Do Not Eat! is a collection of eating-themed illustrations of monsters both cute and strange created by Andrew Bell, such as this sad sausage and angry Hamburger Helper. The carrot skeleton unfortunately didn't make it to the book on time, but it would've fit in too. See more of Bell's illustrations at Creatures In My Head. [via Notcot]
I didn't go to last weekend's Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn, New York expecting to eat anything interesting or unusual, but thanks to 1 Bite 7 Days I got the opportunity to taste three dishes that were new to my taste buds.
1 Bite 7 Days is Heather Menicucci's documentary project named after a Japanese proverb that says, "For every new food we eat, we gain seven days of life." After trying one of her complimentary dishes (or three, if you're a glutton like me), participants enter a private booth where they can talk about what they would do with their extra seven (to twenty-one) days, with their responses being recorded on camera to be compiled into the final video.
I spent a long time thinking about what I would do with my extra days of life, hoping to come up with something profound. To say that I succeeded would be grossly incorrect (the contents of what I said in that booth are private, unless Heather deems them engaging enough to go into the final cut), but the food was enjoyable. Out of the three choices—vinegar pie, pomegranate soup, and pickled fiddlehead ferns—I found the vinegar pie most interesting, although I'd say the pomegranate soup was the most palatable. Read more about the dishes after the jump.
Forget the therapist—just see a vending machine. Usually designed to hold M&Ms and Fritos, this anger management device instead allows you to select a fine piece of china, then watch it fall to the ground and crumble. When enraged and craving comfort, skip the fatty candy bar and go for the fat-free china-smashing option. It's much better for you, and will hopefully goes to a nice mosaic-making foundation. [via Boing Boing Gadgets]
Does your chewing gum lose its flavor in the museum overnight? Italian artist Maurizio Savini's incredible gum-coated sculptures are an impressive testament to bubblegum's resilience and visual appeal. The exhibit's website seems quite enamored with it, gushing, "The sensual act of chewing, the voluptuous warmth of rebelling saliva, the artificial and secretly aseptic fragrance which spreads from the mouth as a promise and missed kiss."
I don't know if I'd go that far, but it's pretty cool.
More neat food-related art features sushi, pizza cutters, and more.
Photo of the Day: Tall Stack
Photo of the Day: Sweet Heart
Creative Candy Photography
If you visit Leeuwarden, Netherlands within the next six months, you might get to sit on one of the giant yolks of Dutch artist Henk Hofstra's art installation, "Art Eggcident." Unfortunately, there are no giant strips of bacon or slices of toast to go with it. [via Coldmud]
Photo of the Day: Meatscapes
Photo of the Day: Melting Ice Cream Truck
Photo of the Day: Pasta Outbreak
Ever look at a radish with a long root and think, "Hey, that looks like a rat!" Maybe not. But with just a few small slices and cuts, you could make something that kind of looks like a rat. Impress your friends with your food-carving technique; just don't serve your radish rats to anyone who's afraid of rodents.
Watch the instructional video, after the jump.
"Once a dusty formality that lived on in the form of radish roses in out-of-the-way hotels, food art, as it is known, is enjoying a new vogue." The New York Times gives us an inside look at the competitive world of fruit and vegetable carving. Some chefs take up produce carving to battle boredom or to impress customers, while top carvers can earn thousands of dollars creating elaborate biodegradable centerpieces for their clients.
Related
Photo of the Day: Bok Choy Fish
The Mutatoes Are Here
The Sounds of Celery
It's your favorite leader of the Autobots, ready to kick ass with organic chili and canned tuna: Optimus Prime! Matt Boulton took this photo of Optimus Prime made out of cans at Canstruction Vancouver, a can sculpture competition after which the cans are donated to food banks. For more information, visit canstruction.org. [via neatorama]
"When I was a kid, this whole field was lush with beautiful green trees and grass."
"Yeup."
"And now there's that...what is that?"
I've never paid much attention to patterns left behind in a tangerine's empty skin, but after looking at designer Svilen Dimchevski's beautiful series of winter trees portrayed in tangerine skins, I'll have to do a double-take before throwing the peel away. [via notcot]
Who needs a thermometer when you have a molten ice cream truck? By that point you don't need an exact reading; it's simply "too damn hot."
This sculpture by Orest Keywan in Australia won the artist the $30,000 Sulpture by the Sea prize in 2006. [via The Last Appetite]
Clockwise from top left: The Velvet Underground & Nico by The Velvet Underground, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb by U2, There Is Nothing Left to Lose by Foo Fighters, and Green Album by Weezer.
Tired of seeing bento boxes that merely look cute? Jacket Lunch Box is a Japanese blog dedicated to making bento boxes that resemble popular album covers. All it takes is the magic of carefully cut nori, kamabako, ham, shredded cabbage, and more, all atop a bed of rice. [Thanks to Sera for the heads up.]
Previously: Bento Boxes on Flickr, Year of the Pig Bento, How to Pack a Bento Box, Character Bento Competition Winner
Chris Jordan specializes in photographic artwork that depicts gross amounts of consumption in single, giant images. The above photo is a tiny piece of an image that represents the more than 100,000 aluminum cans used in the U.S. every 30 seconds. [via Bitten]
Learn how to keep your pigs and sheep bruise-free with this instructional comic about how to best handle livestock. It may have been written in the 1940s-50s, but that doesn't mean the advice is outdated; you probably shouldn't drop lambs or or force them to jump from upper decks, lest you want to lose profit on bruised meat. Check out Comics With Problems for more examples of serious issues being illustrated in less than serious ways. [via bb]
Bored with your fruit? Customize them like graphic designer Sarah King did with an apple, pear and banana. Just don't eat the peel.
Los Angeles-based artist Victoria Reynolds specializes in painting detailed pictures of meat. When have viscera ever looked so beautiful? You can view and buy her paintings at Richard Heller Gallery (the above bacon painting is $5,000 if you're interested) and read more about her at Señor Enrique. [via bb]
It may not be a real sundae, but looking at Kate's illustration of the anatomy of a banana split still makes me hungry. I'd triple the amount of whipped cream though. Check out more of Kate's artwork at Little Doodles.
This is what happens when your kitchen pukes. From Marlene Haring's art installation Heute bleibt die Küche kalt, wir gehen in den Wienerwald ("Today the kitchen remains unused; we're going to the Wienerwald). [via the new shelton wet/dry]
In his experimental film "Cuisine," François Vogel films himself in the kitchen with a fish-eye lens-fitted camera, resulting in distorted perspectives that eventually build up to giving you the sensation that you're looking through a kaleidescope.
Watch the video after the jump. [via growabrain]
Photograph from La Mariposa on Flickr
Brighten up your living room with a...banana wall? View the fruit-bearing wall and more installations at Stefan Sagmeister's exhibition Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far, now showing at Deitch Gallery in New York City.
These bok choy fish are like vegetables and a meat, in one convenient life form! [Thanks to Cathy for the heads up!]
Everyone likes pie. Even bacon!
Check out more of Dan Goodsell's art at The World of Mr. Toast. You can even buy your own huggable, nubbin-armed plush toast, egg or bacon dolls.
I love a good towering stack of fluffy golden pancakes as much as the next guy, but this two hundred and seven pancake stack sculpture by Elizabeth Demaray may be too much of a good thing. And these aren't your pillowy breakfast pancakes, but pancakes that have been dried in a kiln and encased in epoxy resin. Edible? Not so much. It probably makes a good conversation starter though.
In photographer Alex Lucka's series "Food & Beauty," models' faces are embellished with different kinds of meats. Now you have new uses for that salmon steak and ham you have lying around.
Hannes Broecker's exhibit in Dresden, Germany, invites the viewer to grab a glass and drink in the art—literally. The flat, wall-mounted glass containers empty as the night goes by. No need to have studied art history—this is one gallery show almost anyone can appreciate. [from The Cool Hunter, via Prairie]
Jessie Moore of Cakespy illustrates very cute, anthropomorphic foods, mostly in the form of cupcakes. Here she depicts a glaring match between a cupcake and a muffin. I wouldn't be able to pick a winner or a loser; I'd happily eat both of them.
Artist Nathan Sayawa specializes in building Lego sculptures, but judging from his heart sculpture made of conversation hearts he can make anything out of small, colorful, even-sized pieces. His inspiration for this sculpture came from his dislike of Valentine's Day: "It can make your heart feel vulnerable. Almost edible." [via boing boing]
For all those times that you've wondered what would happen to a chocolate bunny artfully subjected to the destructive power of an iron, a heat lamp, and a blow dryer, here's your answer.
Browse through the pages of Cereal Killers to view spooky interpretations of kid's cereal box art done by animation artists and illustrators. Some cereals you won't see on shelves anytime soon: Tinkles, Sugar Postmort-Mmmms, and Lucifer's Charms. [via Drawn!]
Eateries display photos of their food to help the customer decide what to order, but what happens when those photos decay into sickly, off-colored ghosts of their former selves? Despite the lack of any enticing qualities, these photos continue to grace restaurant menus and walls, as documented in the photography book, Bad Food Gone Worse
Although these photographs don't get the stomach juices flowing, Rene explains, "...it doesn't matter how the pictures look. If people are hungry... they will eat!"
Graphic designer and illustrator Jamie Wieck has depicted Dante's descent into hell through the power of...biscuits! Start with a rich tea biscuit, whip your way through a party ring or two, and don't forget the custard creams. When you get to the iced gems, you know you're screwed. The poster is available for £119.99, although with the same amount of money you could also buy yourself a truckload of biscuits. Decisions, decisions...
If you're unfamiliar with the world of mostly European biscuits, check out the biscuit compendium Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down.
The Grocer doesn't sell fresh fruits and vegetables; he just paints vibrant pictures of them and pastes them up on the streets of Chicago. You can buy some of his paintings or request a specific food to be painted on commission, but I find his work most fun when temporarily slapped on the wall of an abandoned building. Not that I'd mind having a watermelon on my wall.
Craig Kanarick shows that candies are at their most beautiful when 1) they're skillfully composed into neat, tight-fitting collages and 2) you're so close to them that you can see every little bump and groove on their surfaces. I would love to display his vibrant, nearly diabetes-inducing creative candy photographs on my walls, but as prices range between $850 and $2500 it would be more economical to buy buckets of candy and photograph them myself.
...Or I could forget the whole "creative photography" bit and just gorge on the candy.
The next time you find yourself face to face with an ugly potato or malformed pepper, don't cast its ugliness aside—it can't help being a mutato. German artist Uli Westphal's Mutato Project highlights the world of "nonstandard fruits, roots, and vegetables" found at supermarkets and farmers' markets in Berlin. Some look like the product of Mother Nature after she's had one too many, while others look like symmetrical works of modern art. Check out the Mutato gallery and judge for yourself. [via swissmiss]
Who needs guitars, keyboards or drums when you can use carrot recorders, celeriac bongos and leek violins? The 11 members of The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra create music from vegetables—sometimes modified, sometimes not—influenced by electronic sounds in contemporary electronic music. It's serious music that sounds better than anything I could play on a real instrument; take a listen or watch this video of their pre-concert preparations and performance:
If you live in Austria you can see The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra perform live tomorrow.
Daniela Edburg's photography exhibit, Drop Dead Gorgeous, shows women in scenes of death or being attacked by popular foods, including Oreos, cotton candy, M&Ms and Lifesavers. However, in her interview with the Morning News she explains that the food isn't evil—we just happen to have love/hate relationships with the food:
When you look at a beautiful package of Oreos everything is new and shiny and attractive, and there is the promise of the sweetness and the pleasure, and then you go and open it and eat it and all you have are a stomachache, crumbs and garbage
Tien Mao visited Japan earlier this year and just posted photos from an early-morning trip to Tsukiji Fish Market, the world's largest wholesale seafood market, where millions of dollars and tons of fish pass through in the early morning six days a week. If you love food, it's definitely one of the places you have to see when you visit Tokyo. I don't know when I'll be there next, but I do know these red tentacles are making me really hungry.
Related: Rion Nakaya also has a lovely set from Tsukiji, taken two years ago. For more market scenes, check out her photographs from Bilbao's Riverside Meat Market and Fish Vendors.
For his master's thesis at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, my friend Ben Brown built News Brews, a device that scans news feeds via the internet, and "parses them to determine the relative frequency at which different coffee growing regions are mentioned. It then brews a cup of coffee from freshly ground whole beans which contains relative proportions of beans grown in the regions in that day's news." I'm looking forward to further developments in the new field of beverage informatics.
My friend Andrew found this beautiful bus stop ad in Chicago recently. Designed just like a World War II-era poster, of a caped nurse cradling a corn dog in the crook of her arm like a baby and feeding it from a mustard bottle, it urges you to visit Springfield's own Cozy Dog Drive In, the birthplace of the corn dog. It's part of a series of vintage-styled advertisements from the Illinois Bureau of Tourism for their Offbeat Illinois campaign, meant to highlight quirky attractions around the state.
I love the corn dog poster best and am planning to get one for my wall, but you can buy any of the other advertisements (the Butter Cow and World's Largest Catsup Bottle are very nice) printed on t-shirts, tote bags, notebooks and all kinds of merchandise from the Enjoy Illinois CafePress store.
My friend Rion Nakaya is an amazing photographer who now lives in Paris and takes train rides across the continent for short weekend trips, just like a good European. This photograph is from a set she put up recently of the wares on display at Bilbao's Riverside Meat Market; I love this photo in particular because most of us are so disconnected from the realities of what we eat, with supermarket aisles full of plastic-wrapped ground beef and freezers packed with boxed chicken nuggets, and this shopkeeper's display leaves you no choice but to consider that yes, your pork chops came from an actual animal because here is its head right in front of you. It's both real and beautiful.
Previously: The Fish Vendors of Bilbao's Riverside Market
My friend and favorite photographer Rion Nakaya now lives in Paris and goes on weekend jaunts all over Europe just like the locals do. Her most recent set of photos is of fish vendors in Bilbao's Riverside Market, which has been the city's center of trade since the 14th century.
I consider it a good morning if my pancakes resemble pancakes. Members of the Pancake Art group on Flickr take their pancakes to a whole other level, crafted into the shapes of bunnies, ducks, and mice.
Rhizome.org's ArtBase on Tea Blog, an ongoing project by British artist Ellie Harrison: "Every time Ellie has a cup of tea (or a different type of hot drink) she notes down the thought which is most on her mind during the first few sips. These thoughts are then uploaded to the Tea Blog at regular intervals. Tea Blog aims to expand indefinitely over the next few years, developing over-time into a vast database of thoughts – a diary of day-to-day life via the ritual of tea-drinking."
It sounds banal, to be sure, but I was surprised to find myself getting really interested after clicking through a few cups worth of entries—Harrison gives you just a snippet of her life, but it's just enough that your imagination starts piecing together what the whole might be like. (Also: the British really do drink a lot of tea, don't they?)
I'm not sure what cheers me up more this incredibly dreary, incredibly wet East Coast morning: that Louisiana's 2007 State Easter Egg has a tiny Emeril inside of it, or that there is a guy named Jacob out there somewhere who loves the Food Network so much that he's been running a blog called Food Network Addict since last June.
(And yes, he has the photos from Iron Chef Cat Cora's FHM shoot.)
"Andy and Angel have been painting with coffee for several years, and have completed hundreds of original artworks. Curious people who view the work are amazed that the artwork is painted entirely in coffee - no additives, just 100% pure coffee."
They have a gallery of coffee-themed paintings, but they really do paint everything with coffee: portraits, wildlife, flowers, scenes from trips to Scandinavia. [via Tastespotting]
From A Hamburger Today | Last week Serious Eats's Alaina Browne blogged about Value Pack, the typeface made from hamburger meat. Today, I bring you the man behind the meatfont, Robert Bolesta
What inspired you to create Value Pack?
It was made for a typography class I was taking at Pratt Institute. The project was to make an alphabet out of any found object. I wanted to do raw meat, and hamburger was the easiest to mold and shape into letter-forms.
What, if anything, does Value Pack say to the observer?
It was intended to be just a type study, but I suppose there are other levels of meaning, if you choose to read into it. I made it before I read Fast Food Nation
Who are your artistic influences or inspirations?
I am graduating in about a month, so right now a couple of my professors have had big impacts on me.
How long did it take to make Value Pack?
A frustrating day to shoot it. I went home to Pennsylvania to do it so I'd have more space. I repackaged each one individually, and I figured out that regular plastic wrap doesn't look the same as industrial plastic wrap, so at midnight I drove to the 24-hour grocery store and asked them if they would go back behind the meat counter to get me a sample of the industrial kind. They actually did it! It was awesome, but it made me feel weird when they watched me leave. They had this look on their faces like they had just given a murderer his weapon.
Tasting Rachael Ray by Naomi Lebowitz is a video composed of Ray's money shots after tasting something on her Food Network show $40 A Day. Lebowitz used clips from more than 30 episodes of the show to make the video, which is a fun watch whether you love or hate Rachael Ray.
[via Gawker]
Since 2000, my friend the Brooklyn artist Ranjit Bhatnagar has been buying food at his neighborhood Saturday greenmarket and scanning his purchases in high-resolution when he gets home, and so you can see a set of his lovely greenmarket produce scans on Flickr.
They're mostly of fruit and vegetables, but occasionally meat, eggs and fish will make an appearance, like in the scan at left. Some of my favorites: a nest of eggs and cilantro, scallion in a sea of popcorn, and a study of reds and greens. (Click on "all sizes" to see them larger and close up—they get even more intense when they're sized larger than life so buy a print if you see something you like!)
A full third of the Serious Eats staff* owns prints of this lovely painting by German artist Michael Sowa. You can get one for yourself for $19.99 at Art.com, or you can get the hardcover book Sowa's Ark and see the Diving Pig plus 54 more of his animal paintings for $24.95 from Amazon.
* Two people, but we carry big sticks.
At right is a piece titled Bubba by SF Bay Area artist Stuart L. Wagner, a pig made out of pork rinds and wood. Finally, a sculpture Homer Simpson can appreciate!
The post-impressionist still life of a ham at right "pays homage to Cezanne and Manet while equaling both in its rigor and sensuousness," and was one of the painter Paul Gauguin's first real masterpieces, painted in 1889 before his famous move to Tahiti.
The Ham is now part of the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., but Fine Art Prints On Demand will happily sell you a print if you'd like one for your wall.)
Food Creation: Designing Tasteful Frictions. Tokyo-based design magazine PingMag interviews food artist Ayako Suwa, who got started creating dishes to accompany exhibitions at her husband's art gallery.
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