Is food art?
T TEMPO we think food, like art, matters. Good food. Wholesome, unadulterated food prepared with love and creativity. Local and organic top our list along with farm-fresh and -raised, grass-fed and wild.
AWe love food and we aren’t limiting our love to expensive fine dining: some of the simplest pleasures are almost free. Viewing art in a gallery or museum. Or baking bread. Not dodgy bread, but the real staff of life stuff – organic, locally grown flour, a starter that belonged to someone’s mother, good salt, clean water. Your hands.
As the marvelous food writer M.F. K. Fisher noted in her wartime gastronomic bible, “How To Cook a Wolf”: “It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with peace, and the house filled with one of the world’s sweetest smells. But it takes a lot of time. If you can find that, the rest is easy. And if you cannot rightly find it, make it, for probably there is no chiropractic treatment, no yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.”
Art and artists matter now more than ever – the new paths they carve out in this new normal will be the ones we follow. Artists are the cartographers of our souls. And food, well food is life, it is our medicine, our fuel and our pleasure. And in very creative hands, it becomes a thing of culinary beauty.
The marriage of the culinary and the conceptual exemplifies how a thoughtfully conceived meal can combine aesthetics, community and consumption in a way that elevates dining to the level of high art.
Or does it? The idea that a perfectly presented plate can be the equal of a canvas makes some people gag. So is food art? And why do we care?
Well Taos is a town known for both. That it is a world-renowned art colony is a given, but its fabulous restaurants surprise and delight first-time visitors, who return time and again. We put it bluntly to a few locals in both arenas. Their answers – delicious, provocative and surprising – follow.
Is food art?
“It can be if so intended, but cooking and eating are also arts.”
— Anita Rodriguez, artist and author who wrote about food and family in her award-winning “Coyota in the Kitchen”
“Art is defined as work produced by human skill and imagination.
Our food is considered on that basis.”
— Ky Quintanilla, executive chef at Trading Post Café, Martyrs and Bent Street Deli
“Being invited to Chef José Andrés’ home for dinner is as art as it gets!”
— Ron Cooper, artist and founder of internationally award-winning Del Maguay mezcal
“For me, art is a form of creative problem-solving; art stays with you. Not all paintings are art, and food can be art.”
— Theresa Gray, artist
“Food is a multidimensional expression of artistic expression, from layers created in production of flavor to mastered textural manipulations, with visual thrills in an initial nod that humans feast with their eyes.”
— Marshall Thompson, chef/owner of Donabe Asian Kitchen.