Quandry: non locative comfort food
October 2, 2005
First things first, hats off to Auke Touwslager for inventing the term locative food on the 27th at the Food Design Symposium at the SMCS. For me this term pinpoints the quandry with which I am faced as a 3rd generation ex-pat. (With some folks it’s just baked into the genes.) Locative food is food that communicates location by its very nature. A truffle could communicate Occitania for example, and truffled eggs would seem to me out of place in Hawaii, Mongolia or Ghana, (unless things have changed drastically) but normal (although nonetheless special) in the Cevennes.
If we consider locally grown food to be desirable for our health, the health of the global environment and the health of the local economy, what do we do when we’ve transplanted ourselves to the other end of the planet and get a hunquering for non-local foods? Is eating a Pacific Rim style rice-bowl morally coherent as an inhabitant of the Netherlands? In an ideal world could we make choices about prioritising the import of certain non-local foodstuffs that we all think we need? My non-locative Dutch list would be:
coffee
rice (I have 7 types in my larder at all times, only 2 of these come from Europe)
soybeans and related products (my tofu and tempeh are produced within 2 km from my house, but the beans, where do the beans come from and are they GM?)
Occitanian wine
olive oil
sesame seed products (tahin, sesame oil, seeds)
most seeds and nuts
peanuts (and that Nectar of the Gawds called peanut butter)
According to the list above it seems that being a vegetarian in the Netherlands, would relegate me to eating quality lacking products made by culinarily handicapped hippies. The image above shows a version of my favourite rice-bowl dinner, of which only the beet leaves have been grown locally. Can non-locative comfort food be sustainable. Even as an enthusiastic porkatarian, I eat one heq of a lot of brown rice and soybeans.
debra at 11:40 | Comments (12) | post to del.icio.us
All I really really want is locative food
October 1, 2005
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That is, food that tells me where I am and where it’s from by it’s very name and nature (without the use of an RFID tag). And all I really really want is to have one major train station and one major airport in one country that sells food that is not created by food product designers but by local people from local ingredients and reflecting the diverse local food culture already present.
Imagine Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport… Could the experience of Schiphol be enriched if you knew that this was the only airport in the world where you could exclusively buy locally grown and produced Dutch food and regional specialities? Was it already one and a half years ago that Doors of Perception and Urban Unlimited organised a cultural experts meeting for the city of Breda, a new node on the line of the High Speed Train. If I recall correctly, we recommended just this very thing.
The images above were taken within a period of 4 minutes. Friday afternoon, chip eaters abound at Amsterdam Centraal Station. Just imagine the possible effect on the environment and the state of agriculture and upon the local economy if these chips were made from a diverse range of local potatoes, fried in oil grown and produced locally. Imagine if you could order chips from a menu sporting 8 different kinds of potato! Imagine if the product of the finger fried potato embraced diversity.
And then there’s the mayo…
And the knowledge economy that could sprout up from bringing the local boutique producer’s products to the transportation hubs of the world…
Frites eaters: images of people eating chips taken on Friday September 30, 2005 from 16:23-27 at Amsterdam CS and on the train to Rotterdam.
debra at 9:53 | Comments (2) | post to del.icio.us
Oh to utter the words, food design…
September 28, 2005
Well it’s about bloody time! Coinciding with all manner of design events going on right now in Amsterdam, the Stedelijk Museum hosted a symposium titled Food Design at the ubiquitous Club 11, featuring three speakers and three completely different interpretations.
Marije Vogelzang (Proef) is doing some very interesting work from her studio slash catering laboratory and counts the stars of Dutch design (such as the Ladies Hella Jongerius, Marlies Dekkers and Li Edelkoort) amongst her clients. After a stunning portfolio presentation, I can’t wait to visit Vogelzang’s restaurant in Rotterdam Proef and get down to the business of tasting and nibbling. (Proef means ‘taste’ or ‘taste it’, in Dutch.) Vogelzang’s work is all about engaging the eater in the underlying concept of the food and its presentation. I loved her daring in a recent catering project in which she used WWII ration ingredients to invoke memories about this bleak period. She elegantly walks the fine line between being thought provoking and utterly disarming when she stated, ‘It’s design that someone puts in their mouth, and absorbs into their body. It’s all very intimate’. That’s what I call a laudable attitude!
Although it wasn’t the most pleasant message to hear, I can’t stop thinking about the corporate presentation by Hans van Trijp from Unilever. Food design according to the multinational means designing the market context in which a food product exists, and has very little to do with actual food. Van Trijp described Honig’s SpongeBob pasta as the perfect marriage of food design and marketing. Predictably, I found van Trijp’s take and food and food design extremely disturbing, but I am so very eager to get in touch with him to hear more of what he has to say about how multinationals, even when we wouldn’t dream of buying their products, influence our every day life right down to the iggly niggly bit of designing a country’s infrastructure. This means that while Marije Vogelzang is designing a lunch using ‘forgotten vegetables’, Unilever, by the very virtue of it’s market share, is determining which races of grains farmers will be growing and how food will be manufactured and distributed in decades to come. I just can’t help but think it’s a wise idea to keep in close contact with the suits. I’m just as much a stakeholder as the next Lady, right?
Ex-designer and unwitting stand-up comedian Marti GuixĂ© as per usual wowwed the audience with a portfolio presentation of more than a decade’s worth of food-related projects. He is the well-known Catalunian ex-designer that has worked extensively with shoe brand Camper, and ultimately designed their flagship restaurant, Foodball, in Barcelona. Balls are something of a leitmotif in Marti G’s gastro-design as you can see from this author’s review. It might have been just the unfortunate lighting, but while presenting images of his ‘corporate sponsored food’, (in this case an omelette with a sauce-stamped Calvin Klein logo), GuixĂ© claims to have noticed van Trijp’s lip twitch.
Although I’m not willing to spill the beans just yet, I am looking forward to GuixĂ©’s collaboration with Mediamatic in just a few week’s time. GuixĂ© and Mediamatic will be opening up a temporary restaurant in the basement of the former TPG builiding where you’ll… read about it in culiblog.
images from l to r: Vogelzang’s salad course of city leafy greens (served with grilled pigeon breast), hanging etagères made of 2nd hand plates designed by Vogelzang for Dutch fabric producer de Ploeg, Gin and Tonic Fog Party by Marti GuixĂ© (artificial indoor fog made of gin and tonic at Casco, Utrecht). The above images are from the (ex-)designers’ websites, © and hopefully also courtesy of Vogelzang and GuixĂ©.
debra at 9:03 | Comments (6) | post to del.icio.us
