his dogs on Lazarus, who later dies of hunger. The rich man is the frowning, double-chinned figure at the table. He is presented as a ‘bad Christian’: gluttonous and unwilling to help the poor. Even his dogs attack poor Lazarus. In the lower part of the miniature, two angels fly above the dead Lazarus and wrap his soul in a white cloth, marking him as a ‘good Christian’. See the materials below for further information about dogs at medieval feasts.

Gluttony in medieval art

Gluttony is one of Christianity’s seven deadly sins. It was frequently depicted in medieval painting.

Paintings about gluttony warn the viewer. It is important to remember that wealthy and noble people commissioned such paintings. Naturally, they did not want artists to depict them as gluttonous. That role was often assigned to peasants instead. Many images in medieval and Renaissance art show peasants overeating, as if suggesting that low social status is associated with gluttony and other ‘bad’ habits. In this fifteenth-century image, for example, we see two groups eating. The ‘intemperate’, drunken peasants in the foreground create noise and commotion, while the ‘temperate’ group of nobles behind them eat modestly and sit upright with ‘correct’ posture.

Were peasants gluttonous?

Had they been given the chance, perhaps. Their lives revolved around agriculture, and they mainly ate grain and beans. Famine occurred regularly, the threat of exhaustion was real, and meat was a luxury.

The nobility, meanwhile, had hunts and feasts. The poor could only dream of what the wealthy ate. This dream was idealised in the utopian world of Cockaigne. People could experience a taste of ‘abundance’ during Carnival and other festivals, when the nobility distributed food to the crowd.

‘Dogs at a medieval feast’ — why are they there at all?

What usually matters in interpretation:

• Dogs in the hall do not always mean ‘dirt and bones under the table’. Much of this is a cinematic myth. In reality, table manners and cleanliness were valued at court and in a ‘good household’, and dogs might be kept separately, apart from small ornamental breeds.

• Why a dog appears in a miniature or feast scene:

o as a marker of status — hunting dogs, the elite’s ‘pets’;

o as a symbol — loyalty, a guardian, belonging to the house or master, depending on context;

o as a detail of everyday life — yes, animals around food are part of reality, but the artist chooses whether to show or omit them.

A dog in a feast scene often functions as a social marker and moral commentary, rather than simply as ‘background’.

‘Why do people not eat in medieval depictions of feasts?’

A short line of reasoning that recurs in research:

• Showing the process of chewing means risking the moral meaning. In the Late

Middle Ages, the iconography of food often revolves around temperance/intemperance and the fear of ‘looking like a glutton’.

• Food on the table: yes. A mouth at work: no. Artists prefer to show:

o wealth and table settings; o gestures — blessing, offering, choosing; o order/disorder at the table; o the contrast between ‘temperate’ and ‘intemperate’.

• A separate case: Judas and ‘eating alone’. In several traditions, the act of eating itself becomes a marker of betrayal: one person eats, therefore they are ‘not one of us’. Feast scenes often depict not ‘people eating’, but ‘attitudes towards food’ — moderation, morality, order, sin.

‘What did people actually eat?’ — realistically, without romanticising

The main factors here are class — rich/poor — region/season, and Church rules. The everyday foundation for most people:

• Bread + soup/pottage: a thick ‘pot’ of grain, pulses and vegetables, sometimes a little meat or fish ‘if they were lucky’.

• Ale/beer was often drunk regularly, rather than only on ‘festive’ occasions; water might be questionable.

• Vegetables, leeks/onions, cabbage, beans, grains and local seasonal fruit.

• Meat was rare for the poor and more often eaten on feast days; the nobility had noticeably more meat, poultry and game.

The banquet ‘display’ — the elite

• More meat, poultry and game, much fish — partly because of fasting — elaborate dishes and a demonstration of resources.

• Spices and sugar as status, almond milk, sauces and striking presentation. An important qualification about Cockaigne: the dream of a land of plenty is a cultural reaction to scarcity. When life offers ‘a pot and bread’, fantasy imagines ‘rivers of wine and food falling from the sky’.

In the Middle Ages, most people lived on bread, soups or pottage, seasonal vegetables and drinks such as ale. Meat was a luxury for the poor and, among the nobility, part of status and banquet display. Images of feasts often avoid the act of eating itself because of a moral perspective — the fear of gluttony — preferring to show table settings, gestures and ‘proper behaviour’. Dogs in such scenes may be both everyday details and social or symbolic markers.

Food in medieval Europe

After 1000, temperatures began to rise, more food could be grown, and fertility and birth rates increased. Viticulture expanded in central England.

People were able to grow grapes between 1000 and 1300, much as they can again today. Towns began to grow. Monasteries owned large areas of land. Feudalism emerged as a social system: nobles received land in return for serving the king in war, while peasants were obliged to live on their lord’s land and give him homage, labour and part of the harvest in exchange for protection.

Peasants could not freely sell their own produce: they used it to feed themselves and their lord. A ‘communal’ economy existed within the community, with tools and resources shared, including mills owned by the lords. Hunting and fishing were privileges of the lords. The nobility held many feasts during this period, supported and embellished by the spice trade through Venice and Genoa.

The fourteenth century: population growth, famine and plague

In the 1300s, the population grew further, while resources were distributed so close to the limit that failed harvests led to famine. Rats carried diseases, including plague, which travelled from Central Asia along trading routes, through Baghdad, to Sicily and then Europe. The plague spread rapidly, and within a couple of years a third of Europe’s population had died.

After the plague, Europe’s entire social structure changed. Lords began paying peasants wages. Peasants began eating more meat. They lived longer. Lords no longer controlled peasants so tightly, but peasants gave their lord half their harvest. This was called mezzadria — métayage, or sharecropping.

Between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, guilds of craftspeople and merchants formed and flourished in Europe, providing mutual assistance and protection for professionals, including a system of apprenticeship.

Spices and sugar as status

Until the end of the fifteenth century, Venice controlled the spice trade. Spices — pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg — and sugar came from distant places and sold at very high prices. People paid heavily for spices and sugar because they were scarce and because they believed them to have medicinal properties. Spices, considered ‘hot and dry’, were thought to balance the ‘cold and moist’, according to ancient medical theories. Being ‘in balance’, eucrasia, was considered a sign of social status. For more about Venice’s spice trade, see the article in the resources below.

Dietetics

The medicinal effects of food were a major subject in medieval society. Medieval diet and medicine drew heavily on the concept of the humours, bodily ‘fluids’. The humours were four fluids in the body believed to influence health, disease, temperament and personality. The Greek physician Hippocrates introduced the connection between the humours and health. Later, the Roman physician Galen added the idea of a link between the humours and a person’s temperament and personality.

The four fluids were blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Each person’s temperament comprised four elements:

• air — warm and moist;

• earth — cold and dry;

• fire — hot and dry;

• water — cold and moist.

Similarly, each food was believed to have its own character: warm/cold, dry/moist. The amount of each ‘fluid’ could increase or decrease because of many factors: diet, season, temperature, sex and time of day. For the body to be healthy, its humours had to be in balance. Too much or too little of any ‘fluid’ produced imbalance and illness. During the Islamic Golden Age, the Persian physician Avicenna, Ibn Sina, adopted humoral theory from Graeco-Roman medicine and presented it in The Canon of Medicine, 1025. Avicenna brought together humours and temperaments, combining them with Persian, Chinese and Indian medicine. In this system, the purpose of a good diet was to prevent a person’s temperament from becoming imbalanced. To achieve this, the dryness of a particular food had to be compensated for by combining it with foods of a ‘moist’ character. Warm and moist foods needed to be balanced by dry and cold ones. Cooking also changed the degree of dryness/moisture, cold/heat and so on. Frying and salting, for example, added ‘dryness’, while boiling added ‘moisture’. Cooks in the Middle Ages and Renaissance spent considerable time ‘balancing’ food in this way. The numerous cookbooks that began to appear after the fourteenth century provide a very good picture of what people ate in late medieval Europe.

Early cookbooks and materials

The earliest cookbooks were written on parchment, usually made from sheep or goat skins. The Roman writer Pliny wrote that parchment was invented in the second century BC in Pergamum, hence the word ‘parchment’, from the Latin pergamena, ‘from Pergamum’. Vellum was considered a higher-quality parchment and was made from calfskin. Paper gradually displaced parchment: paper production began in Italy and Spain in the thirteenth century, and printed paper spread in the fourteenth.

The four humours

Naturally, around this time we see an ‘explosion’ of cookbooks across Europe. They were mainly written by cooks in Italy and France for important people, including the Pope. These books include Liber de coquina, thirteenth century; The Forme of Cury, fourteenth century; Le Ménagier de Paris, fourteenth century; Anonimo Toscano and Anonimo Veneziano, both fourteenth century; and many others.

A visual source with excellent illustrations of how people cooked, ate and managed their households in the Late Middle Ages is the medical book Tacuinum Sanitatis. It is a Latinised version of an eleventh-century Arabic medical work from Baghdad, Taqwīm as-Ṣiḥḥa.

The medieval diet

The medieval diet was based on bread, beans or pulses, meat, wine and beer. Foods did not all have the same cultural ‘value’. Each had its place in a hierarchy extending from earth to heaven, literally according to where the food was ‘born’: in the soil, on a tree or in the air. Cereals were a staple, eaten mainly as bread. Oats were eaten as porridge. By the end of the Middle Ages, wheat had become the most desirable grain. Rye was grown on poor soils, while millet was particularly widespread in south-western France. In the Late Middle Ages, buckwheat arrived in Europe from Asia through the Middle East and began to spread.

Medieval townspeople liked white bread made from finely sifted, pure wheat. With bran included, the bread of the poor was dark, like the slices on which food was placed during meals. Peasants baked bread in their lord’s oven, while towns had bakers. Vegetables were part of a peasant’s daily diet. Cabbage, spinach and leeks were eaten as purées and in soups. Pulses were another food group mainly eaten by peasants and in monasteries. Onions were very common among peasants. Like garlic, onions were credited with numerous medicinal properties. Fruit was considered food for the nobility. Pears stewed in wine were often the ‘finale’ of a meal.

Making butter. Tacuinum Sanitatis, fifteenth century.

Milk was made into cheese or butter. Physicians discouraged drinking milk, believing that it contained too much ‘moisture’.

Dairy products, like meat, could not be consumed during Lent or on Fridays and Saturdays. During fasting, non-animal oils — olive or nut oil — were used for cooking instead of butter. Abstention during Lent and other days of abstinence, totalling more than 100 days a year, was required by the Church.

Fish consumption was therefore very high, particularly herring, known as ‘the fish of the poor’.

A medieval butcher, artist unknown.

In the final centuries of the Middle Ages, meat consumption became predominant. The number of butchers’ shops increased.

Deer, wild boar, herons and pheasants, pursued on foot or hunted in flight, were considered ‘noble quarry’.

Rural inhabitants hunted hares and small birds.

Wine

Viticulture developed significantly during the Middle Ages, and most peasants grew grapes.

Wine was mixed with honey and spices — usually cinnamon, ginger, cloves, grains of paradise and long pepper — and sometimes heated and filtered. This drink was believed to have medicinal effects and was called hippocras, after Hippocrates. Wine put into barrels immediately after the grape harvest was drunk at the beginning of the year. In noble households, a specialised servant, the cup-bearer, was responsible for serving wine. Until the fourteenth century, sugar was still chiefly regarded as a medicine, and French cooking used it primarily in dishes for the sick. Candied almonds and other spiced sweets were served at the end of select meals to improve guests’ digestion. Illustration captions:

• Wine in a barrel, around 1500

• A merchant selling a sugar cone, from a manuscript of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, fifteenth century

‘There is no dish that cannot be improved with sugar.’ — Platina, a fifteenth-century cookbook author

Platina says this as calmly as though he were talking about salt. In fact, he is talking about power. In the fifteenth century, sugar was not an ‘addition’. It was a sign that you could afford long journeys, foreign ports and the hands of others who obtained, transported and sold that sugar.

The phrase ‘improved with sugar’ therefore sounds like a password. Like a small movement of the wrist: a little sweetness, and a dish becomes not merely tastier but ‘higher in rank’. The irony is that sugar then cured almost everything. At the very least, it cured the householder’s self-esteem.

Today, sugar has become so accessible that it is no longer added to demonstrate status. It is added to hide an emptiness of flavour. Here is where history completes a beautiful circle.





Chapter 10. From the Renaissance to Neoclassicism

Original source pages: 88–101



The Renaissance, food and social meaning in painting (Topic 4)

1) What the topic covers The Renaissance, and the periods that follow, especially from the seventeenth century onwards, show food as a language of society rather than merely as “decoration”. In paintings, we look for recurring scenes:

• the market (trade, produce, prices, urban life),

• the kitchen (labour, craft, the organisation of the household, people’s roles),

• the feast/banquet (status, rituals, rules, a display of prosperity),

• biblical subjects, but viewed “through a new lens”: through food, the artist tells us about actual daily life and their own period, as well as religion.

2) An important point about Holland and the seventeenth century From the seventeenth century, many food motifs become Dutch in spirit:

• a love of the tangible object (every lemon and knife is a protagonist),

• still lifes and scenes of everyday life,

• an interest in the material world and its details (tablecloths, tableware, fish, bread),

• objects reveal who you are, how you live, and what you consider right and beautiful.

3) How to look at a painting (my checklist) When I see food in Renaissance or early modern painting, I ask myself:

• What exactly is on the table, and why does it matter? (Everyday or rare, seasonal or imported?)

• Where does the scene take place? (A market, kitchen, banqueting hall, tavern, home?)

• Who is beside the food? (Servants/cooks/traders/nobility?) And who is “in charge”?

• What signals of status are there? (Spices, sugar, expensive tableware, game, exotic produce?)

• Is there a moral or an allusion? (Moderation versus excess, labour versus idleness?)

• What is fashionable? (The way food is served, ingredients, forms, the “beauty of food”?)

4) How the Renaissance differs from earlier periods

• More colour, precision and texture. Food looks “edible”, almost tangible.

• The image is often about abundance and prosperity, or the dream of them.

• A new focus emerges: everyday life and the material world as important subjects for art.

5) The broader background that explains it all Food in art changes along with society:

• economic growth → more goods, trade, towns and markets;

• science and culture → new views of the body, health and everyday life;

• prosperity → food becomes a way to demonstrate “success”, and at the same time an occasion to discuss sin, restraint and morality;

• religion remains important, but its subjects are increasingly “brought down to earth” in recognisable daily settings.

FOOD IN RENAISSANCE AND EARLY MODERN ART

Food in Renaissance painting and beyond is not merely “still life for beauty’s sake”. It is a social language. Through ingredients, table settings, gestures and “who stands where”, the artist shows:

• prosperity or its absence,

• trade and new connections,

• fashions and habits,

• moral ideas (moderation/excess),

• and sometimes politics: who is “entitled” to abundance.

The main idea:

At a certain point, food begins to be painted as though it were an era’s passport. And that passport can be read.

1) Three principal settings: where food “lives”

1.1 The market (market scenes) What it shows: the economy in motion.

Here, produce means money, access and logistics.

Look at:

• the range of goods (local versus imported),

• scales, measures, baskets and packaging,

• the crowd and social roles,

• the gestures of bargaining.

Conclusion: a market scene is a “painting about nourishment”, but it is really a painting about society and exchange. 1.2 The kitchen (kitchen scenes) The kitchen is the “inside” of the household. It reveals the rules of that world: who works, who commands and who serves.

Look at:

• tools, fire and utensils,

• cutting up and preparation,

• who does the dirty work,

• the division of space (where the master or mistress is, and where the servants are). Conclusion: the kitchen is a scene about labour and order. 1.3 The feast/banquet (banquets) A feast is a showcase of status. It is a theatre of abundance.

Look at:

• the seating (who is nearer the centre, and who is “on the edge”),

• the number of dishes and the sophistication of the table setting,

• rare ingredients (game, spices, sugar),

• observance of “proper behaviour” (posture, gestures, moderation). Conclusion: a feast is about power and ideas of what is normal and proper.

2) How the Renaissance/modern era differs from earlier periods

Previously, food often had a “supporting” function, as a sign within a religious story. Now it becomes intensely material: colour, texture, shine, precision. Key changes

• Detail: food is painted as though it is giving off its aroma right now.

• Precision: the tangible presence of objects becomes a value in itself.

• Abundance as a subject: wealth is shown through a table rather than a slogan.

• Morality becomes more subtle: not “here is a sin”, but “here is a hint”.

BLOCK 6. ADDITIONAL MATERIALS: THREE “KEYS” TO THE TOPIC 6.1 “Caravaggio’s Artichoke”: food as a spark of character and of an era

The story: a quarrel over artichokes in a Roman tavern shows that food is part of honour, status and temperament. Caravaggio is not simply arguing about a dish. He is arguing about respect.

• Food as status → “how to tell the artichokes apart/how I am answered” → status = the tone of communication

• Food as everyday reality → tavern, police, complaint → a document of its time

• Food as psychology → an outburst, publicity, conflict → a culture of “honour” and temperament Interpretation:

• “This story helps us see that food in the city is not only nourishment, but also a social stage.”

• “The dispute over serving food shows that service is a language of relationships: who owes what to whom, and who is whose ‘equal’.” Questions for personal reflection:

1. What matters more in the quarrel: the artichokes or the waiter’s answer?

2. If an artist painted this scene, where would the light fall? On the hands? On the face? On the plate?

3. What makes this scene “Renaissance”: individuality, temperament, urban life?

6.2 “When Art Gives You Lemons”: the lemon as trade, technique and morality

The lemon in still lifes, particularly northern European ones, is an almost ideal subject: beautiful, textured, symbolic and able to “speak” about trade. Why the lemon is an ideal protagonist of still life

1. Import/distance: the lemon alludes to trade, routes and money.

2. Technique: peel, highlights, a droplet, a spiral of zest—a demonstration of skill.

3. A contrast of flavours: a lemon beside something fatty or sweet acts as a “balance button”.

4. Transience: cut it and the aroma escapes; freshness fades → pleasure is not eternal.

• Trade → a rare fruit on the table → “we have access”

• The artist’s skill → pared peel → “I know how to paint matter”

• Vanitas/transience → the fruit has already been cut into → “luxury passes” Checklist for analysing a painting with a lemon

• Is the lemon whole or has it been cut into?

• Is it at the centre or to one side?

• What is beside it: glass, silver, oysters, bread, fabric?

• What is the impression: a celebration or “everyday luxury”?

• Is there a moral suggestion: abundance or a warning? Conclusion The lemon often works like “the scent of money from afar”: it brings trade, status and a sense of time into the painting.

6.3 Video on sugar sculpture (Getty): food as spectacle and power

Sugar constructions are not simply desserts. They are food theatre. What is an “edible monument”? A large composition made of sugar, sometimes enormous: architecture, figures, symbols, whole “scenes”. Guests are shown them as marvels. Then they are… eaten or taken apart. Why sugar?

• Rarity and price: for a long time, sugar was a “luxury” rather than an everyday ingredient.

• Technology: being able to work with sugar means having skilled makers and resources.

• Illusion: sugar can look like marble or porcelain.

• Beauty for a single occasion: its meaning lies in the moment and the effect.

Symbol → Example → Conclusion

• Power → sugar “architecture” on the table → power builds a world even in food

• Prosperity → costly ingredients and craftsmanship → a demonstration of means

• Theatre → display → delight → destruction → celebration as an event What to take from this for the Renaissance topic Here, the feast fully becomes a stage on which:

• abundance = an argument,

• aesthetics = status,

• food = a cultural medium, like music or architecture.

3) Summary: the common thread

• Caravaggio → food as social conflict and character

• Lemons → food as trade, technique and morality

• Sugar sculpture → food as power and spectacle The main connection Food ceases to be “just food”. It becomes a language of prosperity, taste, power and meaning.

4) Points for discussion:

1. “I think it matters that food functions here as a social marker: it shows not only prosperity, but also rules of behaviour.”

2. “What interests me in still life is that pleasure is always close to a reminder of time: the fruit has been cut, the drink poured, and the moment is already slipping away.”

3. “Sugar monuments are literally the architecture of power on a table: celebration as a demonstration of resources.”

4. “Even in religious subjects, the artist often speaks about their own present through details of food and daily life.”

5. “The Dutch tradition adds a sense of materiality: the object becomes a bearer of meaning.”

Biblical scenes as feasts

The art of the High Renaissance in the sixteenth century emphasised the human figure with ideal proportions.

Human figures were depicted in balanced and beautiful compositions, while Mannerism exaggerated Renaissance ideals of the figure, light and colour through asymmetrical and unnaturally graceful compositions. This was achieved by “flattening” pictorial space and distorting the human figure, presenting it as an idealised conception of the subject rather than a realistic depiction.

For example, in the painting below on the biblical subject of the Marriage at Cana. Christ’s first miracle took place at a wedding in the town of Cana. During the feast, the hosts ran out of wine, and Christ miraculously transformed jars of water into excellent wine.

In The Wedding Feast at Cana, Veronese creates visual tension through complex cultural codes and symbolism—social, religious and theological—which present the biblical story in a way relevant to a Renaissance viewer. The painting was commissioned by Benedictine monks for a wall of the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Compare it with the medieval painting of the same subject.

By the fifteenth century, most depictions of food belonged to religious subjects and were commissioned by the Church or intended for altars. Unlike paintings of similar subjects in the Middle Ages, Renaissance biblical stories became an opportunity to portray abundant kitchens and appealing produce and delicacies. Religion and religious subjects began to be viewed differently. Subjects such as the Marriage at Cana allowed artists to depict a wedding feast in detail. Such feasts were familiar everywhere, and these paintings became important expressions of culture. They remain significant sources of information about customs and tastes.

The secularisation of food painting

Food assumed an important place in painting when:

1. paintings became more secular and could occupy a central position in a room;

2. still life gained higher status in the sixteenth century as interest in classical art grew in Europe.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, paintings depicting food became more secular: they were made for private homes and placed in particular rooms, such as the dining room. Demand grew among the prosperous bourgeoisie, who wanted to decorate their homes with works that reflected the “earthly” character of their surroundings while retaining moral and religious significance.

The precise purpose, location and ownership of such paintings are often unknown, making generalisation difficult. Sometimes they belonged to wealthy patrons, sometimes to people in the food business, and sometimes to producers themselves—even bakers.

Markets

Perhaps the first painting in which food is more important, or larger, than the Christian subject is the 1551 painting Butcher’s Stall by Pieter Aertsen

(Pieter Aertsen).

This “reversed” significance of the biblical subject is called “Mannerist inversion”, and such paintings are called “inverted still lifes”. In this painting of a butcher’s stall, the biblical story is in the background. This demonstrates the growing secularisation of the sixteenth century and declining attention to religion. Aertsen effectively established the genre of the market painting. Market scenes bring food to the foreground and present a vision of plenty, sometimes even excessive abundance. According to art historians, this painting was probably commissioned by the butchers’ guild in Antwerp.

On the one hand, the materiality of the images gives a sense of control over the world. Meat is the food of the rich, but these images are not necessarily about social class. Meat gives the painting strength, energy and “masculinity”. Yet such market paintings differ from earlier hunting scenes. They do not depict the wealthy: instead, the meat belongs to ordinary people. In this sense, the market painting shows a democratisation of the pleasure of food. On the other hand, the painting contains many religious symbols, alluding to Eucharistic symbolism: fish arranged in a cross and pointing towards the biblical scene; the Trinitarian symbol of the pretzel; a jug of wine above the pretzel, signifying bread and wine. Perhaps this suggests that nourishment for the body should remind us of nourishment for the soul, prompting renewed reflection on the spiritual against a background of the temporal and material.

Allegories of the four elements. Different kinds of food represent the four elements:

• vegetables—earth

• fish—water

• birds—air

• game—fire Biblical scenes appear in the background:

• a vegetable stall, with the Flight into Egypt behind it—an allegory of Earth

• a fish stall in a town, with the Miraculous Draught of Fishes behind it—an allegory of Water

• a poultry stall in a town, with the Prodigal Son behind it—an allegory of Air

• a kitchen scene, with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary behind it—an allegory of Fire “This is a visual ‘shift of emphasis’: the sacred becomes the background, while everyday life comes to the fore, yet the religious subject remains as a moral commentary on abundance.”

The lecture concerns Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a sixteenth-century Mannerist court painter famous for innovative portraits made entirely from objects: fruit, vegetables, flowers, fish and books. Although he also produced traditional religious paintings, his “composite” portraits performed two functions at once: they entertained the court as sophisticated curiosities and could also make critical statements about their subjects.

Mannerism is defined as a late Renaissance style that deliberately “pushes” proportion, balance and idealised beauty to the point of asymmetry and refined deformation. The central example is the portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II as Vertumnus, the Roman god of the seasons and metamorphosis. Arcimboldo adorns the figure with the produce of every season to emphasise abundance and a “golden age” under Rudolf’s rule. The portrait worked as flattering propaganda intended to improve the public image of a generally unpopular ruler, and it fitted well with Arcimboldo’s eleven years of service at Rudolf’s court.

1) Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s artistic identity and career

Court painter and traditional subjects

• Arcimboldo was a conventional court painter to three Roman emperors, indicating sustained patronage and membership of an elite artistic milieu.

• Alongside his experiments, he painted traditional religious works, demonstrating versatility within the recognised genres of the age.

Creator of “object” or composite portraits

• He is best known for portraits assembled entirely from objects: fruit, vegetables, flowers, fish and books, all of which form a human likeness through precise composition.

• Such works served as courtly “amusements”, designed to provide entertainment, wit and visual play.

Critical intentions in character portraits

• Beyond entertainment, many portraits contained criticism of their subjects, concealing satire or moral commentary within the composition.

• Examples of character types include the “librarian”, assembled from books, and the “waiter/servant”, composed of tavern objects, where the selection of objects alludes to the person’s role and qualities.

2) Mannerism (the late Renaissance) and its stylistic features

Definition and historical position

• Arcimboldo is a sixteenth-century Mannerist painter; Mannerism is also called the late Renaissance.

• It follows the High Renaissance and develops by intensifying its ideals.

Exaggerating the qualities of the High Renaissance

• Mannerists pushed proportion, balance and ideal beauty towards deliberate deformation, often creating asymmetry and “unnaturally” graceful compositions.

• In Arcimboldo, this can be seen in the way he layers food and flowers to form “anatomy”: the image moves away from naturalism but retains a complex and carefully considered structure.

3) The portrait Rudolf II as Vertumnus

The subject and iconography

• Arcimboldo depicts Rudolf II as Vertumnus, the Roman god of the seasons and metamorphosis, assembling the figure from seasonal fruit, vegetables and flowers.

• The emperor appears vigorous, strong and handsome; the “harvest” assemblage symbolises abundance and renewal.

Political symbolism and function

• The abundant gifts of all the seasons signify the return of a “golden age” under Rudolf II, alluding to prosperity and divine favour.

• The connection with metamorphosis reinforces an image of adaptability and cyclical renewal, giving the reign a benevolent, mythological colouring.

Patronage and public image

• Arcimboldo served Rudolf II for eleven years, so this flattering presentation accords with the court’s expectations and the patron’s wishes.

• Despite Rudolf II’s general unpopularity, connotations of divinity, strength and prosperity were intended to improve his public image—a telling example of art operating as political propaganda.

The emergence of the Baroque, Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro and an analysis of Bacchus—a brief summary

This lecture, analysed on 2026-02-04, concerns the way the Baroque style grew out of Mannerism in Italy around the turn of the seventeenth century, and how, in less than a century, “aesthetic leadership” in Europe shifted from Italy to Spain and then to France. Particular emphasis is placed on Caravaggio’s decisive influence on Baroque painting, above all through chiaroscuro: a sharp contrast of light and shadow that intensifies drama and creates a pronounced illusion of three-dimensionality. The lecture also offers a detailed analysis of Caravaggio’s Bacchus (Il Bacco), now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, examining its composition, vanitas symbolism and history of patronage. The painting was made for a cardinal who loved Greek mythology; he later gave it to the Medici family, after which it remained in Florence.

The emergence and shift of aesthetic leadership in the early modern period

Italy’s leadership at the turn of the seventeenth century

In the early 1600s, Italy set the tone for European fashion, taste and aesthetics, both in painting and in artistic culture more broadly. It was within this Italian environment that the Baroque developed as a response to Mannerism.

The transfer of leadership to Spain and France

In less than a century, leadership shifted first from Italy to Spain and then to France. This is linked to wider cultural and political changes affecting patronage and “artistic authority”, with France eventually becoming the dominant centre.

The Baroque: origins, characteristics and scope

Origins in Mannerism

The Baroque developed out of Mannerism but countered its stylisation with new priorities: drama, emotional effect and realism. The aim was not simply to be “beautiful”, but to unsettle the viewer in a positive sense, like cinema in which light and shadow guide your emotional response.

Principal characteristics: contrast, richness of detail, grandeur

The Baroque uses strong contrasts, rich detail and large-scale compositions to evoke grandeur and a “wow effect”. This is not confined to painting: the same principles appear in architecture, furniture and music as a shared aesthetic of the age.

Caravaggio’s influence and technique

Caravaggio’s key role in Baroque painting

Caravaggio profoundly influenced the development of the Baroque through his innovative lighting and realism. His approach perfectly matched the Baroque aim of making an image feel as present in the “here and now” as possible.

Chiaroscuro: definition and effect

Chiaroscuro literally means “light and shadow”. Caravaggio deepens the shadows and “strikes” important areas with bright light, creating a powerful contrast that emphasises volume and drama.

Caravaggio’s Bacchus (Il Bacco): composition, symbolism and provenance

Subject and visual description

The painting depicts Bacchus, or Il Bacco in the Italian tradition, youthful and sensual, wearing a wreath of grapes and vine leaves. His manner is relaxed; his fingers toy with the lacing or edge of his open clothing, intensifying the sense of informality and sensuality.

On the table before him are a basket of fruit and a large glass carafe of red wine. Bacchus extends a goblet as if inviting the viewer to join him, directly involving the audience.

Location and history of patronage

The painting is now in the Uffizi in Florence. Caravaggio painted Bacchus for a cardinal who admired ancient, specifically Greek, mythology. The cardinal later gave the work to the Medici family, after which it remained in Florence; its “Florentine residence” was thus largely established by this transfer.

Chiaroscuro in Caravaggio’s Bacchus as a means of creating three-dimensionality

One of the central features of Baroque painting, vividly expressed in Caravaggio’s work, is the active use of chiaroscuro, based on a strong contrast of light and shadow. The lecture emphasises that Caravaggio deepens shadows and singles out the figure with directed light, intensifying the drama of the scene and creating an illusion of volume. In Bacchus, this principle becomes the main means of constructing form and space. Bacchus’s figure is set against a dark, neutral background without distracting details. This arrangement strengthens the chiaroscuro effect: illuminated areas of the body and still life appear to “project” towards the viewer. The volume of the face and body is created through gradations of light and half-tone: highlights on the forehead, cheekbones and shoulders combine with deep shadows on the opposite side, beneath the chin and within the folds of fabric. As a result, form is built through tonal modelling rather than contour, giving the image a sculptural conviction. The drapery and still life reinforce three-dimensionality. The folds of the fabric take shape through alternating bright “ridges” of light and dense shadowed hollows, emphasising its material presence and relief. Glass vessels and wine are rendered through precise highlights and transparent transitions that make the objects feel physically convincing. Thus, Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro has a constructive as well as an aesthetic function: it forms volume, establishes depth and produces the effect of immediate presence characteristic of the Baroque.

Vanitas symbolism in Bacchus: rotting fruit, youth and mortality

Bacchus combines the sensual appeal of a mythological figure with a philosophical undertone. The lecture stresses that the partly rotten fruit is a crucial element of meaning, carrying vanitas symbolism: a reminder of the fleeting nature of pleasure, youth and life. This motif introduces the idea of finitude characteristic of Baroque culture. Bacchus extends a goblet to the viewer, creating an invitation to enjoyment. Yet the still life beside him disrupts the illusion of an “eternal feast”: while the fruit remains outwardly appealing, it shows signs of decay. It is this detail that turns a scene of pleasure into a reflection on time. The fruit serves as a precise metaphor for human youth: at the point of ripeness it is most desirable, but that is also when its inevitable deterioration begins.

Thus, vanitas in Bacchus appears through a subtle contrast between temptation and decay rather than direct moral instruction. Caravaggio preserves an atmosphere of sensual pleasure while introducing a reminder of mortality, creating a tension between the beauty of the present moment and the inevitability of its disappearance.

Rococo, also called the late Baroque, is an artistic movement that emerged in eighteenth-century Paris during the reign of Louis XV, in reaction to the more formal and geometrically rigorous style of Louis XIV’s era. Rococo painting, which dominated French art, was decorative and theatrical. The term “Rococo” comes from the French word rocaille, meaning pebbles and small stones, and refers to the stones and shells used to decorate grotto interiors.

In Italy during this period, works such as the Mona Lisa, the paintings of the Sistine Chapel, Botticelli’s Venus and Leonardo’s Annunciation were created. Venetian architecture and Murano glass also provide striking examples of Rococo. Rococo architecture can also be seen in Naples and Sicily.

Rococo was the cuisine of advertising. It presented dishes as architectural and decorative objects. Roland Barthes wrote of ornamental cookery as something “multicoloured, beautiful, smooth, glazed, covered in sauce, icing or jelly”. In his account, glazing symbolises softness and delicacy. Rococo in cooking means abundant garnishes and sugar. At this point, the discussion primarily concerns French cuisine. Italians, meanwhile, continued to eat simpler, natural, regional peasant food.

In painting, the category of fête galante, or courtly festivity, depicted scenes in which young aristocrats gathered to enjoy themselves in pastoral surroundings.

Food in art—independent study

In Nicolas Lancret’s painting, we see typical elements of Rococo painting: an absence of symmetry, picturesque detail and curved lines. The painting was commissioned for King Louis XV’s private dining room at Versailles. The scene takes place in an idyllic park surrounded by lush green trees. Drunken men are shown seated around a table covered with a large white cloth.

This may be a scene before or after a hunt, since the men appear to be nobles but are in an informal setting.

At the top of the painting, Bacchus towers over the scene. As the god of wine, he emphasises the intoxicating power of the drink consumed by the diners. Bacchus is echoed by the central figure of a man with a laurel wreath on his head, raising a glass of wine in noisy abandon.

Jean-François de Troy. The Oyster Dinner

The statue of Venus at the top of the painting accentuates the oyster feast. Her position as the goddess of love reinforces the notion of oysters as an aphrodisiac. Alongside oysters, another delicacy is depicted: champagne. This was the first depiction of champagne in painting, as the drink had only been invented at the end of the preceding century.

Both paintings show the lifestyle that the king wanted these dining rooms to embody.

In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ideas about God, reason, nature and humanity were synthesised into a worldview known as the Enlightenment. It brought revolutionary changes in art, philosophy and politics. Its central idea was the use and celebration of reason: the power through which people could understand the structure of the universe and improve their own condition.

Enlightenment thinkers condemned Rococo art as immoral and indecent, calling for a new kind of moral art that could teach people to distinguish good from evil.

Neoclassicism versus Rococo and American still life (John van der Lyn, 1850s)

The lecture recorded on 2026-02-04 considers Neoclassicism as a countermovement to Rococo in Europe and emphasises its pursuit of simplicity, order and “purity”, or purism, inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. It examines a specific example: an American Neoclassical still life by John van der Lyn from the 1850s. Typical Neoclassical features are identified: theatrical staging, a rich variety of materials, classical framing elements such as an arch, and a large format suggesting a commission for a dining room. This is noted as a new development in American still life at the time. Neoclassicism as a counterweight to Rococo

Definition and motivation

Neoclassicism emerged across Europe as a reaction to Rococo, which was perceived as superficial and frivolous. The movement sought a return to the simplicity, order and purism associated with classical antiquity, especially the art and aesthetics of ancient Greece and Rome.

How Rococo was perceived

Rococo was characterised by decorative excess and a light, playful mood. Neoclassicism consciously opposed this with restraint and clarity. Features of American Neoclassical still life (John van der Lyn)

A contrast of content: nature and refined objects

The painting juxtaposes nature’s bounty with sophisticated, elegant objects. It creates a “dialogue” between organic abundance and crafted luxury. This contrast emphasises Neoclassical ideals of balance and order while demonstrating cultural refinement.

Variety of materials

Objects made from different materials are depicted: glass, ceramics, silver, marble, wood and fabric. Their selection and representation demonstrate technical skill and the “cultivated” elegance typical of Neoclassical taste.

Theatrical presentation

The composition is arranged like a stage: a raised curtain at the top creates the effect of a theatrical performance. It frames the scene and strengthens the impression of a carefully organised display, in keeping with the Neoclassical preference for structured, formal solutions.

Neoclassical framing elements

The arch serves as a typical Neoclassical “frame” within the painting. Architectural motifs such as arches refer to antiquity and reinforce the connection with the classical tradition.

Scale and function

The painting’s large format suggests a commission for a dining room. This indicates a new development in American still life in the 1850s: works became larger and were intended for formal domestic spaces.

“With an apple I will astonish Paris.”—Paul Cézanne

Alternative rendering: “I shall surprise Paris with an apple.”

[What follows is an imaginative comparison, not documented quotations from Cézanne or Jobs.]

What Cézanne and Apple have in common

Cézanne:

“I’ll take an ordinary apple and make Paris go wild.”

Apple (Jobs):

“I’ll take ordinary things—a phone, a player, a computer—and make the world go wild.”

In both cases, the key principle is:

✅ genius lies in execution and perspective, rather than in the “subject”.

Cézanne does not need gods and kings. Jobs does not need “technical monsters with 1,000 buttons”. Both bring about a revolution through simplicity.





Chapter 11. Modern Painting and Art Made from Food

Original source pages: 102–117



Food as a cultural symbol in modern Western European art

The lecture examines how food became a subject in Western European art in the modern era, especially after the nineteenth century. It explains that artists gradually shifted their focus from beauty, nature and realism towards social and cross-cultural meanings. Food is not always the painting’s “main character”, but it becomes a useful and flexible instrument through which ideas can be expressed outside academic rules and religious symbolism. Against a background of increasing wealth and general prosperity, food becomes a cultural sign and even an artist’s personal “marker”. The lecture proposes to examine numerous paintings to see how food reflects an artist’s style across roughly two centuries of active development and modernisation.

How the focus of Western European art changed (the modern period)

• A shift from traditional values—beauty, nature and realism—to social and cross-cultural meanings.

After the nineteenth century, art became less concerned with being “simply beautiful and lifelike” and increasingly addressed society, ideas, identities and interactions between cultures.

• Approximately two centuries of accelerated modernisation.

Artists moved away from the restrictions of academies and familiar subjects, including religious symbolism, broadening their range of subjects and means of expression. Food as a motif fits this freedom well.

Food as a cultural symbol and personal “signature”

• Food as a cultural sign against a background of growing prosperity.

As society becomes wealthier, food ceases to be only “about survival” and begins to signify status, habits, values, belonging and everyday life.

• Food as a means of creative freedom.

The motif of food helps an artist move beyond the strict rules of academic painting and “obligatory” religious images.

• Food as an artist’s personal identifier.

The choice of ingredients, the manner of depiction and the context of food within the image can become part of a recognisable artistic language, like a chef’s signature seasoning: apparently a small detail, yet enough to identify its maker.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Realism

Realists often chose subjects from the lives of the lower social classes in order to move away from idealism.

Nineteenth-century Realists took the representation of food from seventeenth-century art but “lowered” the social class of the people depicted to give their works a greater sense of truth. In Realism, food does not serve as a metaphor for something else. It is simply what it is, though it may sometimes indicate poverty or simplicity. Let us consider Claude Monet’s painting Still Life with Beef.

Put briefly: in Realism, food is a fact rather than a “symbol”. It is not an “allegory of wealth, sin or time”, but an honest piece of reality: how people live, what they eat and what their daily lives are like.

Left-hand section. Let us consider this painting by Claude Monet:

Still Life with Beef.

We see meat, but food of a relatively “ordinary” kind. This is the sort of beef used, for example, to make Swiss steak; beside it is garlic for flavour. The earthenware mug may contain beer, also used in cooking.

Such a dinner could have provided a substantial meal for a working person in nineteenth-century France. By then, almost anyone could afford meat. In paintings of this kind, artists recorded real everyday life.

Right-hand section. This does not mean, however, that social status ceased to matter.

Édouard Manet, for example, displayed refined taste and culinary sophistication in his Still Life with Carp.

Here he assembled ingredients from which a fine meal could be prepared. The fish is probably a fresh catch from a French market. It will be cooked in a stew or bouillabaisse, in the pot behind it. At this stage, we no longer see allusions to “bodily humours”—moist and dry dishes—or religious symbolism, such as the symbolism of the fish. This painting presents France as a centre of culinary taste and high-society life.

Still lifes and paintings of food became still more significant when artists began to place technique and colour harmony above the subject itself. Freed from Europe’s academic hierarchy, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters concentrated on broad experimentation: loose, “dotted” brushwork, tonal relationships and the placement of colours on the canvas.

Impressionists and Post-Impressionists drew inspiration from natural colour schemes but reinterpreted nature through colour harmonies of their own, which could appear strikingly unnatural. Allegorical and mythological subjects are entirely absent from Impressionist still life. The play of colour, form and brushstroke can be clearly seen in this painting by Antoine Vollon. The still life depicts a mound of butter painted in a rich, deep yellow. The darker shade suggests butter made from the milk of cows grazing on fresh greenery in the countryside.

Kitchen scenes, food preparation and depictions of everyday objects were common subjects for still lifes in Vollon’s time. Every aspect of life, including domestic things, was considered worthy of the same attention.

In Antoine Vollon’s day, butter was usually bought directly from the farmer. Typically, cream was collected after milking and churned, after which pieces of butter were kneaded by hand or worked with a paddle to remove excess moisture, because a high proportion of buttermilk shortened its keeping time.

Butter was generally stored wrapped in cheesecloth in a cool place. In the painting, the cloth wrapping the butter hangs loosely beside a pair of eggs. Thick marks are visible on the butter’s surface, laid over the artist’s brushstrokes. They may deliberately suggest marks left by a knife used to spread the butter or by a wooden paddle used to smooth it, which was also employed in butter-making.

Café culture became another important subject in nineteenth-century art. Cafés had existed in Paris since the seventeenth century. They were modelled on the coffee houses of Constantinople and were initially meeting places for the elite. When social classes began to mingle in the early nineteenth century, cafés became spaces where liberals and revolutionaries gathered.

Cafés came to embody Parisian life and became important meeting places for intellectuals and artists in other major European cities as well. The café became a symbol of modern life.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, cafés grew increasingly popular with the working class. People came for food, drink and company. Over the course of a day, a worker might visit a café before starting work, at midday for an aperitif, after lunch for a digestif, and after work during the “absinthe hour”.

Works by Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh immortalised café life. Artists such as Manet and Degas were acute observers. They assumed the role of the flâneur, the idle observer of urban life, recording events as they saw them. Their paintings convey a spontaneous moment, an instant cut from time, like a photograph.

Édouard Manet had long been recognised as a master of depicting modern Parisian life. His first café painting, At the Café, was painted in 1878. The work captures a small fragment of the café atmosphere witnessed by Manet himself and his artist friends. A woman sits at the centre of the painting. She looks directly at the viewer. One arm rests on the back of a chair, while her other hand lies in her lap. A slight smile on her face makes her feelings difficult to read. It may be a response to the companion sitting beside her. His mouth is slightly open, but he does not engage her in conversation. Manet creates a sense of separation between the two figures, as though he had caught the woman through a camera lens. The cropped edges of the composition reinforce the scene’s photographic quality. Quick, loose brushstrokes give the painting spontaneity and contrast sharply with the smooth surface of the academic painting against which the Realists rebelled. At the Café, Édouard Manet, 1878, oil on canvas

The artist who brought still life almost to the level of abstraction, thereby paving the way for the twentieth-century Cubists, was Paul Cézanne. In still life, he found an ideal means for his revolutionary investigations into geometrical and spatial organisation. For Cézanne, still life became the principal way to free painting from its illustrative function and turn it into a demonstration of the elements of colour, form and line. This was an important step towards abstract art. His paintings inspired many generations of artists. Still life was Cézanne’s most important genre. Over four decades, he produced around two hundred such works. In Still Life with Fruit Dish, he creates a shallow, compressed space that flattens the sculptural volumes of the dish, glass and fruit. This painting was particularly precious to Paul Gauguin. He called it “an exceptional pearl, the apple of my eye”. He was forced to part with it only when he urgently needed money for medical treatment. In this work, Gauguin deliberately imitates Cézanne. We see a similarly compressed space. Gauguin replaces Cézanne’s apples with mangoes and the French floral wallpaper with cloth bearing a Tahitian pattern. One significant difference is the human figure in the top right-hand corner, barely visible through a door or window. Still Life with Teapot and Fruit, Paul Gauguin, 1896, oil on canvas, 18¾ × 26 inches (47.6 × 66 cm). Although Vincent van Gogh is widely known for his Sunflowers, his still life Drawing Board (1889) is a self-portrait in the form of a still life. According to the museum that holds the work, Van Gogh rented the Yellow House in Arles and invited Paul Gauguin to work with him. Disagreements soon developed between the artists, however. After a fierce quarrel, Van Gogh became disoriented and cut off his left ear. He was admitted to hospital in Arles and discharged on 7 January 1889. That day, he wrote to his brother Theo that he intended to begin two still lifes the following day in order to “get used to painting again”. One of them was this painting with a plate of onions, executed in contrasting colours. The tabletop is painted in almost horizontal strokes, while the background is built from vertical ones. The objects in the painting suggest that Van Gogh is returning to the routines of everyday life: a letter from Theo, a plate of onions, a pipe and tobacco, a bottle of wine or absinthe, a coffee pot, a calendar with a burning candle, a stick of sealing wax, a box of matches and, finally, the book Annuaire de la santé on proper nutrition and hygiene. All these are laid out on the table in place of an image of the artist himself. Still Life with a Plate of Onions, Vincent van Gogh, early January 1889, oil on canvas

Food in Art: the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries

• The nineteenth century—a move away from academic and religious subjects.

• An interest in everyday life, the modern city and the artist’s personal viewpoint.

• Food and still life become a useful field for experiments with colour, form and composition.

Café culture

• The café—a symbol of modern urban life.

• A place where social classes mix, converse and observe.

• The artist as flâneur, recording a moment like a photographer. Artists: Manet, Degas, Van Gogh.

Édouard Manet

• Depicts modern Parisian life.

• Uses cropped compositions and rapid brushstrokes.

• Creates a sense of an accidental, “captured” moment.

• Food and drink are part of the setting rather than symbols with predetermined meanings.

Impressionism

• Technique, colour and light take priority over subject matter.

• A rejection of allegory and mythology.

• Still life as an investigation of colour harmonies and brushwork.

Paul Cézanne

• Still life as a tool for analysing form and space.

• Compressed, flattened space.

• A rejection of the illustrative function.

• A step towards abstract art and Cubism.

Paul Gauguin

• Develops Cézanne’s ideas.

• Introduces exotic motifs: mangoes and Tahitian fabrics.

• Combines still life with elements of narrative.

Vincent van Gogh

• Still life as a self-portrait without a human figure.

• Objects reflect the artist’s inner state.

• Contrasting colour and directional brushwork intensify emotion.

Food in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art is a way of speaking about modernity, culture and the artist’s personality rather than a symbol of morality.

American artists

Across the Atlantic, American artists responded to the still-life genre in various ways. Those who trained in Europe brought European artistic styles into American portraiture and still life. Charles Willson Peale became the founder of an entire family of distinguished American artists and a key figure in the United States’ artistic community. He and his son Raphaelle Peale were among the first American artists to work in still life.

Raphaelle Peale used still life to express cultural, political and social values, turning the genre into a significant artistic language. He is regarded as America’s first truly outstanding still-life painter.

Peale was particularly interested in rendering the colour and texture of food. Most of his works depict fruit. Such paintings generally decorated dining rooms. Cutlet and Vegetables is one of only two known works by the artist to depict meat and vegetables. It is also Peale’s largest surviving still life.

Cutlet and Vegetables, Raphaelle Peale, 1816, oil on panel, 46.4 × 61.5 cm.

Food in genre painting and social conflict

Food in genre painting also reflected the social tensions of its time in America.

For example, The Epicure, painted by Francis William Edmonds in 1838, is considered one of the earliest depictions of a tavern meal in American art.

The painting was made in 1838, shortly before the beginning of the Civil War. It depicts a stout Northern businessman eating beef and drinking port, while a thin farmer and his wife try to sell him a suckling pig.

It offers a harsh critique of the simple, rural South, traditionally associated with pig farming, from the perspective of the industrial and decadent North, associated with beef.

The Epicure, Francis William Edmonds, 1838.

The illusion of reality and still life in the second half of the nineteenth century

In the second half of the nineteenth century, trompe-l’œil, or optical illusion painting, flourished in America through artists such as John Frederick Peto. At the same time, William Joseph McClosky’s still lifes of paper-wrapped citrus fruit became well known. These works achieved worldwide recognition and belong to the same period.

Still Life with Cake, Lemon, Strawberries and Glass, John Frederick Peto, 1890, oil on canvas, 25.72 × 35.4 cm. Wrapped Oranges, William Joseph McClosky, 1889, oil on canvas, 30.4 × 40.6 cm.

Oranges as a symbol of luxury and packaging

McClosky’s works featuring paper-wrapped citrus fruit make a strong impression through their colour and almost photographic realism. Bright fruit against dark backgrounds and polished wooden surfaces creates a powerful visual effect. On the east coast of the United States, oranges were still rare at the time. They had to be brought from warmer regions. Paper wrapping appeared in the late nineteenth century to protect fruit from damage and spoilage while it was transported in wooden crates. Because of their rarity, oranges were often given as gifts, and the wrapping paper also served as gift wrap. The earliest wrappers from this period were simple and plain: white, yellow, pink or blue.

Later, around the turn of the twentieth century, producers began to print information on the paper: farm names, the fruit’s place of origin, logos and illustrations.

The twentieth century—Cubists and Dada

Building on Cézanne’s techniques of shifting planes and axes, the Cubists muted the Fauves’ bright palette and focused on breaking objects down into pure geometrical forms and planes. Between 1910 and 1920, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris produced numerous still lifes. Musical instruments often appeared in them. Almost for the first time, still life stood at the centre of artistic experimentation and innovation. Still Life with Pitcher and Piece of Bread, Pablo Picasso, 1936.

Rejecting the Cubist “flattening” of space, Marcel Duchamp and other participants in the Dada movement took a radically different direction, creating three-dimensional “readymade” still lifes. Seeking to restore symbolic meaning to still life, Futurists and Surrealists placed recognisable still-life objects in their dreamlike, unreal spaces. Sculpture-morte, or “dead sculpture”, is often compared with the Renaissance portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, although a face is quite difficult to discern in it. The paper serving as its background identifies the maker of the marzipan vegetables: the confectioner Bonnevie of Perpignan. The name Bonnevie, literally “good life”, and the making of “still lifes”—nature morte, “dead nature”, in French—form a play on words characteristic of Duchamp. Sculpture-morte, Marcel Duchamp, 1959. Marzipan fruit and vegetables, insects and paper mounted on wood, in a glass box, 33.8 × 22.5 × 9.9 cm.

When twentieth-century American artists encountered European Modernism, they began interpreting still life by combining American Realism with abstraction derived from Cubism. Marsden Hartley’s works are characteristic of American food still life in this period. Still Life No. 2, Marsden Hartley, 1921–1923, oil on canvas, 54.6 × 91.8 cm.

In Mexico from the 1930s onwards, Frida Kahlo and other artists created their own version of Surrealism, incorporating local produce and cultural motifs into still lifes. Artists such as Kahlo addressed national identity through food. Frida Kahlo’s art reflects her personal experience and interest in Mexican folk art. Images of birth and rebirth appear in her works, along with skeletons, bleeding hearts and other symbols. In this painting, the pitaya—an edible cactus fruit with a tough skin and juicy flesh—symbolises nature’s bounty. The cut fruit may refer to sexuality, as well as to Kahlo’s own injured body following the serious accident she experienced in her youth. Pitahayas, Frida Kahlo, 1938, oil on aluminium, 25.4 × 35.6 cm.

Still life in the twenty-first century. Fernando Botero

1. Still life today Still life is not an outdated genre.

It remains relevant for as long as an artist has something to remember and record. Objects become a way to preserve a moment, a state of mind or a personal experience.

2. Fernando Botero as an example of contemporary still life Botero shows that still life can be alive and contemporary. He uses the same artistic language for people, objects and spaces.

3. Botero’s artistic language

• Form: rounded, massive, volumetric objects.

Objects look as though they have “come alive”. The style is readily recognisable in any subject.

• Colour: bright, saturated and emphasising the materiality of the world.

• Figures: depicted in everyday life, with detached gazes. They are simultaneously familiar and a little “out of place”.

4. Nostalgia as a central theme Botero’s work is rooted in nostalgia for the world of his youth and his homeland. The artist deliberately returns to personal memory as a source of images.

5. Still life in Botero’s work Food and domestic things are more than objects.

They are instruments for expressing his view of the world.

Through still life, the artist conveys memories, identity and a relationship with the past.

Still life remains a relevant genre in the twenty-first century.

It works when objects become bearers of the artist’s memory, meaning and personal experience.

Food in art is not about food

The lecture discussed how art changed and how the role of food in painting changed with it.

Before, everything was straightforward. Paintings were commissioned. A still life with food showed status, prosperity and the order of the world. Bread, fruit and game on the table amounted almost to a report on society’s life.

Then the world shifted. Artists ceased to be mere executors of commissions. Art became a personal statement. And food ceased to be an “object”. It became a way of thinking.

Still life did not disappear. It survived because it proved flexible. Through food, artists began to speak about themselves, their time and their country. Not “what we eat”, but “who we are”.

European artistic styles spread around the world, particularly to the Americas. Yet there they were not copied blindly. Techniques were adopted; meanings changed. Local food became an occasion to discuss a distinct identity and pride in it. An important idea from the lecture is simple and powerful: food in art is a lens. Through it, we can see society, culture, conflict, joy and memory.

This approach will also work beyond painting. In performance, literature, photography and cinema, food everywhere says more than it seems to at first glance.

Sometimes a plate in a painting is not about dinner at all. It is about a country, a time and a person.

Retrospective Bust of a Woman, Salvador Dalí, 1933 In 1931, Dalí described Surrealist sculpture as “absolutely useless and created solely to materialise, in fetishistic form and with the greatest possible tangible reality, ideas and fantasies of a delirious nature”.

Only two years later, he created the following sculpture: Retrospective Bust of a Woman.

In this sculpture, Dalí presents a woman as an object, specifically an object intended for consumption.

A long, phallic baguette crowns her head; ears of maize hang around her neck; and ants crawl across her forehead as though collecting crumbs.

Salvador Dalí, Retrospective Bust of a Woman, 1933

(some elements reconstructed in 1970).

Painted porcelain, bread, maize, feathers, paint on paper; beads, an inkwell, sand and two pens. 29 × 27¼ × 12⅝ inches (73.9 × 69.2 × 32 cm)

The sculpture Floor Burger, originally Giant Hamburger. Claes Oldenburg became interested in Pop Art after moving to New York in 1956. While artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein drew inspiration from mass culture, Oldenburg found his muse in hamburgers, fans, bagels and other familiar objects. Philosophically, Oldenburg considered himself a Realist. Yet he took objects from the real world and placed them outside their context, making soft what should be hard and enormous what should be small. Floor Burger, Claes Oldenburg, 1962. Canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, painted with acrylic paint. 132.1 × 226.1 cm.

“I like working with very simple ideas,” Oldenburg said. “It seemed entirely natural to me that, if you like touching things, you like touching soft things as much as hard ones. If you are going to make sculpture from the real things around you, why not try making them soft, so that you can push them and they change shape? They had to be stuffed. That was very important. There were different ways of stuffing—you could stuff them tightly or loosely. These large objects were so big, and their interiors required so much filling, that I decided to stuff them with boxes. These enormous objects were inspired by grand pianos on 57th Street or cars in showrooms. Objects that were too large for the shops containing them. We did not make them downtown and bring them here—we made them right in the gallery.” When Floor Burger first appeared, it caused considerable controversy. It does not stimulate the appetite: it is a “dead hamburger”. It is an anti-monument, an anti-hero. It is crushed by its own weight and size. The intention was to challenge popular culture. When the Art Gallery of Ontario acquired the work in 1967, art students made a 2.7-metre-high ketchup bottle in protest at the purchase of Oldenburg’s work. Fifty students, together with their teachers, marched with the bottle in front of the gallery and then attempted to donate it, but the gallery refused to accept it.

The Dinner Party—Judy Chicago

The Dinner Party is a monumental ceremonial banquet arranged on a triangular table with thirty-nine place settings, each dedicated to an important woman in history, such as Sacagawea, the Byzantine Empress Theodora, Virginia Woolf and Georgia O’Keeffe.

The settings consist of embroidered runners, gold goblets and cutlery, and porcelain plates with raised central motifs based on vulval and butterfly forms. The style of each setting was designed to reflect the woman to whom it is dedicated and was made by hand by the artist. The names of a further 999 women are inscribed in gold on the white tiled floor beneath the triangular table. Judy Chicago, 1974–79. Ceramics, porcelain and textiles. 1,463 × 1,463 cm.

The artist’s aim in this work is to present the richness of women’s heritage through a monumental artwork. It is widely considered the first epic feminist artwork. The work is highly symbolic and almost a staging of the Last Supper. It is a formal dinner that identifies and celebrates each woman through what appears on the table. Unsurprisingly, it received varied criticism: some found it emotional and moving, others vulgar and kitsch. Over time, responses became more positive, and the work is now recognised as an important feminist artwork.

Food as a political object—A Subtlety (sugar sculpture)

Dominated by an enormous sugar-coated female sphinx with distinctively Black features, a headscarf and earrings, this work is both beautiful and disturbing.

It makes a statement about slavery and honours the unnamed enslaved people who worked in the sugar industry. The sphinx was 75 feet long and 35 feet high, approximately 23 metres long and 11 metres high. Around forty tonnes of sugar were used to coat the surface, applied by hand to a polystyrene structure.

Kara Walker, A Subtlety (Sugar Baby), 2014. Polystyrene blocks and sugar, 75 feet long and 35 feet high.

This sculpture was installed in the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, New York, which in the nineteenth century produced half the sugar consumed in the United States. A prolonged strike took place here in 2000: 250 workers protested against pay and working conditions for twenty months. The factory has now been demolished and replaced with offices and apartments. Walker’s work also became a work about that factory and its destruction.

Food as a means of displaying craftsmanship

Sometimes food in sculpture is intended to be more accessible and carries no strong symbolism or political message.

We will not explore the commercial reasons for creating these works or discuss their value within the art world. Nevertheless, they are notable projects, whether made by independent artists or well-known fashion houses.

In 2017, British artist Lucy Sparrow recreated an entire supermarket called Sparrow Mart in Los Angeles, filled with 31,000 felt sculptures. The shop was an updated version of Cornershop, Sparrow’s successful 2014 London project based on a shop selling British goods, and of 8 ’till late, a larger installation in New York in 2017. The artist also created another shop, Delicatessen on 6th, in New York in 2019. The art looks very realistic, sweet and “plush”.

An image from Sparrow Mart—a supermarket created from felt sculptures.





Chapter 12. Writing about Food, the Language of Menus and Translated Sources

Original source pages: 118–129



A food writer must be bold both at the desk and at the stove.

The author emphasises that a good food writer should be able both to cook and to write boldly and engagingly about that experience. Creative non-fiction about food—memoirs, novels, poetry and the art of menu writing

• The lecture explains that food writing is a broad field encompassing many genres, while focusing primarily on creative non-fiction and literary forms—memoirs, novels and poetry—in which food serves both as a subject and as a symbolic device.

• The lecture explains why and how food appears in literature, and stresses the importance of sensory detail and understanding the audience when describing food, including in menus, cookbooks and reviews;

• it also shows how food can advance a plot, convey social and historical context, and reveal character.

• Other forms of non-fiction, such as journalism, reportage, culinary history, nutritional science and culinary travel, are explicitly excluded from the lecture, with the exception of menu writing because of its close connection with hospitality and the art of dining.

1. The scope and definition of food writing

• Creative non-fiction as the central genre: food writing spans many genres—novels, poetry, cookbooks, travel writing, personal essays and journalism about nutritional science—but the lecture emphasises creative non-fiction as its most widespread and commercially viable form.

• Creative non-fiction is defined as writing about factual material using creative strategies, such as narrative techniques from fiction, to produce an engaging, novel-like narrative.

• Diverse backgrounds and a shared appreciation: writers enter the field from a wide variety of professional backgrounds;

• the constant foundation, however, is an understanding and enjoyment of food.

• The lecturer notes that someone who does not enjoy eating is unlikely to write about food.

• This shared appreciation supports authenticity, sensory richness and reader engagement across subgenres.

2. The purposes and functions of food in literature

• Direct, literal description of food: food may be described directly in contexts such as menus, cookbooks and restaurant reviews, with an emphasis on sensory qualities—smell, appearance and taste.

• Effective direct food description addresses key questions: where the ingredients come from, who the audience is—the reader or diner—and how much culinary knowledge that audience has.

• It draws on appealing, descriptive and visual language specific to food to convey sensory experience and cooking methods vividly.

• Food as symbol, metaphor and narrative device: beyond literal description, food functions as a symbol or representation, conveying meanings that extend beyond the dish itself.

• In novels, eating scenes can advance the plot, provide social and historical context, and add “literary colour”, enriching setting and mood.

• Food reveals character: social and economic background, education and values. Through food choices and associated moments, readers infer a character’s personality and status.

• These functions align with the fundamental aims of narrative: exploring desires and fears, describing events, and showing how a character changes as a result of them.

3. Genre focus and exclusions in this lecture

• An emphasis on memoirs, novels and poetry: the lecture concentrates on culinary memoirs, novels and poetry as literary forms in which creative techniques are integral rather than merely borrowed.

• It argues that food helps these forms tell relatable stories by grounding abstract themes in concrete sensory experience.

• Exclusions, with an exception for menus: the lecture does not cover journalism, reportage, culinary history, nutritional science or culinary travel, although it acknowledges that they often use creative techniques borrowed from fiction.

• Menu writing is a deliberate exception because of its strong connection with hospitality and the “art of dining”, making it relevant to the lecture’s focus on literary and aesthetic aspects.

4. Practical considerations for descriptive food writing

• Understanding audience and context: writers should adapt descriptions to the reader or diner and their culinary knowledge, ensuring clarity without condescension and selecting appropriate terminology.

• The provenance of ingredients adds depth by placing dishes within geographical, cultural and ethical contexts that enrich narrative or evaluative purposes.

• Language and sensory detail: use vivid, precise food vocabulary to convey smell, appearance and taste;

• this is crucial in menus, cookbooks and reviews for engaging readers and shaping expectations.

• Sensory detail should be balanced with the purpose of the narrative: in a literary context, it can illuminate character and theme;

• in practical contexts such as menus, it informs and attracts attention.

The language of restaurant menus and signals of price

This lecture examines how the language of restaurant menus signals price and status, drawing on research by Stanford University linguistics professor Daniel Jurafsky. It contrasts traditional menu writing, which uses particular keywords and descriptive language to justify higher prices, with the artistic, unconventional menus of elite restaurants such as Osteria Francescana.

While a typical menu works as a clear contract with the diner, avant-garde tasting menus use abstract and imaginative dish names to present dining as art, sending the diner on a gastronomic journey guided by a creative chef.

1. Linguistic signals of price and status in menus

• Daniel Jurafsky’s research: Daniel Jurafsky wrote How to Read a Menu. He and his team analysed thousands of menus to understand how word choice signals a restaurant’s high status and justifies higher prices.

• Historical and contemporary linguistic tools:

o In the 1970s, foreign words, particularly French or Italian ones, were a sign of sophistication.

o Today, restaurants use other linguistic tools to indicate a higher price, including: descriptions of provenance. § Cooking methods. § Descriptions of how food is served. § References to seasonality. §

• Keywords that justify higher prices:

o The study identified words correlated with high prices: farm, ranch, pasture, woodland, garden, farmers’ market, heritage, heirloom, exotic.

o Long words such as “reconstructed” and “dehydrated” also signal a higher price.

o Naming spices and stating their origins increases perceived value.

• Phrases and status: phrases such as “chef’s choice” indicate a premium offering, unlike “your choice”.

• Indicators of a mid-range restaurant:

o The use of “linguistic fillers”: “delicious”, “rich”, “crispy”.

o Words that cast doubt on quality by stating the obvious, such as “real” and “fresh”, indicate a mid-range establishment.

2. The menu as a communication tool

• The menu’s dual function: it is both a marketing text and a contract between the diner and the restaurant. It should clearly communicate the available options, what the food will be like and what it costs.

• Traditional menu structure: information should be easy to find, leading to the familiar organisation into starters, main courses and desserts.

• Breaking conventions: a restaurant may deliberately break these conventions to communicate a different character or brand identity.

3. The art of the tasting menu

• Example: Osteria Francescana. This Modena restaurant’s tasting menu is used as an example of breaking conventions. It has no traditional sections or prices, and the dish names are abstract, obscure or even absurd.

• Characteristics of an artistic tasting menu:

o Abstract dish names: for example, “beautiful psychedelic spin-painted veal” and “oops, I dropped the lemon tart”.

o An absence of rules: because it is a tasting menu, the diner has no choice.

o A reflection of experience: the names reflect the creative and experiential nature of the food.

• The chef as artist:

o Such a menu places diners in the hands of a creative chef for a “gastronomic journey”.

o Food is presented as the chef’s art, while the diners take the role of an audience.

o This is “chef’s choice to the highest degree”, and the food writing reflects that artistic control.

Analysis of a food scene in literature

Work: Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. Scene: Professor Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky and Dr Bormenthal having lunch.

• Plot development: at first glance, this scene slows the action, but it actually establishes crucial philosophical exposition. Over lunch, Preobrazhensky articulates his credo—the famous line, “Do not read Soviet newspapers before lunch”—and establishes a hierarchy in his relationship with Bormenthal, preparing the reader for his subsequent conflict with Sharikov and Shvonder.

• Revealing a character’s background: the food brilliantly reveals Philip Philipovich’s social, economic and educational status. He insists on hot appetisers, drinks vodka from the proper small tumblers rather than stemmed glasses, and teaches Bormenthal the art of dining: “Only landowners whom the Bolsheviks haven’t quite finished slaughtering chase their drinks with cold appetisers and soup.” His choices—caviar, roast beef and an elaborate hot appetiser on black bread—reveal an aristocrat of the spirit, a wealthy man, an aesthete and a representative of the old Moscow intelligentsia, accustomed to and knowledgeable about a high standard of living.

• Social/historical context: the scene takes place in 1920s Moscow. Against a background of devastation, widespread shortages and the rations eaten by the proletariat, and fed to the dog Sharik on the street, the lavishly laid table in the professor’s dining room creates an extraordinary historical contrast. Food here underlines the social divide between the surviving intellectual elite, preserving pre-revolutionary traditions, and the new Soviet reality.

[An educational example of a dish description; this text does not confirm that the dish was actually served or that the listed ingredients were supplied.]

Assignment 2. A menu description of a single dish

Audience: fine-dining restaurant guests seeking refined flavours and valuing aesthetics and environmentally responsible ingredients. Ingredient origins: Murmansk (fish), Sakhalin (roe), local farms (root vegetables and microgreens).

Menu text:

Murmansk halibut fillet with slow-cooked celeriac and roe sauce

“Chablis” Imagine the icy freshness of northern seas embodied in an exquisite culinary creation. At the heart of our dish is a supremely tender fillet of wild halibut, flown directly from the cold, crystal-clear waters of Murmansk. We sear the fish in a hot cast-iron pan until a delicate golden-amber crust forms, carefully preserving its melting, pearlescent texture within. As soon as the plate reaches your table, you will sense the subtle scent of a sea breeze, harmoniously interwoven with the warm, nutty, earthy notes of celeriac purée. The celeriac comes from local eco-farms and is slowly cooked in a wood-fired oven to reveal its natural sweetness. A thick cream sauce based on French white wine gently envelops the fish. Each spoonful bursts on the tongue with the salty pearls of selected red roe from Sakhalin, creating a perfect balance between the delicate purée and the halibut’s marine character. The final touch is young sorrel microgreens, adding visual freshness and a light citrus acidity that cleanses the palate. It is a play of contrasting textures and a symphony of flavours, created to surprise.

The menus of two local Tallinn restaurants: the elite Michelin-starred 180° by Matthias Diether and the popular, affordable café Kompressor, a well-known pancake restaurant in the Old Town.

Here is how their menus reflect the concepts described by Professor Jurafsky.

1. Elite restaurant: 180° by Matthias Diether

This restaurant is an ideal example of the artistic tasting-menu concept discussed in the lecture.

• Structure and format: the menu has no traditional sections such as “starters” or “main courses”. The guest has no choice: it is a fixed set. Dinner is presented as a gastronomic journey in which guests place themselves entirely in the hands of a creative chef.

• The highest degree of “chef’s choice”: the menu opens with a section entitled “Matthias’ inspiration”. Such personalised wording signals a premium offering, unlike the standard phrase “your choice”.

• Names of dishes and ingredients: the names make extensive use of abstraction, emphasising the concept, for example “Tomato marshmallow”, “Carrot variations in the 180° style” or “Sour chocolate”. The menu also emphasises the prestigious origins of ingredients, mentioning names such as Comté cheese, N25 Kaluga Reserve caviar and cheeses from Bernard Antony’s cellar, artificially increasing the dishes’ perceived value.

2. Mid-range restaurant: Pub Kompressor

The pancake restaurant’s menu works as a conventional contract with the guest: it is exceptionally clear and practical.

• Traditional structure: to make navigation straightforward and information easy to find, the menu is strictly divided into conventional categories: “Pancakes”, “Sweet pancakes”, “Snacks” and “Salads”.

• Stating the obvious: in the Estonian and English menu versions, one can find words confirming obvious properties of the ingredients, for example “Fresh salad with chicken fillet” (Värske salat). According to the lecture, words such as “fresh” or “real” are clear indicators of a restaurant in the middle price range.

• Straightforward descriptions: unlike elite establishments, there are no abstract metaphors or references to exotic farms. The names simply and honestly describe the contents of a serving: “Pancake with beef, pickled cucumber and cream cheese”. The food does not claim to be conceptual art, and the menu fulfils a purely practical function.

[TRANSLATED SOURCE. Excerpts headed “The Language of Food”, “How to Read a Menu” and “Entrée”. The recollections, the pronouns “I” and “we”, the collection of 6,500 menus and the analysis results belong to the author of the source material, not to Andrei Gritskov. The author, exact edition, pages and boundaries of quotation require verification. Daniel Jurafsky is named in the subsequent commentary in the original manuscript.]

The Language of Food

In our family, the joke about “consensus” is legendary: she read only every other chapter of War and Peace, so we say she read only Tolstoy’s Peace.

All innovation happens at intersections. Great food is no exception: it is born where cultures meet, as each borrows and transforms its neighbours’ ideas. The language of food is a window into these “in-between spaces”: ancient encounters between civilisations, modern cultural conflicts, and hidden clues to human thought, society and evolution. Every time you roast a turkey for Thanksgiving, raise a toast at a wedding, or choose crisps or ice cream in a shop, you take part in a conversation in the language of food.

San Francisco, California April 2014

How to Read a Menu

The most expensive restaurant in San Francisco will not give you a menu. Well, not quite. The waiters will gladly email you a beautifully printed list of dishes—“taro root, sea urchin, cardoon, brassicas…”—as a souvenir after your visit. This superb Michelin-starred restaurant is not alone. More and more expensive restaurants offer “blind” tasting menus, where you do not know what you will eat until the dish appears in front of you. The higher the restaurant’s status, the less choice you have.

Status used to be expressed differently. If you ate out in the 1970s, you probably visited establishments that the writer Calvin Trillin called La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine. These were pretentious “continental cuisine” restaurants whose menus mixed French and English. Trillin complained of being taken to a “purple palace” where the principal creative employee was the menu writer rather than the chef.

Menu-writing textbooks advised “continentalising” the menu: mixing French words with English or Italian, sometimes merely adding the French article Le to an English phrase:

Flaming Coffee Diablo, Prepared en Vue of Guest Ravioli parmigiana, en casserole Le Crabmeat Cocktail

Such menus are more than fashion. Thanks to the internet, we can study old menus in the New York Public Library’s collection. Early twentieth-century menus from expensive restaurants often abound in French words:

Flounder sur le plat Eggs au beurre noir Fried chicken à la Maryland half Green turtle à l’anglaise Sirloin steak aux champignons

This looks a little naïve today, but social status has not disappeared. Modern expensive restaurants still find ways to display it.

Every time you read a dish description, you see hidden linguistic clues about wealth, class and marketing techniques.

How to recognise an expensive restaurant from its menu Look at descriptions such as these:

Herb Roasted Elysian Fields Farms Lamb Eggplant Porridge, Cherry Peppers, Greenmarket Cucumbers and Pine Nut Jus

Grass Fed Angus Beef Carpaccio Pan Roasted King Trumpet Mushrooms

Dirty Girl Farm Romano Bean Tempura Persillade, Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Bison Burger 8 oz, blue star farms, grass fed & pasture raised, melted gorgonzola

The menu pays enormous attention to ingredient provenance: farms, ranches and markets. Research has shown that expensive restaurants mention ingredient origins fifteen times more often than inexpensive ones.

Expensive restaurants more often offer a fixed menu or “chef’s choice”:

Sashimi Omakase: ten kinds of chef’s choice Antipasto Della Casa: the chef’s daily selection

In inexpensive restaurants, the reverse is true—there is more choice:

Baby lamb chops grilled to your liking Quiche with your choice of either house salad or soup Biscuits and gravy with eggs any way you like ’em

A large menu study We assembled a database of 6,500 menus, containing 650,000 dishes, from seven US cities and analysed their language.

Results:

• Expensive restaurants mention the guest’s choice half as often

• They mention the chef’s choice seven times more often

• They use longer and “rarer” words

• Words on expensive restaurants’ menus are, on average, twice as long

Why? Frequently used words become shorter over time—Zipf’s law. Longer words therefore sound “more expensive”.

Examples of “expensive” words: decaffeinated, accompaniments, traditional, specifications, preparation, magnificent, exquisite.

Inexpensive restaurants use short forms: decaf, sides, extras.

Conclusion: “complicated” words signal an expensive restaurant. More importantly, however, menu language gives clues to a dish’s price.

We also found that the strongest factor determining price is the type of ingredient. Lobster, for example, costs more than chicken, regardless of the description.

The result: a menu is not a list of food. It is a language of status, marketing and psychology.

After controlling for all these factors, we examined the additional influence of individual words on prices.

We found that when a restaurant uses longer words to describe a dish, it charges more for it. Each one-letter increase in average word length is associated with an eighteen-cent increase in the dish’s price. This means that if a restaurant uses words that are three letters longer on average, you will pay around fifty-four cents more for fried chicken or pasta. They seem to be “half-dollar words” rather than “two-dollar words”, but you will still pay more when the menu uses long, “sophisticated” vocabulary.

Counting letters is one way to uncover hidden information in a menu. Another is to check whether the restaurant emphasises how “exotic” or spicy its food is. If so, be careful. Phrases such as “an exotic blend of Indian spices” or “tamarind fish soup with exotic vegetables” raise the price of a dish. Our research showed that each use of exotic or spices increases a dish’s price.

The likely reason is that such food is not exotic to people who eat it every day and know its real price. This “exoticising” is aimed at tourists and people seeking something new, who are prepared to pay more.

“Linguistic fillers” on menus

Another way to read between the lines of a menu is to look for linguistic fillers. These are positive but vague words: delicious, tasty, flavorful, scrumptious, savory, or terrific, wonderful, delightful, sublime. They promise something special, but vaguely enough to let the restaurant avoid responsibility.

There are also “appealing adjectives”: zesty, rich, golden brown, crispy, crunchy. These are not entirely meaningless, but they are often subjective.

We found that such words are more often associated with lower prices. Each word such as delicious, tasty or terrific is associated with a roughly 9% decrease in a dish’s average price. Each word such as rich, chunky or zesty is associated with a decrease of about 2%.

This is not proof of causation, only correlation. Inexpensive restaurants may use more “fillers” to compensate for the absence of genuinely expensive ingredients.

Mid-range menus

In fact, long, wordy menus with many “tasty” adjectives are more common in mid-range restaurants—chains such as Ruby Tuesday, T.G.I. Friday’s and the Cheesecake Factory.

Words such as fresh, rich, spicy, crispy, juicy, fluffy, flaky and buttery occur much more frequently there.

Why? The literal meaning of the words is obvious: “delicious” means the food tastes good; “ripe” means the apples are ripe. But why say it? Surely a restaurant cannot serve bad food and unripe apples? These words fulfil a marketing function.

H. Paul Grice offered an answer to this problem. Grice pointed out that when we try to understand a speaker, we assume that they are acting rationally. If they say something is fresh, there must be a reason to say it is fresh; speakers do not simply add random words. Grice called this the “maxim of quantity”; there is also a related “maxim of relevance”, which states that speakers try to say relevant things. So, if I hear someone say that something is fresh—or ripe, fluffy or golden brown—I immediately wonder why mentioning ripeness would be relevant. We usually mention ripeness because there is an implicit comparison with unripeness. It sounds something like this: “You may be worried that this fruit is unripe, but do not worry: I hereby assure you that it is ripe.” In other words, the very mention of ripeness raises the possibility that some people might think the produce is not ripe, and I mention it to reassure them.

Linguist Mark Liberman suggests viewing this excessive mentioning as a symptom of “status anxiety”. Expensive restaurants do not use ripe—or fresh or crispy—because we assume that food which should be ripe is ripe and that everything is fresh. Mid-range restaurants worry that you will not make that assumption because they are not sufficiently glamorous, so they go out of their way to reassure you. They protest too much.

We can see a similar implication of Grice’s idea in the use of real on menus. You will find this word on many menus, but precisely which foods restaurants call “real” depends heavily on price. Inexpensive restaurants promise real whipped cream, real mashed potatoes and real bacon:

Chocolate-chip pancakes: served with real whipped cream.

Homestyle meatloaf: served with real mashed potatoes, vegetables and gravy.

Chicken patty: melted Swiss cheese in a bun with lettuce, tomato, Thousand Island dressing and real bacon bits.

In slightly more expensive ($$) restaurants, real is used mainly to describe crab and maple syrup:

California roll: real crab and avocado

Blueberry wholegrain pancakes: with real maple syrup

By contrast, in more expensive ($ and $$) restaurants, real is hardly used at all. This is not because those restaurants’ bacon is not real, but because consumers already assume that the bacon, whipped cream and crab are real. If an expensive restaurant called its crab “real”, it would imply that its authenticity might be questioned and needed defending. Grice’s principle comes into play again: if a restaurant says its butter is real, there must be a reason to say so, and the usual reason for taking the trouble to say that something is real is a concern that your listener might think it fake and a desire to reassure them. Expensive restaurants certainly do not want to suggest that any customer might consider their butter fake.

The history of which foods are called “real” or “genuine” on menus is a miniature lesson in what was considered valuable enough to imitate. In the 1990s, there was real bacon rather than Bacon Bits. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was real whipped cream rather than Cool Whip, and real sour cream rather than Imo. Menus from the 1960s offered real butter rather than margarine. In the 1940s and 1930s, there was genuine calf’s liver. Around 1900, the foods most often described as “real” or “genuine” were none of these. People then worried about fake beer and fake turtles. Menus of the period boasted “genuine German beer” and “real turtle”. German pale lager arrived during the great nineteenth-century German immigration, along with hamburgers, sausages, seltzer, home-fried potatoes, potato salad and delicatessens. Before this, Americans drank only dark, English-style ale. Pale, cold-fermented lagers brewed by ethnic German entrepreneurs such as Miller, Pabst, Schlitz and Busch became popular by the turn of the nineteenth century, and restaurants boasted of being able to serve this new prestige product. Turtle soup was also a sought-after delicacy, so much so that mock turtle soup made from brains and calves’ heads—not from Mock Turtles, whatever Lewis Carroll may say—was common as a cheaper substitute. In fact, Jane Ziegelman tells us in her book 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families that New York restaurants “often nailed a real turtle shell to the doorframe” to indicate that they served genuine green turtle soup.

The signs we use to indicate prestige today are less obvious than that turtle shell, but they are still present on menus. Of course, we no longer use broken French. Our modern fashionable menus are light and concise, without cheap filler adjectives or endless assurances about what is “real”. When displaying high status, less is more—in words as well as in food. Instead, fashionable menus are lightly seasoned with something else: carefully chosen, obscure gastronomic terms and pastoral images of green pastures and heirloom vegetables. If they offer you a menu at all.

You should probably avoid a menu overloaded with linguistic fillers such as crispy, crusty, zesty, juicy, spicy, chunky, smoky or fluffy—adjectives written by a menu writer who is trying too hard to persuade you. As for “exotic”, if you see it, do not pay the premium it implies. Instead, do what Calvin Trillin would do: slip down the street to somewhere authentic enough not to need to prove it so insistently.

Chapter Two Entrée

LIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO means visitors, and visitors are a reason to come down from Bernal Hill and explore the many delicious dinner options on Mission Street. My visitors are always willing to experiment with food, but sometimes they find odd things to complain about. My grumpy British friend Paul is irritated by the endless questions in local cafés: “Single or double? Small, medium, large? For here or to go? Regular milk or soya? Whole or skimmed?” “Just give me the bloody coffee,” says Paul, who thinks Americans have control issues. Indeed, as we have just seen, the abundance of choice offered by cafés, diners, fast-food outlets and other inexpensive establishments is matched only by the control we surrender when choosing tasting menus in our expensive restaurants.

Paul is also irritated by our provincial use of words. In the United States, for example, entrée means the main course, while in France and Britain it means what we would call an appetiser. A French meal might therefore consist of an entrée, or starter, a main course, or plat, and dessert, whereas the corresponding American meal would consist of an appetizer, an entrée, or main course, and dessert. Since entrée originally comes from French and literally means “entrance”, we Americans must at some point have corrupted the meaning of the word, as Paul once suggested over dinner.

Paul’s hypothesis seems reasonable, and since he also complains about my knife-and-fork etiquette—it turns out that I do not align my fork…

[END OF TRANSLATED EXCERPT. The final sentence was unfinished in the source.]

[NOTES COMMENTING ON THE SOURCE.]

Daniel Jurafsky explains with great wit how restaurants manipulate us through language.

A brief account of the concepts

Key concepts

• Grice’s rule (conversational maxims) British philosopher Paul Grice formulated a rule: people say only what makes sense in the given context. Applied to menus: if a restaurant says an apple is “ripe”, there is reason to suppose that it might have been unripe. We do not state the obvious for no reason. An expensive restaurant would not think of writing “ripe tomatoes” or “fresh fish”, because in an establishment charging hundreds of dollars, freshness is assumed. Mentioning it would only create suspicion.

• “Status anxiety” This concept explains why mid-range restaurants love filler adjectives such as crispy, juicy, zesty and fresh. They are uncertain of their high status and fear that customers will consider their food mediocre. They therefore “bend over backwards” and protest too much through their wording. Elite restaurants do not experience this anxiety; their menus are minimalist.

• An indicator of overpayment If you see “exotic” on a menu, know that an unjustified mark-up has already been built into the price.





Chapter 13. Taste Memory and Working on a Text

Original source pages: 130–138



The evolution of the word “real”

Jurafsky shows how “real” works like a time machine, reflecting consumers’ fears in different periods. Restaurants write “real” when a popular, inexpensive imitation appears on the market:

• The 1900s: “real turtle”, rather than soup made from calves’ heads, and “genuine German beer”.

• The 1930s–40s: “genuine calf’s liver”.

• The 1960s: “real butter”—fear of margarine.

• The 1970s–80s: “real whipped cream”—fear of chemical substitutes.

• The 1990s: “real bacon”, rather than bacon-flavoured soya pieces.

Today, “real” remains only in inexpensive establishments—real mashed potatoes—and mid-range ones—real crab rather than crab sticks.

The mystery of “entrée”

In the second chapter, the author turns to a new linguistic puzzle. The French word entrée translates as “entrance”.

• In France and Britain, it logically means a starter: the entrance to the meal.

• In the United States, for some reason, it came to mean the main course.

Jurafsky is about to reveal the historical reason why Americans “broke” the word’s meaning.

[LITERARY SOURCES AND STUDY COMMENTARY. The following examples retain the authors and works named in the manuscript. The first person within quoted or translated passages belongs to the narrators of those works. Editions, pages and translations require bibliographic verification.]

Memoir writing—“Proustian moments”

Memoir writing is defined by “Proustian moments”: moments when we take a bite of food and are transported to another time and place. The term comes from a passage in Marcel Proust’s epic novel In Search of Lost Time, published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927.

Many years had passed during which nothing of Combray existed for me except what was connected with the theatre and drama of my going to bed, until one winter’s day, when I returned home, my mother saw that I was cold and offered me tea, a drink I did not usually take. At first I refused, but then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they have been moulded in the fluted shell of a pilgrim. Soon, mechanically, weary from a dull day and the prospect of a dreary tomorrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a piece of cake. The instant the warm liquid and crumbs touched my palate, a shiver ran through my whole body, and I stopped, astonished by the extraordinary changes taking place within me.

An exquisite pleasure filled my senses, separate and detached, with no hint of its origin. At once, the vicissitudes of life became indifferent to me, its disasters harmless, its brevity illusory. This new sensation had the same effect on me as love—or rather, its essence was within me: it was myself.

I ceased to feel mediocre, accidental or mortal. Where could this all-powerful joy have come from? I understood that it was connected with the taste of the tea and cake, yet it infinitely surpassed them. Where had it come from? What did it mean? How could I grasp and define it?

Today’s great chefs understand the power of the Proust phenomenon very well. They know that the most expensive caviar will not stir a guest’s emotions as strongly as a suddenly rekindled memory of a carefree childhood. This direction in fine dining is often called “emotional gastronomy”.

Here are two remarkable examples of how restaurants with three Michelin stars deliberately “construct” Proustian moments:

1. “The Crunchy Part of the Lasagne” (Massimo Bottura, Osteria Francescana)

• The idea: Massimo Bottura, the chef of the very restaurant discussed in your lecture, asked himself what memory almost all Italians share. The answer was simple: a Sunday family lunch cooked by a grandmother, and a desperate struggle with brothers and sisters for the tastiest piece of lasagne—the slightly burnt, crunchy corner of the baking dish.

• The dish: Bottura decided to serve only that corner. The dish is a deconstructed lasagne: a weightless, perfectly crisp strip of pasta, in the three colours of the Italian flag, floats above the lightest béchamel mousse and a rich meat ragù.

• The Proust effect: the guest bites into the crunchy piece, tastes the concentrated flavour of homemade ragù and is instantly transported thirty years back to the noisy kitchen of their Italian grandmother. Mature, dignified people in expensive suits have literally wept over this plate.

2. “Sound of the Sea” (Heston Blumenthal, The Fat Duck)

• The idea: British chef Heston Blumenthal, a pioneer of neurogastronomy, wanted to recreate the pure, childlike happiness of a summer trip to the seaside: running across the sand while gulls cry and the salty breeze fills the air.

• The dish: the waiter brings a wooden box with a glass top, containing real sand. On the glass is an arrangement that perfectly imitates the shore: edible “sand” made from tapioca and miso butter, various seafood, seaweed and “sea foam”. But the main secret is that the dish comes with a seashell concealing an iPod and headphones.

• The Proust effect: the guest puts on the headphones and hears the surf, the cries of gulls and the crunch of footsteps on sand, while inhaling the aroma of sea foam. Hearing, taste and smell come together. The brain receives a powerful signal, and the person instantly “drops out” of the restaurant, transported to a childhood holiday by the coast.

The connection with menu language: notice how this echoes Jurafsky’s lecture. These dishes do not need words such as “real” lasagne or “fresh” seafood.

Their names are simply buttons that trigger emotion; the guest’s memory does the rest.

The dome at Alchemist is precisely what finally erases the boundary between dinner and immersive theatre.

If Professor Jurafsky discussed in our lecture how restaurants use words on menus to create atmosphere, chef Rasmus Munk has gone radically further. He has discarded words altogether. Instead of writing long menu texts, he physically places you inside the idea behind each dish.

The main act of dinner at Alchemist takes place inside an enormous planetarium. You sit at a winding table, beneath a 360-degree projection. The imagery and soundtrack change completely for each “impression”.

Here is how it works in practice:

• Illusion and plastic in the ocean: when you are served a dish addressing ocean pollution—for example, an edible “piece of plastic” or cod—the dome around you becomes an underwater world. You relax while looking at beautiful jellyfish, then suddenly notice that they are transforming into floating plastic bags. The sound of water and these images make the dish’s flavour far more dramatic.

• Giant eyes and dystopia: for certain provocative dishes, often referring to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or shaped like a human brain or eye, enormous eyes appear on the dome. They blink slowly and literally follow your every movement. Eating while being watched from all sides is a powerful psychological experiment that creates a sense of vulnerability.

• Heartbeat and the circulatory system: when the “Drop of Blood”, Lifeline, arrives with its QR code for donors, the dome begins to pulse to the rhythm of a beating heart. Red blood cells float around you, and the sound of the pulse resonates directly in your chest.

• A burning forest: to emphasise deforestation, or when a dish with the aroma of ash and smoke is served, virtual flames may engulf the dome. You sit in the middle of a burning forest and hear the crackle of trees; this audiovisual sequence makes the receptors perceive the food’s smoky flavour ten times more intensely.

• The northern lights: for lighter dishes intended to “cleanse” your palate and provide a respite from difficult themes, the dome takes you beneath an Arctic night sky with shimmering aurora and soothing ambient music.

This is an ideal example of neurogastronomy. Munk knows that 80% of what we call “taste” arises in our brains through sight, hearing and smell. By controlling the dome, he literally hacks your perception of flavour. This is more than a restaurant: it is the quintessence of everything we have discussed. Here, food finally ceases to be merely food and becomes immersive theatre, art and even a political statement.

The fact that they call the servings “impressions”, rather than “dishes”, fits perfectly with the theory that avant-garde restaurants abandon traditional rules entirely and turn dinner into artistic performance. The guest is an audience member, surrendering control completely to the chef.

1. Social protest on a plate

• A chicken foot from a cage: this is an exceptionally powerful example of “social gastronomy”. The chef serves the dish directly on a metal cage. By making the guest hold a chicken foot and eat from it, Munk creates deliberate discomfort to draw attention to the conditions in which birds are kept on factory farms. It is not about feeling full; it is about making you think about where food comes from.

• The chocolate coffin: one of the most emotionally difficult impressions. This skilfully made chocolate is a direct statement against the exploitation of child labour on chocolate plantations in Africa. Munk makes us literally “swallow” this bitter truth with a sweet dessert.

2. A call to action (Lifeline)

• A drop of blood with a QR code: this is a brilliant symbiosis of cooking and charity. A blood-drop-shaped shell, often made with real pig’s blood for texture and colour, mixed with berries, conceals an icy filling. But the most important element is the QR code on the table. It is real. The chef uses the “Proustian moment” of surprise to direct you to a blood- or organ-donation website. Have you ever seen a menu save lives?

3. Playing with illusion and Pop Art

• Andy Warhol’s banana: Munk loves breaking the brain’s expectations. You see the classic banana from The Velvet Underground cover, but the peel is a crisp, edible shell concealing a wholly unexpected texture and flavour.

• Glowing amber: two spheres served on an illuminated cube. Inside this sugar or honey sweet, Munk often “entombs” wood ants, imitating a prehistoric insect trapped in amber. This invokes primal foraging and creates a powerful visual trigger. The ants’ acidity provides that burst of flavour.

4. The alchemy of textures

• Golden spheres: extremely thin, almost weightless golden crisps served on crumpled fabric. Alchemist often uses such textures to deceive the sense of touch: what looks like crumpled metal melts in the mouth in a fraction of a second.

• Airy cubes: sponge-like, porous forms. This is pure play with the physics of ingredients—dehydration and aeration, which we read about in the lecture.

• A siphon containing red liquid: a mesmerising process of distillation or brewing directly at the table. It transforms a drink from an ordinary accompaniment into an alchemical ritual.

Alchemist takes the concept of “dish names as art” to its absolute limit. Munk does not justify his prices with words such as “fresh” or “real”: he sells you a worldview.

Be specific Let us consider some techniques we can apply when writing about food, not only in memoirs but also in cookbooks or restaurant reviews. Good food writing is simply good writing. We read either to learn something new or to enjoy ourselves. Good writing should be interesting, thoughtful, engaging and entertaining.

Be specific: use concrete language and sensory details to describe how food tastes. Food writing awakens memories; it is full of human emotion and sensuality. Avoid vague words such as delicious, tasty and yumm. Do not use too many adjectives, and steer clear of adverbs. When editing your draft, remove general words and replace them with specific ones, such as chanterelles. This makes your scenes more vivid for the reader. For example: My first awareness that food was more than a substance with which to fill your stomach when hungry, like filling up at a petrol station, came after my fourth year of primary school. It happened during a family holiday in Europe, aboard the Queen Mary, in the tourist-class dining room. Somewhere there is a photograph: my mother in Jackie O sunglasses, my younger brother and I in our painfully cute cruise outfits, boarding the enormous Cunard ocean liner, all of us anticipating our first transatlantic voyage, our first trip to my father’s ancestral homeland, France.

It was all about the soup. It was cold. This was something of a revelation to a curious fourth-grader whose experience of soup had so far been limited to Campbell’s cream of tomato and chicken noodle. I had been to restaurants before, of course, but this was the first food I truly noticed. It was the first food I enjoyed and, more importantly, remembered as something pleasurable. I asked our patient British waiter what this wonderfully cool, tasty liquid was. “Vichyssoise,” came the reply. A word that, even now—despite its becoming a tired workhorse on every menu and a dish I have prepared thousands of times—still sounds magical to me. (Excerpt from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, 2000)

Use action verbs

Use action verbs rather than passive constructions to give your writing movement. Some active verbs you can use to describe food preparation are drizzle, sprinkle, peel, scrape, crush, slather, grind and scorch. Notice how these words feel: they bring the text to life. Active verbs can be used to describe anything—a place, a scene or people. For example, here is an excerpt from Mei Chin’s James Beard Award-winning article “Eat Drink Mother Daughter”, published in Saveur in 2018. This paragraph forms part of the introduction, where she describes the setting as she and her mother visit a Taiwanese night market.

“Ultimately, it is Tainan’s strangeness that seduces me, especially the carefree way sex, death and old-fashioned hospitality mingle here. Scantily dressed beer promoters with the Heineken logo across their chests weave through brightly lit family restaurants. Vendors praise their coffin-shaped breads, while children chew cold meat left on altars in honour of the dead. Meanwhile, ladies wear hats and shelter beneath parasols, their faces as pale as the moon.”

2. Use metaphors Metaphors enrich writing. The symbolism of food in literature is no different from its symbolism in painting. French philosopher and essayist Roland Barthes said, “Metaphor is the salt of words.” Just as salt enhances the flavour of food, metaphor makes writing more vivid.

Roland Barthes gave several examples of powerful culinary symbols: he said that wine is to the French what milk is to the Dutch. Wine signifies transformation, from dry earth into moist liquid. It also changes people’s behaviour. Wine differs from spirits: it implies a positive form of intoxication. Milk, according to Barthes, is anti-wine because it soothes, restores and envelops. Milk is pure and innocent. Barthes also wrote about steak and chips. Steak, he said, was as much a part of sanguine mythology as wine. It is the heart of meat, its pure state. It symbolises bovine strength. Steak benefits every temperament. It is a national element in France. It combines succulence and simplicity. It is both basic and elegant. It is patriotic, like the flesh of a soldier. An example of metaphor in literature: Émile Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris, or Le Ventre de Paris, published in 1873 and set in the bustling market of Les Halles. In this passage, the smell of the many cheeses in Madame Lecœur’s storeroom is compared to a symphony. The section became known as the “Cheese Symphony”: “The cheeses stank from every side. On two shelves at the back of the shop lay enormous pieces of butter: Breton butter overflowing its baskets; Norman butter wrapped in canvas, resembling casts of bellies over which a sculptor had thrown wet cloths… […] Beside the pound packages of butter lay a gigantic Cantal, as though split by axe blows; then came golden Cheshire, Gruyère like a wheel that had fallen from some barbarian chariot, Dutch cheeses resembling severed heads smeared with dried blood and hard as skulls, which had earned them the name ‘dead heads’. Parmesan added its aromatic sharpness to the others’ thick, muffled smell. […] Then came the strongly scented cheeses… each adding its piercing note to a phrase so sharp it induced nausea.

…It was the smell of Camembert that they noticed most strongly. This cheese, with its gamey reek, drowned out the milder odours of Maroilles and Limburger; its power was astonishing. From time to time, however, a faint breath, a note like the sound of a flute, came from the Parmesan, while the Bries entered with their soft, musty odour—the quiet sound, so to speak, of a damp tambourine. Livarot launched into a staggering reprise, while Géromé sustained the symphony with a prolonged note.”

3. Use analogy or simile Similes differ slightly from metaphors. They compare two things without directly calling an object something else. We use words such as “like” or “as if” to make a comparison. They are an excellent alternative to adjectives, but try to avoid worn-out clichés, such as “soft as silk”.

Here is an example from New York Times critic Sam Sifton, who likens eating toast to a kiss: “The very first item on Marea’s menu is ricci, a piece of warm toast thickly spread with sea-urchin roe, covered with a thin slice of lardo, Italian cured pork fat, and scattered with sea salt. It produces exactly the sensation of kissing an incredibly attractive person for the first time—a flash of surprise and pleasure at once. Salt and fat give way to a primal sweetness and combine in a supremely pleasurable fashion. The feeling lingers on the tongue and vibrates through the entire body.”

4. Use dialogue

Dialogue helps characterise people without discussing their character directly. It also establishes relationships between characters.

Below is an excerpt from Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone, from its first chapter, “The Queen of Mould”. Through dialogue, we gain a sense of who her mother is: “‘I can make a meal out of anything,’ my mother proudly told her friends. She loved boasting about ‘Everything Stew’, a dish invented while she was preparing a casserole from a two-week-old turkey carcass. The very fact that my mother admitted to cooking with a two-week-old turkey says a great deal about her. She put the turkey and half a tin of mushroom soup into a saucepan, then began rummaging through the refrigerator. She found leftover broccoli and added it. A few carrots followed, then half a carton of sour cream. In a hurry, as usual, she added green beans and cranberry sauce. Then, somehow, half an apple pie slid into the dish. For a moment, my mother looked horrified. Then she shrugged and said, ‘Who knows? It might be good.’ And she began throwing in everything else from the refrigerator: leftover pâté, some cheese scraps and a few softened tomatoes.”

5. Use humour

Writing does not have to be serious. As you search for your own voice, you can practise using humour.

Here is a poem by John Updike, the American writer known for his attention to the concerns and passions of ordinary Americans: FOOD It is always there, The true best friend of man. It never bites back; It is already dead. It does not say we are poor lovers Or call us for an interview. It simply pleads, “Take me”; It cries, “I’m yours.” “Mash me all over,” it says; “Everything you are is pure.”

The process of creative writing and editing

This lecture provides guidance on the creative-writing process, from generating initial ideas to refining the final text. It explains how to use various prompts, including sensory ones, to begin a first draft, described as an unedited flow of memories.

The lecture then examines the crucial editing stage in detail, emphasising careful word choice, stylistic awareness and reader engagement. It provides a checklist of elements to review during editing and practical advice—taking breaks, reading aloud and seeking feedback—to improve the quality of the written work.

Main points (Knowledge Points)

1. The writing process: from prompt to first draft

• Beginning with prompts o Writing can be initiated with a “prompt”, which may be a single word, a sentence or an image.

o In food writing, the prompt may be sensory, such as a particular smell, sound or taste.

o Meeting notes or an interview transcript may also serve as starting material.

• The nature of a first draft o The initial version of a written work is called the “first draft”.

o This draft is usually raw and unedited, and is often described as a “mess”.

o The content of a first draft comes mainly from memory: it is a process in which writing “comes from the heart”.

o Technical details are filled in later during editing, allowing the initial creative flow to continue uninterrupted.

2. The process of editing and revision

• The art of editing o Editing takes place at a higher level of thought, with conscious attention to style and word choice, word by word.

o The process is compared to reading “one small piece at a time” to ensure that the words work together and convey the intended meaning and effect.

o Writing becomes a “work of art” when the right words are chosen and arranged correctly to create both meaning and emotion.

o Writing succeeds when readers can relate to it and feel, smell and see what the writer has described.

• An editing checklist o A set of questions can guide the editing of a draft:

Is the voice—the author’s tone—clear and consistent? § Is the metaphor coherent, and does it work effectively? § Are clichés avoided? § Are there enough specific descriptions? § Is the character developed? § Does the title work? §

• Practical editing advice o Take a break: step away from the work before beginning the editing process.

o Allow enough time: rushing through editing leads to missed errors and overlooked opportunities for improvement.

o Adopt the reader’s perspective: read the work as though encountering it for the first time, to gain objectivity.

o Read the work aloud: this helps check punctuation and catch repeated words.

o Seek outside feedback: if possible, ask someone else to read the work.

o If that person is your spouse, ask them to be gentle in their criticism.

Food-writing techniques

This lecture extract serves as a concluding reflection on food writing. It reiterates that the class defined the field and considered effective techniques with examples. Its central idea is that the principles of strong food writing—clarity, effectiveness and creativity—are universally applicable and immediately useful to the audience, whether their focus is professional, personal or creative, including memoirs, cookbooks and novels.

Key points (Knowledge Points)

1. The nature and benefits of food writing

• Defining food writing Earlier in the lecture, the essence of food writing was defined, and examples of accomplished work in the genre were considered.

• The wider relevance of food-writing techniques The skills gained from studying this subject are useful to everyone because they support clear and effective communication. Food writing provides a means of self-expression and a way to talk about one’s work and interests.

• The benefits of studying creative writing Learning creative-writing techniques improves a person’s abilities as both reader and writer. The skills practised in the lecture offer the audience immediate practical benefits. They apply to various forms, including professional food writing, memoirs, cookbooks and novels.





Chapter 14. Food in Photography

Original source pages: 139–157



“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer changed after seeing it. In a word, it is effective.”—Irving Penn, photographer

The early history of photography

In photography’s early history, some photographers unexpectedly turned to still life, working with form, contrast and detail.

Here is an example of a still life by Ansel Adams, regarded as the “father” of landscape photography and one of the founders of Group f/64. He is said to have been inspired by a meeting with Paul Strand, after which he decided to become a professional photographer. In this image, using food as his subject allowed Adams to demonstrate his exceptional ability to render different textures, shadows and forms in black-and-white photography.

Another founder of Group f/64, alongside Adams, was Edward Weston. He was one of the twentieth century’s most innovative and influential American photographers.

His photographs of cabbage leaves, peppers, artichokes and mushrooms are well known and invite us to see food as part of nature’s architecture. In his pictures, these vegetables become landscapes.

• Influence and style: Edward Weston had a significant influence on the modern photography movement that began in the 1930s. He is known for photographing the natural surroundings of his home on the California coast. Weston paid particular attention to cabbages, photographing various compositions of this vegetable between 1929 and 1936. He was interested in the physical textures of vegetables, seashells and other objects that frequently became his subjects at the time.

• Group f/64: Group f/64 advocated “unmanipulated”, sharply focused photography. The group was named after the smallest aperture on the large-format cameras they used, which provided maximum sharpness. Their sharply focused lenses were the direct opposite of the blurring and softening optics used by the Pictorialist movement. Pictorial photography often lacks sharp focus, is printed in colours other than black and white—from warm brown to dark blue—and may show brushstrokes or other traces of surface treatment.

• Cabbage Leaf, Edward Weston, 1931: this is the most successful of Weston’s cabbage photographs and has become an icon of Modernist photography. Without camera tricks, he transforms an ordinary leaf into a sensual, monumental form; its undulating surface seems [the ending of the phrase is missing from the original PDF]

Edward Steichen moved food photography still further from its associations with the painterly tradition.

Working on a commission for Stehli Silk Corporation to create a pattern for its American scarf series, he arranged sugar cubes in neat rows and backlit them to create cross-hatched shadows. In this example, photography is concerned with outline, form and shadow. It becomes design.

The arrival of colour advertising

With the introduction of colour advertising in the mid-1930s, styles began to change. Food photography ceased to be exclusively a fine art: now images existed to sell.

This was the era of cookery booklets, each containing three or four pages of “Technicolor” photographs.

The work of Nickolas Muray, a photographer hired by the popular US women’s magazine McCall’s, captured lavish post-war tables full of colour, abundance and cheerfulness for its homemaking and food sections. He used the colour carbro process—a combination of carbon-based pigments and silver-bromide prints to create a single colour image—to produce richly coloured photographs of arranged food for the magazine and other advertisers until the 1950s.

These magazine images succeeded because they sold a particular way of life. They were precursors of other US magazine work that gradually became more realistic and alluring, reaching perfection on the covers of Gourmet while continuing to portray not only delicious food but also the lifestyle that accompanied it.

And, of course, none of it was edible. To preserve its appearance under the harsh direct lighting needed to obtain such bright colours, food was sprayed with hairspray or even coated with furniture varnish. Soap bubbles replaced beer foam, while glue took the place of milk in cereal. We will encounter this problem of preservation and its solution in Topic 9, “Food in Films”. Only in the 1990s did commercial food photography for magazines and cookbooks shift from these theatrical presentations towards more naturalistic images of real food.

Photojournalism in the 1950s

In France during the 1950s, black-and-white photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson set a standard for photojournalism to which many journalists still aspire.

He was a master of candid street photography and coined the term “the decisive moment”. His photograph of a small boy carrying two bottles of wine is an excellent example of such a moment.

Another photographer equally skilled at capturing people in candid pictures and portraits, with some attention to street food, was the Armenian-Turkish photojournalist Ara Güler. For more than five decades, he documented a city’s memory as a visual historian known as “the Eye of Istanbul”.

Chatting in a Passage Cafe in Beyoglu, Ara Güler, 1958

Images like these captured national identity and remained recognisable around the world for generations. The “macaroni eaters” of Naples provide another example of this formation of identity, subsequently reinforced by similar images in cinema.

William Eggleston

Sometimes photographs of food without people were just as powerful in creating atmosphere and shaping national identity.

In the 1970s and 1980s, William Eggleston photographed everyday places, petrol stations and supermarkets—the banality and consumer culture surrounding him.

He was interested in structure and composition from unusual angles, making his ordinary subjects poetic by finding harmony in colour and form. There is a sense of a “stolen moment” before people enter the frame again.

Photograph captions:

• Untitled, William Eggleston, 1983–1986 (left: tomatoes beside a sink)

• Untitled, William Eggleston, 1976 (right: diner interior)

Peter Fischli and David Weiss

Sometimes artists have no particular reason for using food in their art.

In 1979, Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss created their Wurstserie, or “Sausage Series”, styling sausages and pickled cucumbers to make them appear to be choosing carpets in a shop or attending a fashion show. The series consisted of ten photographs, each depicting a small dramatic scene created mainly from an assortment of sausages, sliced meats and various domestic objects. Their work was surreal and playful. It has been compared with Dada and Fluxus art. We will consider Fluxus in our final topic, when discussing anti-art and hospitality.

The use of colour in the 1970s

In the 1970s, Irving Penn created clean, bright still lifes of food using blocks of colour.

In these works, he placed food in unusual compositions. He was a fashion photographer who made a series on “small trades”, photographing workers in their work clothes with their tools, isolating them in his studio and turning them into prototypes, or archetypes, of their trades.

This photograph has a real modernity and simplicity. The thaw is only just beginning; there is a feeling of anticipation. The colour is changing. In this image, Penn holds time still. Yet there is also the promise of new beginnings. After thawing, all of it will return to life.

Ouka Leele

In the space where the boundary between commercial and fine-art photography becomes blurred, Spanish photographer Ouka Leele uses colour playfully.

She hand-colours her black-and-white photographs. The artist became well known after the fall of Franco’s fascist regime, and her colourful images reflect that new period of freedom and exuberance, with its wider artistic possibilities. The image below, Peluquería, Limones (“Hairdresser’s, Lemons”), resembles an advertisement but is not one. Photograph caption: Ouka Leele, Peluquería, Limones, 1979

Jo Ann Callis

Photographer Jo Ann Callis emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important figures in the fabricated-photograph movement. She worked with colour photography, sculpture, painting and digital images. She staged scenes to convey the sensual tones and textures of fabric and food.

The food, often set against bright, saturated colours, appears extraordinarily sensual. Callis’s food is feminine in a way that critiques feminine clichés. Photograph caption: Jo Ann Callis, Untitled, 1994, from the series Forbidden

Pleasures

Photorealism in the 1980s

The rise of Photorealism in the 1970s reasserted illusionistic, realistic representation while retaining some Pop Art ideas about merging object, image and commercial product; this tendency continued into the 1980s. The work of Ralph Goings and Martin Parr is characteristic in this respect:

Martin Parr

Martin Parr draws on clichés or stereotypes to depict food and comment on national identity. His images are often garish, consumerist and, quite frequently, simply absurd.

Parr focuses on what is considered “ordinary” food: not the food of banquets or weddings, but that of church bake sales and butchers’ counters. Here, the British seaside appears as a scrum of people waiting for hot dogs and tea.

Contemporary photography and Sarah Lucas

This lecture considers the transformation of contemporary photography from a documentary practice into a medium that manipulates reality and conveys social messages. Particular attention is given to staged scenes and mixed media that create images resembling performance. Artist Sarah Lucas is singled out as a key figure, especially for Two Fried Eggs and Kebab, which uses found objects and visual humour to parody traditional still life and challenge social norms, particularly those concerning representations of the female body. The lecture explains how Lucas uses male and female symbols in a non-sexualised, non-moralising way, exploring moral dilemmas and creating humorous, subversive narratives.

1. The evolution of contemporary photography

The shift from documentation to manipulation

Photography is no longer regarded solely as the art of recording what is seen. It has become a medium that manipulates reality through staged scenes, objects placed outside familiar contexts, and combinations of photography with other techniques.

Staged photography as social commentary

Artists have experimented with staged photography since the beginning of the last century. This approach allows images to be created as performances and to communicate social messages, in a manner similar to Pop Art strategies.

2. Artist analysis: Sarah Lucas Artistic style and methods. Sarah Lucas is an English artist known for visual humour. Her works use photography, collage and found objects. She parodies the traditional still-life genre and seeks to question cultural norms.

A well-known work: Two Fried Eggs and Kebab. The work depicts two fried eggs and a kebab arranged on a wooden table. The composition resembles a female body, specifically the features to which it is often reduced: breasts and a vagina. Artistic intention and interpretation. Lucas uses male symbols, such as a phallic banana, though not in this work, and female symbols, such as fried eggs as breasts. Despite this, her art is not considered sexual or didactic. She explores moral dilemmas and creates humorous narratives. The work demonstrates food’s flexibility as an artistic material: it can be both funny and subversive.

Comparison with Judy Chicago. Two Fried Eggs and Kebab invites comparison with Judy Chicago’s feminist work The Dinner Party. Sarah Lucas’s work, however, is not explicitly labelled feminist.

Sian Bonnell

Two decades after Fischli and Weiss’s “sausage photographs”, English photographer Sian Bonnell photographed slices of bologna sausage arranged as tiles in her kitchen, and a ring of fried eggs around the lavatory in her bathroom, resembling a mat.

She placed household objects and food in unfamiliar contexts within various theatrical installations, often in her own home, and photographed them. In these works, the photographer becomes a performance artist. She no longer photographs food as an everyday object but reinterprets it to examine typical English food and domestic space critically, as we saw, for example, in Claes Oldenburg’s hamburger.

Between 2003 and 2005, Sian Bonnell created a project called Everyday Dada, making various installations throughout her home using food as a material. The project included subcategories such as “Serving Suggestions”, “Dream Home”, “Forensic Housekeeping” and “Picturesque Cooking”. In the series, Bonnell works against familiar conventions of decoration and food presentation by combining them. In several photographs, for example, she uses sliced processed meat as kitchen and bathroom tiles.

Pomegranate blood: still life at 1,600 frames per second

Work under consideration: Pomegranate (2006).

If Sian Bonnell transformed food into strange domestic décor, Israeli artist Ori Gersht does something quite opposite: he deconstructs the very essence of stillness. He takes the classical “matrix” of a seventeenth-century still life and introduces a modern instrument of destruction.

An explosion as an act of communication In his series, Gersht explores the relationship between photography and digital technology at the moment when the camera stops merely recording reality and begins to “see” the invisible. By filming at 1,600 frames per second, he literally stops time at the moment a pomegranate explodes. What is only an instantaneous bang to our eyes becomes a majestic and terrifying process of transformation through the lens.

The contrast: tranquillity versus bloodshed In the manuscript, the work is compared with Juan Sánchez Cotán’s Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber (1602).

Gersht’s work enters into a direct dialogue with Juan Sánchez Cotán’s 1602 painting.

• In Cotán: we see absolute balance, silence and the mathematically precise arrangement of suspended fruit. It is the apotheosis of aesthetics and humility.

• In Gersht: the serene image turns into “bloodshed”. A bullet pierces the fruit, and the pomegranate—which in Hebrew sounds the same as “grenade”—lives up to its name.

This is a powerful example of food ceasing to be an everyday object and becoming an indicator of social tension. Here, the aesthetics of still life collide with the physical violence of technology, creating a new form of catharsis through the shock of the beauty of destruction. Cotán’s stillness serves merely as a background, bringing out more vividly the energy of an explosion that cannot be seen with the naked eye but can now be felt subconsciously.

Laura Letinsky: the aesthetics of scraps and the melancholy of the table

Instead of photographing classical still lifes of appetising food awaiting a meal, Letinsky photographs what remains on the table afterwards. A philosophy of decay

• Field of investigation: the artist explores the fine boundary between ripeness and rot, abundance and waste, pleasure and the mere maintenance of life.

• The absence of people: there are no people in the images, only their “traces”—the remains of a lavish dinner, rubbish and scraps.

• Melancholy still life: instead of anticipating a celebration, we see its ending. It is a quiet, almost intimate view of pleasure’s finitude. Where are the “digital intervention” and deconstruction here?

If we compare her with Ori Gersht, we see two opposite approaches to time:

1. Ori Gersht (explosion): he uses extremely high-speed filming—1,600 frames per second—to freeze time at the moment of catastrophe, the explosion of a pomegranate. He turns a peaceful seventeenth-century still life into a “bloodbath”, in which a bullet invisible to the eye becomes the principal actor. His work is a dialogue with Juan Sánchez Cotán, where classical stillness collides with technological violence.

2. Laura Letinsky (decay): by contrast, she slows the gaze. Her work is “slow” art. She takes the same classical still-life matrix but strips it of its ceremonial splendour. Her “rubbish” looks as aesthetically pleasing as Cotán’s melon, making us seek beauty in what we usually discard. To sum up: Bonnell turned food into absurd décor, Gersht into a war zone, and Letinsky into a monument to a vanished moment.

What does this offer us as investigators?

• Bonnell teaches us to see structure and form in food, separating taste from visual context.

• Gersht exposes the hidden aggression and dynamics we do not register in everyday life without technological help.

• Letinsky makes us experience catharsis through absence, as we judge a person and their empathy only from the rubbish they have left behind.

In each case, food ceases to be “merely an ingredient” and becomes a complete language of communication, conveying meanings from social protest to existential sadness.

Gastronomic catharsis: from sausage tiles to an exploding pomegranate

Food is more than calories or flavour: it is a complete language of communication that contemporary artists dissect with surgical precision. To truly “read” contemporary art through a plate, we need to step beyond the dining table.

1. Domestic absurdity: food as a building material The first step towards understanding is to deprive an ingredient of its sacred function of “being eaten”. In Everyday Dada, Sian Bonnell transforms slices of bologna sausage into kitchen tiles and fried eggs into a lavatory mat.

• This makes us rethink domestic space and typical English food critically.

• The photographer acts as a performer, tearing everyday objects out of their familiar context.

2. Technological violence: the moment of disintegration Where Bonnell works with static absurdity, Ori Gersht reveals the dynamics of destruction. Using extremely high-speed filming at 1,600 frames per second, he records the instant a bullet turns a ripe pomegranate into a bloody mess.

• In this act, the classical aesthetics of seventeenth-century still life—an homage to Juan Sánchez Cotán—collide with contemporary violence.

• A linguistic trap lies here: the Hebrew words for “pomegranate” and “grenade” are identical, turning the fruit into a symbol of concealed threat and social explosion.

3. The melancholy of leftovers: life after triumph We see the culmination of this transformation in Laura Letinsky. She rejects glossy images of “food awaiting its consumer” and focuses on scraps.

• Her work explores the delicate relationship between abundance and rubbish, pleasure and decay.

• The absence of people makes their “traces”—dirty dishes and the remains of dinner—even more eloquent indicators of human presence. Conclusion: we see a path from shock (Bonnell), through an emotional explosion (Gersht), to quiet empathy and awareness that a moment is finite (Letinsky). This is a true neurogastronomy of the spirit, in which the visual image of food opens a direct path to the subconscious, making us experience catharsis where we once saw only breakfast.

Elad Lassry: a glitch in the commercial matrix Elad Lassry is a contemporary artist who uses commercial food-photography techniques for artistic purposes. His compositions emphasise the deliberate staging and construction of photographic images, questioning the reality of photography itself.

“I am fascinated by the collapse of stories and the confusion that arises when there is something ‘slightly wrong’ in a photograph,” he says.

Although his work does not focus exclusively on food, it includes notable examples such as Chocolate Bars, Eggs and Milk.

Nanda: globalisation versus tradition Korean artist Nanda creates works that refer to Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup series. She overlays elements of Korean tradition onto the global culture of coffee and tea consumption.

• A collision of worlds: she places takeaway cups from the Coffee Bean chain within a traditional tea-ceremony setting.

• A critique of standardisation: through interaction with mass-produced goods, the artist critiques contemporary society.

• The duplication effect: by repeating the image of the same woman, Nanda draws our attention to how standardised our gastronomic experience has become in the age of globalisation.

Carl Warner: architect of edible worlds British artist Carl Warner concludes the food-photography topic; his work forms a distinct category of commercial art.

• Foodscapes: Warner became famous for detailed landscapes built entirely from food and ingredients.

• A fresh perspective: his aim is to inspire people to look at food from another angle.

• Advertising craftsmanship: much of his work was created for advertising, demonstrating the possibilities of food photography when food is both object and subject of the image.

The gastronomic architecture of consciousness Where Nanda exposes standardisation through paper cups, Carl Warner takes this idea to its limit by turning ingredients themselves into mountains, forests and seas. We see a complete cycle: from food that cannot be eaten (Bonnell) to food that becomes an entire universe (Warner).

This exploration demonstrates that, through a master’s lens, food ceases to be merely fuel for the body. It becomes a mirror reflecting our fears (Gersht), our past (Letinsky), our false present (Lassry) and our global ambitions (Nanda).

Food-photography techniques. This lecture introduces food photography as a rapidly developing genre at the intersection of art and gastronomy. It emphasises the shared technical foundations of commercial and fine-art photography and their common aim: to use a two-dimensional frame to evoke strong emotions. By analysing the techniques of leading practitioners, particularly their use of angles, composition and colour, photographers can improve projects for marketing, websites, social media or personal purposes.

1. The nature and purpose of food photography

A popular genre. Food photography is becoming increasingly popular in both the art world and gastronomy.

Elements shared with fine-art photography. Commercial food photography shares key technical elements with fine-art photography. Both use two-dimensional space to create still images that elicit an emotional response in viewers.

The principal aim. The main aim of food photography, as of any art, is to evoke strong emotions in the viewer.

A broad range of applications. Food photography is widely used in marketing, for personal pleasure, on websites and on social media.

2. Improving food-photography skills. Key technical elements.

The impression made by a food photograph depends to a large extent on angle, composition and colour.

Learning from the masters. Develop your skills by studying the genre’s history and the work of master food photographers. Analysing their work helps you set higher creative ambitions.

A brief history of food photography by period The beginning: still life → advertising (up to the 1950s)

Food photography grew out of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century painted still lifes. When magazine advertising emerged, food began to be photographed for print. Features of the early period:

• studio lighting

• staged scenes

• food looked “perfect” but not always realistic; varnish, glue, foam instead of milk, and so on were used The main task: to make the product as attractive as possible for advertising.

The magazine era (1950–1980). The growth of food magazines and cookbooks brought the genre to a mass audience.

Key changes:

• the arrival of colour printing

• the development of a visual language for recipes

• standards for cookbooks Food still looked “perfect”, but the idea of atmosphere had begun to emerge.

The “real food” revolution (1980–2000)

This period brought a turning point: food began to look alive and natural rather than plastic. The main changes:

• natural light instead of harsh studio lighting arrangements

• imperfections became part of the aesthetic

• food styling emerged as a profession

Social media and the digital era (2000 → today). Food photography became:

• part of restaurant marketing

• a key tool for brands

• a widespread skill (Instagram, TikTok) Today, the genre is divided into:

• commercial advertising

• editorial photography

• fine-art food photography

• social-media content The principal aim remains the same: to evoke emotion and appetite.

Masters of food photography (studying their styles) 1. Irving Penn

One of the first to turn food into an art object. What to study:

• minimalism

• graphic qualities

• a clean background

• attention to form What we learn: 👉 Food can be art as well as advertising.

2. Jonathan Lovekin. A photographer who changed the visual language of cookbooks. Style:

• natural light

• gentle disorder

• “life in the kitchen”

He photographed Jamie Oliver’s books.

What we learn: 👉 Food should look real and alive.

3. David Loftus. One of the best-known contemporary food photographers. Style:

• bright colours

• movement

• storytelling What we learn: 👉 A photograph should tell the story of a dish.

4. Bea Lubas. A contemporary Instagram and magazine aesthetic. Style:

• soft light

• pastel shades

• minimalism

• airiness What we learn: 👉 Colour and light create a brand’s mood.

5. Skyler Burt. Commercial food photography of a high standard.

Style:

• dramatic light

• textures

• a cinematic quality What we learn: 👉 Light = the principal instrument of emotion.

Main conclusions (what to remember)

1⃣ The aim of a food photograph

Not to show food.

👉 To make the viewer feel.

2⃣ Three foundations of a strong image

Angle: from above—graphic qualities and composition

• 45°—restaurant style

• at dish level—a “sense of being there”

Composition: the rule of thirds

• negative space

• rhythm and balance Colour: warm colours → appetite

• cool colours → freshness

• contrast → focus of attention

3⃣ The masters’ central principle. Food photography = a mixture of:

• art

• marketing

• psychology

• light

Examining food photographs: how to analyse an image

Use this framework when examining any photograph of food.

Image-analysis method (four steps)

1. Light

2. Angle

3. Composition

4. Emotion and story The main question is always: why do I want to eat this right now?

Examples of analysing the masters’ work

1. Natural light and a “living kitchen”

Photographs by Andrew Scrivani. What we see:

• soft light from a window to the side

• many textures: wood, fabric, ceramics

• traces of cooking: crumbs, drops of sauce Why it works:

• the brain reads “reality”

• a sense of presence is created

• the food appears freshly prepared 👉 Perfect cleanliness kills appetite. What students should remember:

2. Minimalism and colour

Donna Hay’s work. Features:

• a light background

• one to three colours in the frame

• simple geometry Why it works:

• the eye rests

• attention remains entirely on the dish

• an ideal style for social media What to remember: 👉 The less clutter, the more expensive the image looks.

3. Storytelling and imagination

Carl Warner’s work (the Food Landscapes series). Features:

• food becomes landscapes

• a subject and story within the frame

• a strong “wow” effect Why it works:

• emotion + surprise

• the image is memorable What to remember: 👉 Food photography can be conceptual art.





Chapter 15. Workshop: Photographing Food on a Phone

Original source pages: 158–160



Checklist: how to photograph the perfect dish on a phone 1⃣ Preparing the scene (70% of success)

Remove everything unnecessary

Only the following should remain on the table:

• the dish

• cutlery

• the background

• one or two decorative elements The rule: if in doubt, remove it.

Choose a simple background

The best options:

• wood

• stone

• a white table

• fabric (linen/cotton) Avoid:

• bright patterns

• glossy surfaces

• coloured plastic surfaces The background should support the food rather than compete with it.

Add “life”

At least two elements:

• a napkin

• a spoon/fork

• spices

• crumbs

• a hand in the frame Food should not look like a “museum exhibit”.

2⃣ Light—the main secret

Ideal light

Shoot beside a window.

The best arrangement:

• light from the side

• the dish near the edge of the window

• you stand at right angles to the window This gives:

• volume

• texture

• soft shadows

What not to do

❌ Shoot under a ceiling light ❌ Use flash ❌ Mix yellow artificial light with daylight If the light is poor, the photograph is already beyond saving.

The napkin trick

If the shadows are too harsh:

• place a white napkin opposite the window It will act as a reflector.

3⃣ Choosing the angle

Remember this permanently:

90° (from above) Best for:

• breakfasts

• pizza

• tables with several dishes

• flat lays 45° The most versatile angle:

• plated food

• desserts

• restaurant presentation Dish level. Best for:

• burgers

• cakes

• drinks

• dishes with height If there are layers, shoot from the side.

4⃣ Phone settings

Before shooting. Always:

😄

• wipe the camera lens

• switch on the grid

• turn off the flash

• disable filters

Exposure (the most important technique)

Tap the screen → lower the brightness slightly.

An underexposed photograph = a more “expensive” look.

Focus. Always focus on:

• texture

• the most appetising part of the dish Not the centre of the plate—the centre of deliciousness.

5⃣ Composition in ten seconds

Use the rule of thirds:

• place the dish off-centre

• leave “air” in the frame Add:

• a foreground (crumbs, a piece of cutlery)

• a background (a blurred object) This creates depth.

6⃣ Colour and appetite. Remember the psychology of colour:

Warm colours stimulate appetite:

• red

• orange

• yellow

• brown Contrast = a tastier image. Examples:

• green salad + dark background

• pasta + a white plate

7⃣ Take a series, not a single photograph

At minimum:

• a wide shot

• a close-up

• a detail Professionals never take just one shot.

A quick final checklist

Before publishing, ask yourself:

☑ Is the light coming from a window?

☑ Are there any unnecessary objects?

☑ Is the food’s texture visible?

☑ Does the image have depth?

☑ Do I want to eat this right now? 📸 If the answer to all five is “yes”, the photograph is ready.

As German film director Werner Herzog aptly observed:

“I am deeply convinced that cooking is the only alternative to filmmaking.”





Chapter 16. Food in Cinema, Performance and Eat Art

Original source pages: 161–172



Food as a means of creating meaning in cinema, and iconic scenes

The lecture considers food as a significant cinematic device. It explains that food in a film conveys personality, socioeconomic status, cultural context and thematic ideas about society, gender roles, race, ethnicity and class. The speaker cites memorable food scenes—for example, in When Harry Met Sally, Rocky and Goodfellas—to show how engaging and iconic they can be. Historically, food played a supporting role, providing pleasure, narrative or atmosphere; the emergence of the “food film”, however, made it a central focus.

Food conveys context: place and time

The choice of ingredients, cooking methods and serving traditions can indicate geographical and historical circumstances.

Visual and auditory details—crockery, glasses, cutlery and the place where food is served—situate the story in particular cultural moments and locations.

Food symbolises social themes: wealth, poverty, love and loss

The presence, absence or quality of food symbolises economic circumstances: a luxurious dinner versus a shortage of food.

Emotional states and relationships, such as romance and grief, are reflected through shared meals, refusal of food or solitary eating.

Characterisation through attitudes to food

Preferences, taboos and eating habits reveal characters’ personalities, backgrounds and values.

What people eat or avoid, and the ways in which food is served and consumed, provide insight into character dynamics and development.

Material culture: tableware and ways of serving food

Visual indicators of status

Crockery, glasses and cutlery signal social and economic status, for example porcelain versus disposable tableware. The setting of a meal—a formal dining room versus a café or an improvised place—reveals class differences and social norms.

Serving context as narrative information

How and where food is served reflects family structure, hospitality traditions and power relationships. The style of service, whether shared dishes or individual portions, hints at cultural values and hierarchies within relationships.

Food as a lens on society and roles. Reflecting and shaping social constructs.

Food consumption reflects the society created by the director and comments on norms and inequality. Food can reinforce or question traditional roles: gender roles within the family, and relationships between different racial, ethnic and economic groups.

Negotiating identity and power

Cooking, serving and eating can reinforce or disrupt expectations about who cooks, who eats first and who controls resources.

The exchange of food across cultures can reveal tension or solidarity between social groups.

Memorable food scenes and their functions. Entertainment and memorability

Food scenes are enjoyable and often become iconic, increasing audience engagement. Examples include the café scene in When Harry Met Sally, Rocky drinking raw eggs for breakfast, and the prison cooking scene in Goodfellas.

Multiple functions within narrative

Historically, food has served as a source of pleasure, a narrative device and a means of producing comic, erotic or dramatic effects. Such scenes establish tone, pace and character relationships effectively while remaining vivid and memorable.

The emergence of the “food film”. A shift from supporting to central role

Until recently, food was secondary; with the emergence of “food films”, it became the central theme. Such films make cooking and dining the principal driving forces of the narrative.

Food as comedy Remember black-and-white silent films and cakes flying straight into the characters’ faces?

There is something inherently comic about a cake. Pie-throwing was long the gold standard of comedy. A crowd hurling pastries at one another and covering cars and passers-by with whipped cream is one of the immutable laws of slapstick. A banana exists to be slipped on, and a cake to be thrown at someone. The use of cakes for comic effect appears to have been one of the earliest uses of food in cinema: the device originated in the silent era and survived successfully into the 1960s.

Historical examples

• The Battle of the Century (1927): this physical comedy was characteristic of Laurel and Hardy’s films, popular in the 1920s–40s. The film is famous for using more than 3,000 cream pies in its climactic scene.

• The Great Race (1965): this film holds the distinction of featuring the largest pie fight in cinema history.

Not all comedies are created equal.

The classic scene in which Charlie Chaplin eats his boots when facing starvation shows the full drama of gold prospecting in comic form. It is an iconic moment from The Gold Rush (1925), the film by which Chaplin himself said he most wanted audiences to remember him.

In the film, two prospectors during the Klondike Gold Rush in Yukon, Canada, are trapped in an Arctic cabin and suffer from hunger. Forced to eat his boot, Chaplin’s character retains his dignity and treats it as an exquisite delicacy. His cabin companion has a different imagination: looking at Charlie, he sees a giant roast chicken. The boot in the film was actually made of black liquorice.

In 1980, director Werner Herzog really did cook and eat his own shoe after losing a bet. Herzog cooked the footwear—the same pair, he claimed, that he had been wearing when the wager was made—at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, with chef Alice Waters’s involvement. The shoes simmered for five hours with garlic, herbs and duck fat. As part of this performance, Herzog reflected on the value of cinema, emphasising that from time to time we must be reckless enough to do such things.

Italian Neorealism and the symbolism of food in post-war cinema.

This lecture examines the history of Italian cinema, paying particular attention to two key areas: Italian Neorealism after the Second World War, and the symbolic use of food in Italian films, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.

• It explains how Neorealist films depicted post-war economic hardship and society’s moral condition, often through location shooting and non-professional actors.

• Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) illustrates themes of scarcity, hope and social tension, particularly in the poignant meal scene involving Bruno.

• The lecture also explores how food, especially pasta, became a symbol of “Italianness” in cinema. An example is the climactic spaghetti scene in Poverty and Nobility (Miseria e nobiltà), featuring Totò, which embodies Neapolitan poverty and comedy.

Italian Neorealism as a movement

• Defined as a film movement that emerged after the Second World War, characterised by stories about the lives of the poor and the working class.

• Filmmakers used location shooting and frequently employed non-professional actors to heighten realism.

• The movement sought to depict Italy’s harsh economic and moral conditions after the war and twenty years of Fascist rule.

• Food scenes served both to enhance realism and to participate in contemporary cultural and political debates about Italian identity and social conditions.

Social tension: food scarcity versus abundance

• Neorealist films emphasised the stark contrast between food shortages among the working class and abundance among the wealthy.

• This contrast highlighted wider social tensions in post-war Italy and reflected Fascism’s legacy.

• Food was portrayed as more than sustenance: it was a marker of inequality and a lens through which national problems could be discussed.

Focus: how food scenes contribute to the depiction of social tension and hope. In this Neorealist masterpiece, food is not simply fuel but an emotional barometer. The key moment for analysis is the lunch scene in the trattoria.

• Contrast (aesthetics versus a social abyss): we see an attempt to create a “small celebration” amid catastrophe. Antonio takes his son Bruno to a restaurant, trying to play the role of a comfortably situated father. Aesthetically, this is a moment of intimacy: the tablecloth, wine and hot food can be interpreted as an attempt to restore dignity through ritual. But the social commentary ruthlessly shatters this idyll. At the next table, Bruno sees a wealthy family and a boy eating mozzarella in carrozza, a mozzarella sandwich.

o Gastronomic symbolism: the strand of melted cheese stretching from the wealthy boy’s food is a metaphor for unattainable carefree ease. For Bruno and Antonio, their modest pizza is the limit of what they can afford, beyond which lies the abyss of hunger.

o Conclusion: the scene shows how fragile comfort is. Food works here as a “painkiller”, providing a brief respite—hope—but its very taste is poisoned by anxiety about the future: social tension.

Comparison: food as a symbol of Italianness (1950s–1960s)

Works: Poverty and Nobility (Miseria e nobiltà) versus Bicycle Thieves.

Here we compare two poles of Italian hunger: the tragic and the carnivalesque.

• Poverty and Nobility (the spaghetti scene): here, food is catharsis. The final scene, in which Totò’s characters descend upon an enormous tureen of spaghetti, is more than dinner: it is a pagan dance of the stomach.

Contrast: they dance on the table and stuff their pockets with pasta in tomato sauce. This is high comedy—aesthetics—masking an animal fear of hunger: social commentary. Pasta is a symbol of life that must be physically claimed in order to survive. It is the poor person’s “gastronomic orgy”.

• Bicycle Thieves (restraint): unlike Totò’s Neapolitan exuberance, food here marks shame and limitation. Pasta or pizza does not fly through the air; it is counted in lire.

• Conclusion: in both cases, pasta is the nation’s “code”. In the comedy, however, it symbolises abundance and vitality against all odds, while in De Sica’s drama it emphasises scarcity and the class divide.

Investigation: non-professional actors and location shooting

Topic: their influence on realism through the lens of “real flavour”.

The use of non-professionals in Neorealism can be compared with using wild, uncultivated ingredients in fine dining: it provides a flavour of “terroir” that cannot be imitated.

• Faces as an era’s menu: by casting workers and ordinary people from the street, directors obtained faces on which the history of war was written. This is the “neurogastronomy” of cinema: viewers read authentic exhaustion and hunger because these are lived rather than acted. Performance—aesthetics—gives way to documentary truth: social fact.

• The street as a set: filming amid ruins and in real streets created an atmosphere in which the city became the main character. This is not a “refined studio” but reality’s rough texture. It is like coarse wholemeal bread compared with a factory-made roll: there is grit in it, but there is life too.

Essay: “The Geopolitics of the Empty Plate”

Topic: cultural and political debates through scarcity and abundance. Essay:

In post-war Italian cinema, a bowl of soup was never merely soup. It was a political manifesto. If we view the screen as a nation’s menu, Neorealism offered a dish called “Honest Poverty”.

Through the contrast between scarcity and abundance, directors discussed where Italy was heading after twenty years of Fascism. On one side, we see the aesthetics of the upper bourgeoisie: full tables, mozzarella, white tablecloths. This is the image of Italy promised by propaganda and pursued by the “economic miracle”. On the other side is the social commentary of the streets: workers’ empty stomachs, stolen bicycles as a means of earning bread, and pasta in jacket pockets. Food became a complete language of communication in this dispute. Abundance on screen was often marked as morally suspect or inaccessible, while scarcity sanctified the protagonist, making him a martyr of the system. Neorealism showed that the taste of bread depends directly on society’s conscience. And that taste was bitter, but real.

Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette): plot and thematic focus

• The story centres on Antonio, who obtains a job putting up posters that requires a bicycle for transport; his bicycle is stolen on the very first day.

• Antonio and his son Bruno wander through the city searching for the bicycle, symbolically seeking hope amid economic despair. The narrative emphasises stress, hopelessness and a bleak future, especially through young Bruno’s perception.

The meal scene as a moment of respite and symbolism

• A particular lunch scene offers a brief respite, as Bruno experiences good fortune and carefree pleasure like the more privileged boy eating mozzarella.

• Food in this scene provides temporary relief and a glimmer of hope for father and son while also emphasising how fleeting their respite is.

• The scene embodies the film’s broader themes: hope, class inequality and the fragility of comfort amid constant deprivation.

Pasta as shorthand for identity and context

• In the 1950s and 1960s, plates of macaroni or spaghetti were often used in films to define characters and situations quickly.

• Food acted as a cultural symbol embodying “Italianness” and providing audiences with immediate contextual clues.

Case study: Poverty and Nobility (Miseria e nobiltà)

• The film’s final scene is described as an “immortal ode to pasta”, featuring Felice, played by Totò, and his friends.

• After being forced to go without food for three days, the characters, who are pretending to be aristocrats, feverishly fall upon a dish of spaghetti.

• Their frenzied meal includes dancing on the table and stuffing spaghetti into their pockets, indicating both hunger and a desire to stock up against future starvation.

• The scene reflects “the whole world of Naples”, blending poverty with comedy and highlighting Totò’s performance, which uses food to convey both social reality and cultural identity.

Food films—origins, themes and cultural

The lecture introduces and analyses the “food film” genre that emerged in the 1970s, explaining how technological advances in filmmaking and a growing cultural interest in cooking allowed filmmakers to make food the principal star. It describes the defining characteristics of such films in detail: a focus on cooks, kitchens and the visual presentation of dishes; and the use of food-related stories to explore identity, power, class differences and cultural norms. It also outlines recurring themes such as desire, disgust, national and ethnic identity, changing traditions and masculinity in cooking. The lecture lists landmark examples from different cultures and notes the exclusion of films centred on cannibalism. Its aim is to teach viewers to perceive and interpret food in cinema critically.

The origins and definition of food films

• Emergence in the 1970s The genre originated in the 1970s. Its emergence was driven by growing public interest in food and technical developments in the film industry that made food cinematography more visually appealing.

• Food’s central role In food films, food is the “star” and remains central throughout. Cooks are often the protagonists, linking the narrative to culinary spaces and professionals.

• Visual techniques and locations Cinematography often uses close-ups and panning shots in which food fills the screen, emphasising texture, colour and presentation to engage viewers. Principal settings include kitchens, dining rooms, food shops and food trucks, showing both everyday and professional gastronomic environments.

• Narrative functions Storylines consistently portray characters negotiating identity, power or class through food, using culinary practices and shared meals as narrative tools. Food reinforces or challenges cultural norms; the films present engaging adventures that reflect what society considers normal.

Audience connection and cultural influence

• Universal appeal Eating is a universal activity that enables viewers to identify with characters, even in animated films. The familiar processes of eating and cooking create bridges of empathy across diverse audiences.

• Reflection and norms Through their stories, food films invite reflection on cultural norms, potentially reinforcing traditions or challenging the status quo. The genre uses gastronomic narratives to investigate social constructs and personal identity.

Recurring themes

• Desire and disgust Food films repeatedly communicate themes of desire—pleasure, appetite and sensuality—and disgust—aversion and taboo—by drawing on visceral responses to food.

• National and ethnic identity Food serves as a marker of national and ethnic identity, revealing cultural heritage, migration, assimilation and pride through cuisine.

• Ethnicity and changing traditions Stories often address ethnicity and the evolution of culinary traditions, exploring tensions between preserving established practices and changing food habits.

• Masculinity in cooking The genre explores masculinity in cooking by examining gender roles, professional kitchen hierarchies and changing perceptions of men in culinary spaces.

Canonical examples and exclusions

• Landmark films: genre-defining examples include La Grande Bouffe; Tampopo; Babette’s Feast; Like Water for Chocolate; Eat Drink Man Woman; Big Night; Chocolat; Soul Food; Tortilla Soup; Ratatouille; and Jiro Dreams of Sushi. These films span different cultures and styles, illustrating the genre’s breadth.

• Excluding cannibalism: films in which cannibalism is central are excluded from this lecture’s list of food films. Examples are Delicatessen and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

• Analytical aim: by analysing these films, viewers can learn to “truly see” food in cinema, understanding its thematic and narrative significance.

Film analysis: Babette’s Feast. Negotiating identity and power through food.

In this film, food is more than nourishment: it is a complete language of communication capable of dismantling ascetic dogma. We observe a sharp contrast—aesthetics versus social commentary: the grey, tasteless soup eaten by the villagers symbolises their rejection of earthly pleasures in pursuit of spiritual salvation. This is their “norm”, their social construct.

But Babette changes the balance of power by investing all her resources, and her soul, in creating an authentic French dinner. The preparation of turtle soup shocks both the audience and the characters, bordering on disgust—a visual technique that elicits a visceral response. Yet a transformation takes place when the camera moves to close-ups of the finished dishes, filling the screen with texture and colour.

Key moment: the table scene. We see taste and smell becoming a direct connection to the guests’ subconscious. The strict Puritans experience catharsis as they savour quails in sarcophagi. Food is an instrument of power here, but power that liberates rather than oppresses. Through haute cuisine, Babette restores their lost memories and emotions, turning the culinary space into a place of reconciliation and empathy.

Comparison: Eat Drink Man Woman versus Soul Food. Preserving traditions and national identity.

Both films use food as a marker of ethnic identity, but approach it from opposite sides of the barricades.

• Eat Drink Man Woman (Taiwan): here, haute cuisine is a language that replaces words. The father, a chef, loses his sense of taste—a neurogastronomic tragedy—but continues speaking to his daughters through elaborate, ritual Sunday dinners. Tradition appears weighty, demanding enormous skill and discipline. Generational conflict is resolved through the table: food remains the only constant in a changing world. The cinematography emphasises professionalism: quick knives, steam and fire form the “matrix” of Chinese cooking.

• Soul Food (USA): in this film, cooking is less a matter of craftsmanship than the family’s “glue”. Tradition is more democratic and “domestic”. Food indicates the clan’s cohesion. Where food in the Taiwanese film is art and ceremony, here it is comfort and survival.

Conclusion: in both cases, we see a cultural code preserved through food. Changing traditions are shown through refusal or acceptance of participation in these rituals. Food becomes an anchor holding the characters’ identity together when the external world—the social context—tries to divide them.

Masculinity in cooking: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Hierarchy and the male role in the kitchen.

The film about Jiro is an ideal illustration of masculinity in cooking through the lens of monastic devotion. Here, the kitchen is not a place of creativity in the usual sense but a rigid hierarchical structure resembling an army or monastery.

Jiro is an absolute patriarch. His style is one of minimalism and perfectionism. He “reads the matrix” of fish and rice better than he reads people. We see the professional space of the kitchen completely displacing personal life. Masculinity is expressed through total control and the suppression of emotion for the sake of results, rather than through brute strength. Jiro’s sons live in their father’s shadow, and their path is one of endlessly repeating the same actions in pursuit of an unattainable ideal. This is a story about a man fulfilling himself through restraint and discipline, with sushi becoming the only worthy language of communication with the world.

Assignment 4. Desire and disgust: Tampopo. Visceral reactions and breaking taboos.

Tampopo skilfully plays in the territory of “desire/disgust”, combining gastronomy and eroticism.

The egg-yolk scene: this is the essence of desire. The camera uses an extreme close-up to show a yolk passing between the lovers’ mouths. Food ceases to be nourishment and becomes pure sensory pleasure, an instrument of seduction. The moment’s aesthetic intensity is pushed to the limit.

The oyster-and-blood scene: here, the director deliberately introduces disgust, a taboo, to intensify sensuality. The mixing of food with bodily matter, blood, creates shock and leaves the viewer balancing between nausea and voyeurism. These scenes work through contrast: the ordinary act of eating becomes intimate, breaking social norms of propriety. This is neurogastronomy in action: the viewer’s brain simultaneously receives signals of hunger and arousal, producing a powerful emotional response.

Essay: animation and taste memory in Ratatouille. Identification through a “direct connection to childhood”.

In the animated film Ratatouille, we find perhaps the most precise example of how taste works with memory. The protagonist is a rat, which in itself creates dissonance and disgust in a kitchen context: a social commentary on a “dirty animal” in a sanctuary of cleanliness. Yet this barrier collapses because taste is universal.

The key scene is the moment when the critic Ego tastes the ratatouille. Here, a mechanism operates that I call a “direct connection to childhood”. One bite of a simple peasant dish instantly transports the cold snob to a warm evening in his past.

Why does it work? Visually, animation allows the effect to be heightened: we literally see the colour palette and light around the character change. This moment enables any viewer, regardless of age or culture, to identify with him. We all have that “taste of childhood” capable of melting the ice of cynicism. The film shows that haute cuisine can be defeated by the sincerity of simple food when it is prepared with feeling. It is the triumph of empathy over snobbery.

Eating and temptation—La Grande Bouffe

Marco Ferreri’s cult 1973 film La Grande Bouffe is considered one of the first food films, although it does not quite resemble contemporary examples. Its four protagonists—a pilot, a chef, a television star and a judge—decide to eat themselves to death on exquisite food. They retire to a villa, invite prostitutes and are later joined by a schoolteacher. They indulge in gluttony and sex, the prostitutes flee, and all four protagonists die one after another. Bouffer is French slang for “to stuff oneself”. The film is grotesque, comic and frightening. It was a savage satire of consumer society. Food serves as a metaphor for the meaningless routine of desire and satisfaction under capitalism.

Eating and temptation—Babette’s Feast

At the opposite pole is the Danish film Babette’s Feast (1987), based on Karen Blixen’s story of the same name, which tells of asceticism and hidden temptations.

Babette’s French dinner transformed a devout Danish village and earned the film the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. Babette’s Feast explores the conflict between self-denial and sensual pleasure, presenting great culinary art as a way to awaken true spiritual grace. After the meal, the guests forget old grievances, rekindle former love, join hands in a circle and begin to sing. They may not have understood every subtlety of the extraordinary dinner, on which Babette spent 10,000 francs, but they feel its uplifting effect in their souls.

Creating identity—Tampopo

The Japanese comedy Tampopo (1985) is another food film released at around the same time.

Tampopo tells the story of a lorry driver and his companion who help Tampopo, whose name means “dandelion” in Japanese, save her failing ramen shop and become a fearless master of ramen.

The film is a comedy about the complexities of Japanese culture. Several stories are woven into the plot, each reflecting a particular aspect of the characters’ relationship with food. And the film’s true star is, of course, ramen.

Challenging traditional roles—Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water for Chocolate (Como Agua Para Chocolate) is a 1992 Mexican film in the magical-realist style, based on the popular novel of the same name published in 1989 by Mexican writer Laura Esquivel.

The film’s central theme is tradition and gender roles. Its main conflict lies in a family tradition that forbids the youngest daughter, Tita, from marrying so that she can devote herself to caring for her mother. Through Tita’s magical cooking, however, which ultimately frees the family from these conventions, Tita and her sister not only break barriers and gender roles in their society but also help establish a tradition of treating one another as equals.

Food in art—independent study

Swiss-Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri was an influential figure in conceptual food art and was associated with Fluxus. The Fluxus movement emerged in 1960 as a response to the art world’s elitism and insularity.

Fluxus aimed to break down the boundaries between art and life.

Food was one of the principal themes of Spoerri’s work, and he called this aspect “Eat Art”.

One form of this art was his “snare-pictures of eaten meals”.

Spoerri took the remains of a meal on a table, fixed them to its surface with spray adhesive, and then hung the table on a wall, turning a horizontal surface into a vertical one.

As early as 1961, Spoerri declared certain food products to be artworks by marking them with a rubber stamp reading Attention Oeuvre d’art, or “Attention: work of art”.

He stamped shop-bought tinned foods at Galerie Koepcke in Copenhagen.

Three years later, he organised a performance called Restaurant de la Galerie J in Paris, where he cooked food himself over several evenings.

Art critics acted as waiters, playing on the idea that a critic “serves” art to the viewer and helps explain the work. Spoerri was one of the first artists to use food in art in an attempt to answer the question:

“What turns everyday life into a work of art?”

In 1967, he introduced the term Eat Art.

His motto was:

“When all other arts disappear, the noble art of cooking will remain.”

Spoerri planned and held large banquets as part of his Eat Art concept until 2001.

One was Déjeuner sous l’herbe, “Lunch beneath the Grass”—“The Burial of a Snare-Picture”.

The banquet was conceived as a neo-avant-garde artistic act. A theatrical lunch for 120 guests was organised in the grounds of a château. At its end, the twenty tables at which the guests had eaten were buried in a forty-metre trench exactly as they had been left after the meal, as snare-pictures, without gluing the objects down.

Eat Art asked not only “What is art?” but also “What is a restaurant?”

Many conceptual artworks raise these questions again and again.

One such project was the restaurant FOOD in the 1970s.

Alison Knowles

Alison Knowles first presented Make a Salad in 1962 as a leading member of the Fluxus group of artists founded in downtown New York.

Knowles has presented the work at least a dozen times. She explained:

“Anyone can enter this work of art simply by eating it.”