Week 5

On Tuesday, artist Maryam Razi visited our class to present her board game prototype based on the Hox Zodiac. I enjoyed getting a glimpse into her typography process. It was very inspiring for me, as someone who wants to develop my own typeface but has always been too intimidated to try. The premise of Maryam’s game is also very intriguing- it encourages players to generate their own zodiac-influenced recipes by rolling a dice. Coincidentally, all of the projects I am currently working on have something to do with food, so watching Maryam’s demo provided some great insight into how food can be incorporated into art and design.

Maryam’s Adobe Illustrator file showing her typography process.

Saffron that Maryam brought to our class.

For instance, I am working with Valentin and Peyton to create an art piece on bread. For another class, I will be shooting an experimental music video advocating for the consumption of organic and non-GMO fruits and vegetables over artificially modified foods. I recently designed the packaging and working prototype for an uncooked egg-shaped table lamp, and I’m also considering doing my capstone project next quarter on something related to food. So this week’s lesson was quite relevant to my personal interests. I found this very interesting (and visually pleasing) article from Google Arts & Culture called “A Bitesize History of Food in Art,” to better understand the purpose and meaning of edible materials in art.

Food is the basis of our survival. It provides sustenance, but is also one of the greatest pleasures in life. Because food is so universal, it has been a common motif in paintings and sculptures since all the way back to the Roman-era. Food has always been deeply intertwined with religion. For the Romans, wheat represented Ceres, the goddess of grain, embodying virtue (Bass-Krueger). In the Catholic church, bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus Christ (Smith). Different foods can indicate social class, can imply abundance, and can even be used in an erotic context in art. In modern art, food has become a tool for commentary on consumerism and mass-production, a la Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup series. The Google article presents another really cool example of this from contemporary Korean artist Nanda, where she juxtaposes traditional Korean culture with cups from international coffee chain Coffee Bean, critiquing consumer culture in South Korea.

The Coffee Bean, Nanda and 난다, 2008

Now, I feel that food’s versatility as an art subject makes it a quite intimidating topic to tackle. Food has so much meaning that it can be difficult to narrow down what exactly I want to say when including it in my work. I think that this is a challenge we faced in our bread project. The historical and cultural connotations of bread are so broad and diverse that we’ve had trouble pinpointing what we want to do it with for our project. I think that following Professor Vesna’s suggestion to watch Michael Pollan’s “Cooked” episode “Air” on Netflix helped us a lot. The episode dove deep into the history of bread and the scientific process of making it. I finished the episode with a whole newfound appreciation for the food staple. Because bread is mostly air, it allows us to magically make more food from less. This was demonstrated in the video, where a baker smashes loaves of bread until they’re flat. It was astounding to see how condensed bread is when you get rid of the air. And yet, I find bread to be one of the most filling foods that you can eat. Another point in the episode that stood out to me was when Pollan spoke about the demonization of gluten, which came as a result from the invention of over-processed storebought bread. Capitalism is a vicious cycle. Actual bread is supposed to be just flour, water, and yeast. Storebought bread like Wonder Bread has been chemically enhanced to rise faster and produce as much bread as possible as a cheap way to feed a huge demand. Because of this, storebought breads are widely stripped of nutrients. Manufacturers’ solution to this is not to revert back to the old tried and true method of making bread, but instead to pump more “vitamins” and chemicals in the bread to make it “healthier” for consumers. The interviewees in the documentary make the argument that most of the people who report gluten-intolerance are actually just experiencing reactions to the over-processed nature of storebought bread, not just the gluten itself. This is interesting to me because I’ve always wondered what exactly makes gluten so bad, I always see gluten-free this and gluten-free that when walking through the aisles of a grocery store. But gluten plays such an important part in making bread so yummy and textural. Peyton told us a fascinating story about how her usually gluten-intolerant sister was suddenly able to safely eat bread when visiting Europe, most likely because European breads are made with more traditional methods than American.

Promo poster for Michael Pollan’s “Cooked” “Air” episode, Netflix

It seems that for our project, we will now be shifting away from scoring methods to focus on different grains and how they result in different breads. We will be making a large physical venn diagram to examine the overlap in ingredients between wheat bread, barley bread, and cornbread. We are still looking into ways to make our project more interactive for our classmates.

I have been tasked with researching corn as a grain as well as cornbread. Connecting back to Alvaro’s lecture several weeks ago, corn originated in Mexico but was later appropriated by Spanish and other Euro-American colonizers. Cornflour is made of finely ground corn kernels (Healthline). In the American colonies, cornbread emerged out of necessity in Southern cuisine because the heat and humidity of the south caused European wheat to go rancid (Lee). Cornbread is also a staple in African, Euro-American, and Native cuisine. With the corn grain, I am interested in how a Native crop ended up migrating to so many different regions and becoming a food staple in many different cuisines. It says a lot about the colonization of the Americas. I am excited to see if the scientific process of baking cornbread differs greatly from that of bread made from wheat.

I would also like to use this blog to document the fermentation process of my kombucha. I am having a surprisingly fun time keeping track of the scoby’s development and I am excited to eventually try my brew.

 

Day 1:

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Works Cited

Bass-Krueger, Maude. “A Bitesize History of Food in Art.” Google Arts & Culture, Google, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/a-bitesize-history-of-food-in-art/9QJyZ-tyLu9GJQ.

Lee, Carissa. “The a-Maize-Ing History of Cornbread.” The Stanford Daily, 19 Nov. 2021, https://stanforddaily.com/2021/11/18/the-a-maize-ing-history-of-cornbread/.

Nanda. “The Coffee Bean.” Google Arts and Culture, Google, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-coffee-bean-nanda/xAHhmwI9pf6XTw.

Pollan, Michael. "Cooked: Air." Netlfix. 2019, www.netflix.com.

Smith, Gregory A. “Just One-Third of U.S. Catholics Agree with Their Church That Eucharist Is Body, Blood of Christ.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 5 Aug. 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/05/transubstantiation-eucharist-u-s-catholics/#:~:text=Transubstantiation%20%E2%80%93%20the%20idea%20that%20during,'%E2%80%9D.

Streit, Lizzie. “Cornstarch vs. Corn Flour: What's the Difference?” Healthline, Healthline Media, 4 July 2019, https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/cornstarch-vs-corn-flour#:~:text=Corn%20flour%20is%20made%20by,whereas%20cornstarch%20is%20mostly%20carbs.