DEATH STALKS THE KITCHEN

Look, none of us doubts that there are profound and mysterious connections between 

food, passion, love, sex and death.

 

Even so, I was surprised by a recent headline in the Daily Telegraph that read,

YouTube chef ‘chopped up lover and dumped his head in the sea.’

 

I won’t intrude on the grief of the people concerned by naming names, though of course you can look it up. What actually fascinated me about the headline was that the paper thought  ‘chopped up lover and dumped his head in the sea’ needed to be in quotation marks, whereas YouTube chef didn’t.  I suppose this mean that anybody who calls themselves a YouTube chef,isa YouTube chef.

 

The Telegraph article enters the Nicholson archive alongside other headlines that include 

 

‘I’ve got a taste for killing,’ says cannibal who ate man’s tongue.

 

The Head in the Hellman’s Box

 

Hunger forced her to eat raw batter

 

Teen ‘poisoned dad’s pasta and choked mum’

 

Chef cut corners on pie that killed worshippers

 

Sausage Tycoon killed in his sauna with a crossbow

 

How very different from the home lives of our own dear Angela and Helena.

IT'S ART (BUT IS IT FOOD?)

My pal Kevin Kinsella alerted me to a recent fad (I don’t think it’s quite a meme yet) on German Twitter where people are making sandwiches in the style of great visual artists.  Apparently it was started by a woman named Marie Sophie Hingst, with the hashtag #KunstGeschichteAlsBrotbelag. And others have joined in, as is the way with twitter.

Some are very literal indeed, just food cut into shapes to resemble works of art.   

But even before I clicked on the link Kevin sent me I was thinking of Mondrian and Rothko – and evidently so were others:

My own small addition to the genre is inspired by Carl Andre, top American minimalist, famous for his gridding, and it’s not a sandwich, but store-bought cheese tidbits arranged like this:

Of course, any work by Carl Andre would have been far more rigorous, far more geometrically precise, than my work, but then I suppose he wouldn’t have been using store-bought cheese tidbits

EGGLESTON REDUX

And sometimes you miss something really obvious.  As I said in my previous post, I was at Paris Photo LA, eating potato croquettes (above), while waiting to gawk at William Eggleston; and how could I not think of another of his great food photographs, this one:

There on the left hand side of the freezer is the product that that sometimes provides the title of the picture.  Eggleston titles are problematic, I think: a whole lot of them are simply “Untitled” but titles get attached  just so that everybody knows which ones they’re talking about.  Anyway, the title of this one, is “Frosty Acres Tasty Taters.”  Sounds like poetry, doesn’t it?

And I can’t resist just one more great Eggleston food picture: a photograph of a man looking at a steak with more love than some men have ever looked at anything: