[…] when eaten together, food does not taste different. But it tastes better.
carlo petrini1
[…] a shared meal is a better meal.
massimo bottura2
The first banquet of which we have evidence took place about 12,000 years ago.3 Those gathered feasted on seventy-one roasted tortoises. Remnants of their smoke-blackened shells were discovered by archeologists in the Hilazon Tachtit cave in Israel. Natalie D. Munro and Leore Grosman estimate that the tortoise-meat was enough to feed about thirty-five people. The remains of the body of an old woman, possibly a shaman, were found in the same cave. The tortoises were probably the main course served at her funeral feast. A nearby cave, where leftovers of three wild cattle and a man’s bones were excavated, was also a scene of banqueting. That people dined there is clearly indicated by the signs of cutting and roasting, similar to those on the tortoise shells. Apparently, as early as 2,000 years ago, a shared, highly ritualized meal replete with symbolic meanings was considered a suitable farewell to, commemoration of, and tribute to the community’s prominent individuals. Sumptuous repasts also provided a helpful tool that “served important roles in the negotiation and solidification of social relationships.”4
All crucial events in people’s lives take place at the table. What we eat and what we exclude from our diet are strongly differentiating factors. The food on our plates tells the story of the religions we worship, the topographies we inhabit, and the classes to which we belong. Eating customs contribute to the formation of our individual and collective identities.8 As Robert Nozick explains, “Eating food with someone can be a deep mode of sociability […] a way of sharing together nurturance and the incorporation within ourselves of the world, as well as sharing textures, tastes, conversation, and time.”9
1
Talking during eating and about eating is explored by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, who poses her essential question in the very subtitle of her book Word of Mouth: What We Talk about When We Talk about Food, and hastens to answer it, writing that: “Sometimes we talk about food simply to talk about food. Yet as often as not we talk through food to speak of love and desire, devotion and disgust, aspirations and anxieties, ideas and ideologies, joys and judgments.”10 As mentioned in “The Antinomies of Taste,” Immanuel Kant dreaded eating alone. He believed that solitary eating could paradoxically exhaust the body, rather than nourishing it, and that it contradicted the idea of humanity, which was actualized in and through conversation.11
There isn’t one such dish. My mother made wonderful souffles, perhaps one of those … But more than anything, I remember the atmosphere, the comings and goings around the table at my home, the entire social dimension of eating, the family facet of it. This was the most important thing, I guess. If there was anything I wanted to reproduce later, it was this social, companionable, family-like ambience enveloping the meals. And,
anyway, this is itself part of a bigger whole – you remember the taste, but you also remember the pleasure, the sense of security, the bonding.14
Feasting was appreciated in antiquity as the most potent unifying factor. One of ancient Sparta’s most rigorously observed rules concerned warriors’ mandatory attendance at shared meals. Nothing could exempt one from the obligation of dining together with others. Those who fought shoulder to shoulder were also supposed to eat shoulder to shoulder at syssitia or pheiditia, that is, obligatory daily banquets, instituted by king Lycurgus. The soldier-eaters were also expected to supply certain foodstuffs to the common kitchen.15 Aristotle, too, praised feasts “to which all the guests contribute” as superior to those “furnished by a single man.”16 This dovetailed with and buttressed democracy, which promoted bringing disparate points of view together and thus fostered unity in variety.
our ancestors fitly called the festive meeting of friends at table, as implying union in life, a convivial meeting [convivium] – a much better name than that of the Greeks, who call such an occasion sometimes a compotation [σνμπóσιον/συμπόσιον], sometimes a social supper [σύνδειπνον], evidently attaching the chief importance to that which is of the least moment in an entertainment.17
Although Cicero preferred convivium as the term most accurately capturing the community of feasting, the wording he rejected – symposion and syndeipnon – conveys the notion of community forming around the table as well.
While Cicero did not disdain the sensory pleasure of eating, which he considered natural as long as it was kept in moderation, he declared himself grateful to his “advanced years for increasing [his] appetency for conversation, and diminishing [his] craving for food and drink.”19 Cicero viewed old age as a stage in life when important existential values were attained, and as years went by, meetings at the table more and more distinctively represented “union in life” rather than “union in banqueting.” “I […] daily fill my table with my neighbors, prolonging our varied talk to the latest possible hour,”20 relates Cato the Elder, Cicero’s porte-parole and the protagonist of his treatise. Mealtimes offer the opportunity to put into practice one of the ideals of Stoic philosophy, that is, conversing in a friendly fashion on the most important issues of existence, which helps one remain detached from current events and erect an “inner fortress.”
2 Taste and Difference
In Critique of Judgment, Kant defines the sphere of taste as emphatically subjective, because the experience of it, he contends, cannot be shared. De gustibus non est disputandum – there is no arguing about taste. However, as the previous chapters have amply shown, while taste is the most “private” and intimate of the senses, our individual tastes are not simple effects of free choices, but result from the cultural training we undergo from birth onwards.21 A multitude of social factors leave very scarce room for the whims of individual predilections. Our tastes mirror our social status and cultural background. We are what we eat, but appetite is hardly an indisputable zone of freedom. Our menus are determined by knowledge about the properties of various foods as much as by emotional, social, and economic considerations, with transcendence occasionally interfering with our choices as well. Consequently, the activity that unites all people at the same time performs a strongly differentiating function.
[i]n the language of Homer and the ancient Greeks, “bread eaters” is synonymous with “men.” Already in the Poem of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian text of the second millennium B.C., primitive man becomes civilized when he is no longer limited to consuming foods and drinks available in nature, such as wild herbs, water or milk, but begins to eat bread and drink wine, “artificial” products […].22
The baking of bread sets civilized humans apart from nature and also from barbarians, who feed on game and sheep.23 Bread perfectly illustrates the process in which food works as a socially, culturally, and religiously differentiating mechanism. As an integral element of the miracle of the Eucharist, which “refers to the Gospel account of the Last Supper, bread assumed an even greater significance as sacred food, capable of putting man in contact with God.”24 The moment of situating bread at the center of the Christian tradition marked a radical break from the Jewish tradition, which bars fermented foods from religious rituals.25
Bread also exemplifies how the differences in what is served at the table overlap with class divisions. The medieval rural diet was based on simple soups. Bread was eaten very rarely, and if it was, it was brown bread. White wheat bread became a symbol of social superiority,26 as it was eaten in towns and was a staple on the tables of patricians and monks.27
Food is entangled in the mechanisms of differentiation and, consequently, of exclusion. The difference between our own folk and strangers is also demonstrated by what “we” eat and “they” do not. “We” differ from “them” because we do not consume insects, pork, snails, or beef. Hunger is exclusionary, as is poverty, which makes people eat excessive amounts of cheap, high-calorie, processed foods. In our culture, the poor are fat and the rich are slender for the first time in history.
These economic, cultural, and political differences were compellingly explored by Marina Abramović and Ulay, who arranged two differently laid tables as part of their performance Communist Body/Fascist Body, which was attended by a small group of their friends. The performance was staged in the artists’ small apartment in Amsterdam on the eve of their birthdays in 1979. The invited guest came just before midnight to find the hosts asleep and two tables waiting. One of them was elegant, covered with a damask tablecloth,
3 Community in the Making
Food and eating have a differentiating function. However, dining is at the same time a universal language, and given this, sharing a meal may effectively help one become familiar with otherness and develop an awareness of diversity. This idea has long inspired Rirkrit Tiravanija, who has made shared meals a pivotal component of his practice as an artist. He cooks because he believes that eating and savoring are universally accessible experiences, and that consuming food in the company of others makes people receptive to their co-diners.31 In Tiravanija’s view, art has already achieved everything it possibly could as far as the production of objects is concerned. Consequently, its task today is
to create though interactions, exchanges or references. This may be a good way to show the diversity and difference of experiences. When one wants to experience something beyond oneself, objects prove too distant. Cooperation and exchange are human attitudes – they bring people closely together. […] It’s astonishing how open and desirous of sensations people become through food. The world we live in is becoming more and more open. Things interpenetrate each other.32
Thai curry, a typical dish of his parents’ homeland, has become emblematic of Tiravanija’s art. Born in Argentina, the son to a Thai diplomat, Tiravanija studied in Canada and the U.S., and now he lives between Berlin and New York. He
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 1992 (Free), 1992
© rirkrit tiravanija. courtesy of the artist and gladstone gallery
In Tiravanija’s projects, the cooking and sharing of food time and again morphed into artistic events. He was made famous by a performance staged during his solo show Untitled 1992 (Free) in New York’s 303 Gallery in 1992.34 Red and green curries were served to the visitors throughout the exhibition. Curry, Tiravanija says in an interview with Daniel Birnbaum, is a quick and
The amalgamation of authenticity and local conditions patently rivets Tiravanija, who is straightforward about his fascination with James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture,39 which argues that there is not one form of
Democratic dialogue is predicated on the acknowledgement of the equality of all the parties involved, which is invariably an ethical decision. Multicultural societies face the challenge of overcoming the past, in which the dominant culture imposed its norms and interpretive principles, precluding genuine dialogue. Tiravanija cooks because he believes that eating together may engender relationships and genuine dialogue, which though not necessarily leading to agreement, sparks the hope of mutual understanding, a sine qua non of democratic community.41
Tiravanija grew up in Bangkok, hanging around the kitchen of his grandmother, who was professionally involved in gastronomy, teaching future chefs proper principles of nutrition and running her own restaurant. As a child, Tiravanija eagerly watched the hustle and bustle of both the domestic and the restaurant kitchens, though he himself did not begin to cook until he was a student in Toronto, where he made meals for himself and his friends, as well as working in an Indonesian restaurant.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 1992 (Free), 1992
© rirkrit tiravanija. courtesy of the artist and gladstone gallery
I thought that what was happening was that the life around the objects was missing. So I tried to do projects of cultural retrieval. The idea was to take the pots and Buddhas and the objects that had been encased and entombed, to take them out of the case, and to use them – to create life around the objects again and point to this life in a way that shows it is more interesting than the object itself.44
Tiravanija states that his work as an artist seeks to restore art to culture. He is concerned about elitist tendencies which sever art from its roots and cause its commodification. The title of Tiravanija’s 1992 performance crucially included the word “free.” Its polysemous meanings are clarified by the artist himself: “(Free) in this particular situation could signify the emptying of context/content: from exhibition to non-exhibition, from place to non-place. (Free) could also be read as open, or simply as no charge for the situation, the
Intimately anchored in everydayness, eating and cooking have become a fitting form of expression for Tiravanija, an artist who defines his mission as reincorporating art into the rhythm of life and stirring up life in objects of art. Another reason for his choice of food is that cooking and eating are interwoven with the “idea of being active, of participation, and then idea of relationship to architecture and to the art institution.”50 What Tiravanija also achieves in and through cooking is to give an artistic expression to his daily existence: “I thought I should just do a simple thing I normally do and that was cooking.”51
4 Impossible Community
On 15th November 2012, a table was put up on a lawn in Czopowa St. in Gdańsk. Anna Królikiewicz draped it with a white tablecloth, and threw a multicolored rug over it at one end. On top, she arranged china, heavy cutlery, and wineglasses made of thick glass.
Visually and symbolically, the Stół [Table] installation explicitly evoked the venerated conventions of Baroque still-life paintings, which showed artfully patterned configurations of dead game, expensive tableware, and assorted
Anna Królikiewicz, Stół [Table], Narracje [Narratives] Festival, Gdańsk 2012; photo: M. Andrysiak
© a. królikiewicz
Królikiewicz resorted to Baroque trappings to evoke the complicated history of Gdańsk, which was once a rich Hanseatic city and enjoyed considerable liberties, but was constrained by its location on the border between two cultural and political powers of the period: the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania and the Kingdom of Prussia. Inspired by the collection of Baroque paintings at one of Gdańsk’s museums, the installation aimed to reproduce the spirit of the city from its times of glory, when it became wealthy from trade with the East, attracted hosts of artists, and invested in art. Its affluent burghers could afford Persian carpets, spices, saffron, and sugar. Do the illustrious times of the free and proud city which carefully cultivated its multiculturality hold any significance for contemporary residents of Gdańsk? This question is certainly related to Królikiewicz’s Stół.
Anna Królikiewicz, Stół [Table], Narracje [Narratives] Festival, Gdańsk 2012; photo: M. Andrysiak
© a. królikiewicz
“The body knows and remembers.”54 The social norms imposed by and uniting community are encoded in the body. The cultivation of old prescripts and principles of table behavior is geared toward sustaining the thin thread that links the present to the past. Królikiewicz’s gesture of installing her table in the city’s port area aimed to establish contact with the Gdańsk of yore. Nevertheless, she ultimately questioned the topos of the table as a site that brings people together, unites them, and facilitates communication. Her installation was in fact a “non-invitation” to the table. A cold November night, knocked-over chairs, and a lavish table strewn with piles of fish and food scraps left by no-one knows whom – all this served Królikiewicz to foreground aporias inherent in community building. As a resident of the Tri-City,55 she is implicated in the narratives of the local community, by which she is formed and of which she is a part.56 Therefore, in order to fully constitute her own identity, she must refer to the past, though – as the installation vividly suggests – this is a fraught relationship. The actors of those events have already left the stage. What we still have access to are the vanishing traces of their lives.
In the introduction to Culture and Cuisine: A Journey through the History of Food, Jean-François Revel addresses inconveniences and problems involved in the study of the history of food: “Habit is everything,” he states, “and what
Królikiewicz’s Table was not welcoming. It exuded a sad beauty of past grandeur, but it repelled as well. The beauty of decay, the deliberately ugly splendor of putrefying fish bodies, the Oriental opulence of the tableware were all compelling, yet at the same time produced the impression of distance, aloofness, and alienation.
The participants in the performance were late. The banquet was long over (Fig. 18).
Anna Królikiewicz, Stół [Table], Narracje [Narratives] Festival, Gdańsk 2012; photo: M. Andrysiak
© a. królikiewicz
5
Recounting his experience of the U.S., Jean Baudrillard resorts to quite dramatic vocabulary to convey his horror at American habits of eating: “You see that all the time here. It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honour of sharing or disputing each other’s food.”61
The world-famous Dutch designer Marije Vogelzang agrees with the French postmodernist and considers solitary meals symptoms of the “chronic loneliness” haunting the inhabitants of modern metropolises.
Vogelzang has developed a special interest in food and food-related rituals since 1999. Besides designing, she also cooks and theorizes food and food
Marije Vogelzang, Sharing Dinner, Tokyo 2008
© m. vogelzang
Marije Vogelzang, Sharing Dinner, Tokyo 2008
© m. vogelzang
Sharing is Vogelzang’s favorite among the long list of components of the meal. Sitting around the table together, we obviously share food, but we also share, less obviously perhaps, time, space, and conversations. Vogelzang designed a plate consisting of two separate halves and used it to serve well-known combos, such as mozzarella and tomatoes, or herring and potatoes (Fig. 20). As some people were given, for example, only herring and others only potatoes, they were encouraged to interact with a stranger next to them. Without swapping with a neighbor, nobody could partake of the entire course. Living in big cities increasingly often means living alone. Vogelzang’s manner of serving the starter helped the diners begin conversations and, perhaps, make friends with strangers encountered around the common table at Proef, a restaurant Vogelzang has run in Amsterdam since 2005.
Marije Vogelzang, The Taste of Beirut, Beirut 2008
© m. vogelzang
Vogelzang, like Królikiewicz, often looks back into history. Her attachment to the past surfaces in her ambition to reintroduce forgotten varieties of root vegetables and in Black Confetti (2004), a lunch project she developed to commemorate the deadly bombing of Rotterdam in 1940. The wartime trauma was evoked through simple, modest dishes based on the surviving recipes and wartime memories. Food as the repository of memory and a means of mediation also lay at the core of Vogelzang’s Taste of Beirut: Khobz w Meleh on the Green
Marije Vogelzang, The Taste of Beirut, Beirut 2008
© m. vogelzang
Marije Vogelzang, Eat Love Budapest, Budapest 2011
© m. vogelzang
Marije Vogelzang, Eat Love Budapest, Budapest 2011
© m. vogelzang
To transform the context of experience was the aim of Vogelzang’s Colour Food project (2002), which she developed for a hospital for obese children in New York. The point was to erase the stifling division into the healthy/dietetic and the unhealthy/fattening, which is known to overlap with the distinction into the boring and the tempting but forbidden. Vogelzang’s idea was to arrange snacks into a rainbow and encourage associating colors with certain properties. For example red foods were supposed to express self-confidence, green to connote health, black to express discipline, and yellow to betoken friendship. In this way, food was freed from its negative aura, and the unfriendly miraculously transmuted into the friendly.65
6
As Zygmunt Bauman argues, culture orders social reality without itself being ordered, as it has lost its previous quality of a system in which values and norms were rigorously positioned vis-à-vis each other.66 Culture represents a pool of values which are actualized in human relationships at particular places and moments, but do not last permanently. Once called into being, they do not endure forever, and configurations of values fall apart only to re-assemble in new patterns, depending on the needs of people who wish to act together.
Culture is a process which only now and then unfolds harmoniously. Social transformations stumble upon bumps, such as conflicts of interests, money
Art is capable of “construct[ing] navigation tools”69 and transforming individual and social experiences, but this process is indispensably premised on participation. If artists do not want to don the mantle of a sermonizing teacher, their projects must be integrated with the rhythms of everyday life, rather than indulging in sublime flights. Dewey and Bourriaud would both support the demand to stop the severance of art from life, which would benefit both art and life. Dewey claims that: “Works of art that are not remote from common life, that are widely enjoyed in a community, are signs of a unified collective life. But they are also marvelous aids in the creation of such a life. […] In the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity.”70
Aesthetic experience which involves sharing a meal perfectly exemplifies the complete engagement of the audience. Without discursive mediation, the artist’s intentions are directly comprehensible and become embodied. Tiravanija releases “artistic energy,” but this does not always visibly mark off his works of art from the rhythm of life. At a group exhibition, the audience mistook Tiravanija’s performance for a banquet accompanying another artist’s show. In Królikiewicz’s project, the everyday is profoundly transformed and aestheticized. For all the differences between them, Tiravanija’s and Królikiewicz’s practices have certain aspects in common. Firstly, they dismiss the equation of an artwork with its materiality while foregrounding the temporal dimension of an encounter. Secondly, they expand the palette of aesthetic experiences by stimulating the senses of smell and taste. Thirdly, they believe that food and eating may be transformative. Fourthly, they build on and explore tradition and memory, whereby their actions aim to elicit audience engagement, not merely in the sense of simple participation, bust as a dialogic complementation of works of art.
Having a meal together engenders a social and cultural relationship which, rudimentary though it may be, constitutes a community. Such a community is fragile and temporary, but it heralds a possibility of founding something more durable and consequential. In any case, in our times of individualism enforced by the neoliberal economy and ideology, even the shortest of communal experiences are indeed invaluable.
In Łukasz Modelski, Piąty smak. Rozmowy przy jedzeniu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie), 42.
Massimo Bottura and Cynthia Davidson, “Three-Star Soup,” Log 34 (Spring/Summer 2015): 94.
Natalie D. Munro and Leore Grosman, “Early Evidence (ca. 12,000 B.P.) for Feasting at a Burial Cave in Israel,” pnas 107, no. 35 (31 August, 2010): 15362–66.
Munro and Grosman, “Early Evidence,” 15362.
Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
Cf. Glynn L. Isaac, “Food Sharing and Human Evolution: Archaeological Evidence from the Plio-Pleistocene of East Africa,” Journal of Anthropological Research 34, no. 3 (1978): 311–25.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 4–5.
For example, Polish people traditionally have carp for their Christmas Eve supper. On this evening, the carp is not just food. Crucially, it is a symbol of Christmas and an expression of the nation’s cultural bonds.
Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 56.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Word of Mouth: What We Talk about When We Talk about Food (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2014), xiii–xiv.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Loudon, ed. Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 180–81.
Luis Fernández-Galiano, “How Did Food Get So Big? Ten Sketches,” Log, no. 34 (Spring/Summer, 2015): 14.
Ferguson, Word of Mouth, xxi.
Łukasz Modelski, Piąty smak. Rozmowy przy jedzeniu (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2014), 253.
Ryszard Kulesza, Starożytna Sparta (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskiego Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Nauk, 2003), 76–77.
Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 1999), Book 3.xv, 75
Cicero, De Senectute (On Old Age), trans. Andrew P. Peabody (Boston: Brown and Company, 1884), 3;
Cf. Marek Węcowski, The Rise of the Greek Aristocratic Banquet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 70.
Cicero, On Old Age, 35.
Cicero, On Old Age, 36.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London and New York: Routledge, 1984).
Massimo Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, and Other Stories about Food and Culture, trans. Beth Archer Brombert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 2–3.
Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, 6.
Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, 3.
Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, 7.
The foods once typical of peasant diet are becoming symbols of luxury and healthy nutrition today. Whereas wheat is common and cheap, spelt is healthy, fashionable, and expensive.
Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, 21–22. An equally eloquent, if much later, example of social differentiation through food is provided by coffee-drinking in 18th-century France, a custom which separated rational people from the plebs. Coffee “was seen by many contemporaries as a key source for the production of mind, superseding older foods and drinks such as wine and facilitating new forms of sociability centered on polite conduct, which distinguished the rational eater from the rabble.” Emma C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 (Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 15.
See Rodney Symington, The Magic Mountain: A Reader’s Guide (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 67.
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John Edwin Woods (New York: Vintage International, 1996), 40.
Mann, Magic Mountain, 40.
Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Zapowiedź projektu Zielony Jazdów,” Tranzystor cswzu 7, no. 4 (2012): 1.
Tiravanija, “Zapowiedź projektu,” 1.
Rirkrit Tiravanija. Cook Book: Just Smile and Don’t Talk, ed. Thomas Kellein (London: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 2010), 11.
Tiravanija first made curry part of his show at New York’s Scott Hanson Gallery in 1989, but at that time the audience could only smell the dish without tasting it.
Daniel Birnbaum and Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Rirkrit Tiravanija: Meaning Is Use,” Log 34 (Spring/Summer 2015): 164.
The idea of producing an original Thai noodle dish resulted in the invention of pad thai as part of a national identity building strategy in the aftermath of World War Two. The dish differs from its Chinese models in the sauce, which combines sour and sweet flavors with a distinctive nutty note. The now-iconic dish was at the center of Tiravanija’s performance Untitled 1990 (Pad Thai).
Thomas Kellein, “Essay,” in Rirkrit Tiravanija: Cook Book, 150.
Thomas Kellein, “Interview,” in Rirkrit Tiravanija: Cook Book, 16.
See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Rirkrit Tiravanija. Cook Book, 150.
Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Dialogue: Non-Consensual Democracy and Critical Community (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 160–64.
Birnbaum and Tiravanija, “Meaning Is Use,” 163.
Birnbaum and Tiravanija, “Meaning Is Use,” 165.
Birnbaum and Tiravanija, “Meaning Is Use,” 164.
Birnbaum and Tiravanija, “Meaning Is Use,” 164.
Rirkrit Tiravanija and Hans Ulbicht Obrist, Rirkrit Tiravanija: The Conversation Series 20 (Köln: Walther König, 2010), 10.
Tiravanija’s words reverberate with pragmatist echoes. His views correspond to John Dewey’s ideas about the place and role of art in culture. They both are also equally critical of what Dewey terms “museum art.” Cf. “Culinary Experience: A Pragmatist Perspective” in this volume.
Birnbaum and Tiravanija, “Meaning Is Use,” 168.
Tiravanija and Obrist, The Conversation Series 20, 7.
Birnbaum and Tiravanija, “Meaning Is Use,” 168.
Tiravanija and Obrist, The Conversation Series 20, 116.
Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Connerton, How Societies Remember, 87.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2012), 64.
Tri-City (Polish: Trójmiasto) is a collective term for the three adjacent cities of Gdańsk, Gdynia, and Sopot on coast of the Baltic Sea in Poland. (translator’s note)
Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).
Jean-François Revel, Culture and Cuisine: A Journey through the History of Food, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Doubleday, 1982), 5.
Cf. Revel, Culture and Cuisine, 5. Julian Barnes would in all likelihood subscribe to Revel’s insights. The seventh piece of advice to beginner collectors of cookery books listed in his The Pedant in the Kitchen reads: “Avoid books of famous recipes from the past, especially if reproduced in facsimile editions with period woodcuts.” Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), 29.
Stanisław Czerniecki, Compendium ferculorum albo zebranie potraw, ed. Jarosław Dumanowski and Magdalena Spychaj (Warszawa: Muzeum Pałac w Wilanowie, 2009).
On the often insurmountable challenges of parsing the present from the past, see Connerton, How Societies Remember, 7.
Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 15.
Marije Vogelzang, Eat Love: Food Concepts by Eating-Designer (Amsterdam: bis Publishers, 2008), 73.
The title literally means “Bread and Salt on the Green Line.”
During the Lebanese civil war (1975–1999), the so-called Green Line was demarcated to divide the western, chiefly Muslim part of Beirut from its eastern, mainly Christian part. Cf. Vogelzang, Eat Love, 146.
For more information about Vogelzang’s later projects and her philosophy of uniting people through food, see her website
Zygmunt Bauman, “Culture as Consumer Co-operative” in Postmodernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge, MA, and Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998), 127–40.
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, with Mathieu Copeland (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002), 18.
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 18.
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 28.
John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Perigee, 2005), 81.
John Dewey, Art as Experience, 84.