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The 2nd installment of EAT boasts even more color, as the start of summer means the abundance of tomatoes, berries, zucchini, peaches, and a diverse assortment of greens at the Farmers Market. After a long winter and spring of eating root vegetables like potatoes, turnips, parsnips, and radishes, it has been nice to incorporate more color and lighter textures into meals. Swapping out the spicy crunch of a radish with the cooling crunch of a cucumber has made braving the heat more bearable. Replacing roasted turnips and parsnips with less-dense roasted zucchinis makes mimicking light Mediterranean dining more believable.
Once again, homemade stir-fries are a reoccurring meal. Take note of the color-field explosion that features fennel, blue potatoes, and striped beets. The beets almost look artificial since they resemble mini candy canes. Also take note of new things we have tried making this week: hand-made buckwheat pasta, beet and cucumber stir-fried with coconut oil and roasted peanuts, and pesto with basil, garlic scrapes, and beet greens. Of course there were just as many salads consumed as there were desserts—maybe even more desserts were consumed than salads, come to think of it. I base this on a very loosely reciprocal eating technique: no bread with a salad means going out for dessert later; salad for lunch and dinner means a mid-day dessert snack and one at night, etc. We also threw a raw dessert into the mix via the chocolate raspberry ganache cake, made with walnuts, dates, and raw cocoa powder in our trusty food processor. There was a point when I was obsessed with sticking to a raw foods diet and used the food processor 3+ times a day to make nut pates and raw energy bars, but that phase has passed because it was creating a crater in our weekly food bill.
Shooting images for EAT, has gotten me thinking more about the relationship between art and life and the Allan Kaprow model of when “art become[s] life.”[1] What better place for art and life to intersect, interweave, and co-mingle than in food? In the making, consumption, and presentation of food? Everyone needs to eat, and there are so many politics in this necessity. I am convinced that Fluxus artists were onto this, but that there is just not enough literature to highlight it. Perhaps because it is much more effortless to actually participate in the “life” part of consuming food than it is to sit around thinking about why and how it can be “art.” The pondering discourse has always come later. What if Allison Knowles just made a salad and left it at that?
For now, I’ll just stick to eating and let the photographs speak for themselves. Much less effort this way.
A note on viewing the photo essay: please maximize on your screen so you can click on “more info” to view the detailed descriptions.
Ding Ren is an artist and writer. She creates simple, paired-down work using everyday observations. In the fall she plans to relocate from Washington, DC to Amsterdam where she will continue eating and observing.
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