Culinary Cultures (2010)
Culinary Cultures is a performative installation in the guise of a buffet-style dinner
party that will bridge two socially separated spaces – the kitchen and the institutional laboratory – thereby mixing techniques, flavors, smells, sounds and forgotten culinary practices while referencing current materials that provide base samples for science experiments and education.
If we consider these two groupings of words, first: wetware, mold, clones, bacteria, yeast culture, tissue cultures, living and recently-living organisms, dissection, preservation, temperature, humidity. This list will most likely bring to mind the image of an institutional laboratory. Where these; cheese, carrots, yoghurt, mixed greens, vinegar, wine, bread, flay, chicken bouillon, pickles, 350 degrees, moisture - denote a much different image, that of the domestic - a kitchen, and the ingredients in a typical home. The two lists, although seemingly dualistically paired, are actually interchangeable if one shifts the backdrop between the lab and the kitchen.
Edible Companion Bread with Daughter of Mother Vinegar & Olive Oil
Assorted cheese cultures (microscopic views available)
Fruit and crème fraîche (sun incubated)
Cloned Veggies and Mixed Greens served “very recently living”
Fish in acid vat (lime) with sprouts, fungi and vine vegetables
Yoghurt cultures
various Agar Agar gelatin sculptures, edible plant tissue culture dishes
fresh pressed Wheatgrass Cocktail
Before the 18th century laboratories were sites of alchemical and artisanal inquiry - places where all kinds of element play occurred from potion and pigment mixing to experimenting with numerous properties and minerals in hopes of procuring gold.
Natural philosophers worked on their experiments in rooms or buildings extended from their living quarters and when the work became much to volatile or needed
larger furnaces or ventilation and isolation, the studio or atelier separated from the home by mere necessity due to either large scale production of dangerous solutions, incubation or production of commercial materials.
The institutional scientific laboratory is a rather recent development established
around the early nineteenth century and attributed to the industrial revolution within a Western context. The kitchen however, has a much longer history, dating back thousands of years. One can summon images of brewing cauldrons, chickens and children running underfoot, stones and pestles for grinding wheat, crude and uncontrolled experiments with cultures for producing breads, wines, preserves, cheeses and a multitude of other delicacies concocted from plants, minerals and animal organisms. Perhaps the kitchen can even be loosely credited as the origin of the modern laboratory in the development of an assortment of practices surrounding controlled (somewhat) experiments in a sterile (progressively more with modernization) space often separated as a workspace from the living quarters.
Now, many of us moderns, are a little estranged from practices that include working with living or nonliving ingredients from basic elements or “from scratch” as some homemakers may phrase such activities. When visiting a synthetic engineering lab in 2009, the lead scientist used a yeast culture to demo a living culture under a microscope to the visiting artists. I was surprised, yeast? I asked her - like the kind used for making bread? Yes, she replied softly as she made a fancy swirl of growth medium (sugar based liquid) in the petri dish. I have used the very same yeast hundreds of times in a mixing bowl with sugar and water. We watched as she placed the petri dish in an impressive machine which looked like something between a fridge and a industrial boiler - an incubator to provide warmth for the yeast culture to begin growth. After ten minutes she produced the dish and we huddled around to observe the delicate pattern, now bubbly and expanded on the bottom of the plastic dish. It reminded me of a fancy drizzle glaze one might use to impress dinner guests on a plate of fine cake and fruit.
Has something been lost in moving experimentation with living cultures out of the kitchen and into the laboratory? Of course it makes perfect sense to protect our home and family from any kind of chemical exposure or bacterial infection but at the same time - do we really need to separate practices of working with living materials
and food consumption to the point where we rely on the growth and production of a large majority of our food through industrial processes - produced in monocultural systems, packaged and distributed globally?
Perhaps we have just lost a few simple practices in our daily schedules that could realign us with the simplicity of growing, breeding and concocting - maybe we just need to be more aware of the interesting qualities of such organisms and the reality that we eat living materials everyday - or maybe, we have been a little alienated from the processes of cultivating the very food we consume and only need to be reminded?
The modernist paradigm to separate and segment the senses, to categorize and
syntheticize taste, smell, touch is very much a part of our food production and consumption reality. Many of us are engaged in the reversal of this through supporting food that is grown free-range, local, organic, chemical and additive free, in an attempt to move back to a form of food consumption that is more agrarian, a less industrial packaged diet of artificial colors, flavors - diets that could not sustain our general health nor agricultural production. Food doesn?t have to come in boxes or exist as partitioned parts wrapped in plastic and Styrofoam. How did it come to this - what series of events lead to the modern supermarket schema and would would it be like if the current methods we have for food consumption were to change altogether? I think initially, if we are going to engage in this kind of thought experiment, we need to question our very intimate relationship to food culture, to the spaces and networks where food is obtained, produced, prepared and consumed - both in a contemporary and historical sense. At the same time this question is vague - there are as many culturally diverse ways to think about this question as there are varieties of food ingredients. In the project four main organisms (yeast, bacteria for vinegar, bacteria for yoghurt, plant) were sampled, grown, incubated and then consumed - this was a preliminary investigation to think about such questions - what is our everyday relationship to living materials that are destined for consumption - how can these relationships be re-examined? Components of the installation included:
1. Mother of Vinegar - a slimy bacterium substance used to make vinegar from left over wine. Was at one time kept in a ceramic crock in the corner of the kitchen. 2. Doughbie: An Edible Companion - each dinner guest will receive a Doughbie kit to take home. A wearable bread-baking system that uses the body heat of human host to rise the dough throughout the day. Dough is worn in a snuggly-type garment close to the body, baked at the end of the day (while saving a small section to use for the next days culture). 3. Yoghurt grown through bacterial incubation 4. Agar Agar sculptures representing fetuses and fish, a contribution by Alison Loader 5. Edible plant clones - plants intended for tissue culture growth, interrupted and consumed
6.Very recently living plant juice from wheatgrass in the form of cocktails...and wine - brought by all guests to share...
Further References and Websites
Eyebeam, Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, www.eyebeam.org
Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, Environmental Health Clinic,
http://www.environmentalhealthclinic.net/ooz/projects/xspecies/
Centre for Genomic Gastronomy, http://www.genomicgastronomy.com/
Herbologies/Foraging Networks, Pikselache,
http://www.pixelache.ac/helsinki/herbologies-foraging-networks/
Conflict Kitchen, www.kubidehkitchen.com
vvork (search 'food') www.vvork.com
Bompas & Parr, www.jellymongers.co.uk/
Graeme Gooday. Placing or Replacing the Laboratory in the History of Science, ISIS
Wilcoxson, Shand and Shand. Kitchen Microbiology. The American Biology Teacher, VOL 61,
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Ursula Klein. The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation. ISIS, 2008
Cecelia Novero. Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2010.
John Varriano. Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2009.
John Knechtel, ed. Food. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.
Barbara Fischer, ed. Foodculture: Tasting Identities and Geographies in Art. Toronto: YYZ, 1999.
Michel Delville. Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Julia Robinson. The Sculpture of Indeterminacy: Alison Knowles's Beans and Variations. Art Journal, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Winter, 2004), pp. 96-115
Lucy Baldwyn. Blending in: The Immaterial Art of Bobby Baker's Culinary Events.
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The Virtual Laboratory, Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin <http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/essays/index.html> accessed January, 2010.
In the Lab, The Naked Scientists: Science Radio & Science Podcasts <http://
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Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., USA, 1987.
Latour, Bruno, Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: the Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Sage, Los Angeles, USA, 1979.