Food – Page 2 – Kristen Baumlier

Category: Food

EAT LOVE – A Book of Food Concepts by Eating Designer Marije Vogelzang

Posted on January 12, 2014January 20, 2014 by Kbaumlier

Since 2000 Marije Vogelzang has been designing eating concept, and exploring the verb ‘to eat’. Her work explores everything that surrounds the act of eating including atmosphere, the people involved, and the stories behind the ingredients. The work will often explore the taste and texture, sound, smell and color of food and the way it is prepared and served.

Some of her work has explored the process of design of the travel of food to your body including “the journey of food from seed all the way to poop.” Her work is developed in her studio and restaurant, and has evolved in the last ten years.

A new book called EAT LOVE, has won the award for Best Designed Cookbook of the Netherlands, and presents some of the research and projects of Vogelzang. The book which has 160 pages has images, personal stories, sketches, and designs.

I took a peek at the book website, and found there were some interesting projects featured in the book.

Some of pages include:

Cupcakes With a Lack of Attention (With pictures of cupcakes labeled with “no!,” “take me,” “come here,” “eat me,” “you can resist me,” and other messages.)
Cressware, Gardenware for the body (The designs include a watercress hat and cape.)
Funeral Dinner (The phrase white food is suitable as “solace food,” is on the page with an image of white food on a table.)
The Binding Strength of Food (A large sculptural sausage structure, with a description about the artists’ process.)

I recommend getting a snack from the fridge, and checking out the book webpage, or ordering on Amazon.

Images and Links:

EAT LOVE – www.marijevogelzang.nl

EAT Love – on www.amazon.com

GOSSIP for 2 – A Cake Meant to Be Shared

Posted on December 30, 2013 by Kbaumlier

Every meet a friend for coffee or dinner, and you share a dessert? This interaction of spending time talking over dessert inspired a special cake designed by Julie Hinault, a food designer and Olivier Dessyn, pastry chef and owner of Mille Feuille Bakery Café. The two collaborated to to create “GOSSIP for 2,” which is a cake designed for two people to share as they talk, gossip, or share things with each other.

The idea for the project started in France, while Hinault was developing her master thesis and was questioning the relationship between food, conversation, and the special status of dessert. She writes on her site, ”Dessert is often seen as an indulgence, many of us often share a cake, or only take a small piece. We cannot bare the idea of indulging alone, we prefer to share our guilt!”

Hinault worked with pastry chef, Olivier Dessyn to create a delicious and unique cake made with almonds, coconut, bitter chocolate mousse, pineapple, and lime. The cake is frosted with two tones of frosting, indicating that it is meant to be shared.

Curious to share with a friend? You can get the cake for $12 at the Mille Feuille Bakery Café, located in New York. Yum!

Links and Images:

www.juliehinault.com

www.millefeuille-nyc.com

Snow Day – A Maple Themed Food Truck for Social Justice

Posted on December 8, 2013December 11, 2013 by Kbaumlier

Drive Change is a non profit that was started to help create opportunities for formerly incarcerated youth to earn a paycheck as well as connecting to other people thorugh food. Founders Annie Bickerton, a social entrepreneur and Jordyn Lexton, a teacher wanted to create change and address the issue that in New York, criminals as young as 16 years old are recognized and tried as adults, and oftentimes emerge back into the world unsure of how to integrate back into society. What is a way to do this? By creating food trucks that create opportunities for formerly incarcerated youth to get experience working and interacting with others.

The first food truck, called Snow Day, is getting ready to open in early January. The food will be maple sugar themed with Pancake Poppers, Maple Grilled Cheese, Maple Braised Pulled Pork Sliders, Maple Bacon Brussel Sprouts, Sugar on Snow (sugar lollypops made on real snow), Maple Bacon Doughnus and other items. The food will be made from locally sourced food.

The team plans to get Snow Day out on the streets during the first week of January, where it will alternate between three location in Chelsea, Lower Manhattan, and DUMBO.

Hungry for maple syrup food? You can learn more about the project’s mission by watching the Drive Change Launch Film and checking out the Drive Change and Snow Day truck website.

Images and Links:

snowdayfoodtruck.com

Drive Change

Drive Change Launch Film

Food Chain: Hear the Sounds of Produce Dying

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Kbaumlier

What does it sound like when lettuce is withering up and “dying?” Leonardo Amico attached electric circuits to pieces of Romaine lettuce, and used oscillators to transform the measurements of water content and decomposing cells into sounds and tones.

In the online video titled Processing Decay, which documents the making of the piece, you hear sounds that sound like pulses and alarms. When the lettuce is fresh, the sounds are longer and fuller, and when the video cuts to 5 days later, the sounds of the wilting lettuce are shorter notes that occur more frequently. The experience of seeing the lettuce wilt and hearing the sounds change is unique and a little sad.

On the project/video site Amico writes:

“Technology relies on the stiffness of the inorganic. Digital processing consists of a sequence of logical operations inside lattices of chemically modified silicon crystal. Rarely computational and organic processes meet each other (apart from the peculiar relationship humans can build with electronic technology and gadgetry) but nonetheless they share a common characteristic: they both express themselves as phenomena over time.

This work intends to explore the possibility of an encounter between the two realms, by translating their processes into the universal language for phenomena; sound. Over the course of hours, days and weeks time spoils the texture of the leaves and degrades cells, slowly affecting the behavior of the system and its sonic output. The accuracy and precision of digital chips are forced to take into account the inevitably slow failure of inert biological matter.”

The piece is part of a collaborative project by Amico and Pere Saguer called Food Chain that was a music cd, dvd, and zine that explored the metaphysical properties of food coproduced with Badweather Press.

Images and Links:

Processing Decay – Video

www.badweatherpress.com/foodchain.html

Ghost Food – Experience How We Might Eat After Global Warming

Posted on October 24, 2013October 28, 2013 by Kbaumlier

Two years ago, the cost of peanut butter went up, due to a lower supply of peanuts due to severe heat and drought. In the discussion about climate change, our food supply and food security are named as a growing problem, and that 2050 is the tipping point for when our supply will not meet our demand.

GhostFood is an interactive art project created by artists Miriam Simun and Miriam Songster which presents an experience of how we might eat in the future. For the project, a food truck offers a menu with food substitutes for 3 foods that would be affected by global warming. The menu lists cod, chocolate, and peanut butter. A visitor can order a food sample, which comes in a white tray and a thin tubelike mask that allows you to smell what you are supposed to eat.

Once the mask is on, the visitor is able to smell the food that they ordered, in a small round piece that is soaked in synthetic chocolate, cod, or peanut butter.

Both Simun and Songster have done past projects with food and smell. GhostFood is meant to present a simulation of how food might be experienced if it is no longer available.

The press release for the project describes the experience as:

“When you get to the front of the line, ask for the cod, and rest assured that the food substitute served is fish-less and made from climate-change resilient ingredients. Your flavor experience will be delivered by a GhostFood server.

If you inquire, you might learn that the potential future of the codfish as an ocean ghost is the result of a future mass drowning. Cod eggs that the female fish release into our oceans can no longer float in surface waters due to decreasing salinity levels in an Atlantic that is warming.

GhostFood serves this post-extinction sidewalk snack hoping that when you float in the ocean next summer you will consider that buoyant feeling a little differently.”

The project premiered as part of the DesignPhilly event on October 9, 2013.

Image Source and Links:

steamworkphilly.com/ghostfood.html