I've always been fascinated by the idea+content of the infamous 'Body Show.' Although it seems there are various incarnations of it worldwide, including:
My recent line of work has made me think about this... the idea of 'medical' material on display, science on exhibition, the place where the science/medical world meets the art world; the process itself of deconstruction, extraction, + plasticisation; and fundamentally, a sort of universal 'sick fascination', the human desire to dissect, understand, preserve, and display...
(this post is to point out the link/influence between these bodies and my latest outcomes)
The issue du jour, it seems, is food waste. How ridiculous that households are encouraged not to let a scrap go to waste, when many big corporations are throwing out tonnes of perfectly good food every day and many even going so far as to lock their bins.
It's the same irony that sees some of us riding bicycles to save petrol when companies are opening new airlines and oil drills; that discourages us from taking long showers or leaving the tap on while we brush our teeth when households use only a fraction of the water used for animal agriculture. (Here and here.)
France is a step ahead, as I've written about earlier (the clever ugly produce marketing) and as this recent article investigates. 'French supermarkets will be banned from throwing away or destroying unsold food and must instead donate it to charities or for animal feed, under a law set to crack down on food waste.' Here's hoping that New Zealand follows suit and introduces similar policies. This article lists some companies' policies on food waste… shame it doesn't mention the bakery where I used to work, which sold on half its leftovers to pig farms, and put the other half into locked skips, filmed on camera so that they could be sure no one was getting their products for free. Name em and shame em, I say. Pandoro Bakery, sort your shit out!
When I was living in France in 2013 not a single scrap of food from our household would go to waste. Even if there were just two bites of a salad or stew left, they would go in a container in the fridge - never the bin - and someone would make sure to eat them the next day. The last resort was the compost bin, and the compost went into the prolific vegetable garden. This philosophy has become second nature for me and I'm still horrified when I see friends and family here in NZ tipping uneaten leftovers into the bin - that would have gotten me scolded by my French host family. Then I remember the restaurants, cafes and supermarkets that are doing this on a much larger scale on a daily basis.
I'm not sure what this has to do with my art. Still working that one out. Something analogous, food = materiality, personal responsibility being dwarfed by corporate interests, like the one little artist's eco-friendly art practice up against the multitudes of massive companies using toxic chemicals by the tonne. I don't know. Yet.
Something came up in the tail end of my crit last Thursday that made me verbally explode, although it was right when we were supposed to be wrapping up so I didn't get to rant and rave quite as much as I would have otherwise. (so it was probably good timing.)
In any case, considering my heated reaction I thought I'd better explain my views more thoroughly on here.
Sometimes it seems that social media is all about food. The internet is buzzing with an endless stream of recipes and food photography. Is it even possible to go out for a meal these days without someone taking a photo of it and posting it online before they've even picked up a fork?
A while ago I read an article about a health blogger who has used social media as a platform to create a business, which seemed to be doing well. Recently, however, she was exposed as a fraud. Her claim to have healed herself of various cancers through a specific diet and lifestyle regime was a lie.
Frankly, this should come as no surprise. But as far as I’m concerned that isn’t the heart of the issue. The problem is that, just like many similar bloggers, the woman has no qualifications and no real scientific backing to substantiate her health/diet ‘advice’ in the first place.
In short, she should never have charged anyone money for her services, regardless of whether or not her recovery story was real or fake. As Tori mentioned , a lot of people are so desperate in their pursuit of the particular 'Healthy Lifestyle' glamorised by social media that they'll follow any advice if it has the right pictures attached to it.
This story reminds me of something that happened at home a few weeks ago. My sister made a ‘healthy banana cake.' It was refined sugar free, gluten free, vegan, etc., and it failed completely. The middle didn’t set, and the outside tasted like a burnt sea sponge. I asked where she got the recipe from, and she said simply ‘Online.’ Which didn’t really answer the question, so I asked, ‘What blog?’ and she replied, ‘Have you heard of Madeline Bourke?’
I sure have. Madeline Bourke is a social media queen who has turned her name into an industry, posting daily photos of her meals, designer exercise gear, bikini body… and charging $15 AUD a pop for her digital recipe book and ‘7 day eating plan’.
Her expertise? None. Miss Bourke dropped out of her first year of studying nutrition. She works as a receptionist and a part-time model, and has no qualifications (except perhaps for high school...)
With this in mind, and since they haven’t been properly tested or officially published, I wouldn’t trust any one of her recipes enough to try them, let alone pay $15 to access them! And while I agree with most of her points on what constitutes a healthy diet, that’s just because it’s common sense. You don't have to be a genius to suggest that your readers eat more vegetables.
My sister and I have argued over this before, and the failed cake was a perfect case-in-point. Despite her good intentions to make baking healthier, Madeline Bourke is not by any means an expert baker. Yet thousands of people are following her, and making her doomed-to-fail recipes.
"You too can look cook like this."
Surely we know that most of these bloggers aren’t experts. That’s not the drawcard. The whole food-blogging industry is just driven by curiosity: we’re curious to see what other people eat, and to try it ourselves, because we’re fundamentally interested in the way other people live.
And this is where the internet comes in extremely handy. Our exposure to the lives of people outside of our own social networks used to be limited to carefully selected, edited and printed forms, i.e. books and magazines and newspapers. No wonder we resorted to seeking out ‘pen pals.’ Who knew what life was really like for other ordinary people in other countries?
Now, via the internet, we have millions of pen pals at our fingertips, with no obligation to write back. Whether they live here in NZ or on the other side of the planet, a world of bloggers are just living out their day to day lives, and writing about it, and sharing photos, in real time. In many cases, they are also sharing recipes.
And I think that's incredibly exciting. I’m grateful that I live in this day and age when I can read all about the lives of people who are totally normal, rather than celebrities. I'd way rather poke my nose into the lives and kitchens of ordinary people, who aren’t famous or exceptionally interesting or followed by paparazzi.
Celebrity culture is proof that even mature, functioning adults have imaginary friends. I’m not interested at all in celebrities, but the select handful of bloggers who I follow definitely fill an equivalent role.
Food blogs are the field of the internet that I’m most interested in and probably spend the most time looking at. However, unlike my sister, swindled by the glamorous image feeds of self-promoting foodstagrammers, I'm wary, and extremely picky, when it comes to which ones I read. Here's a run-down of some of my favourite foodie people in the online world:
Sarah has a degree in holistic nutrition and many years of experience as a chef in a vegetarian restaurant. Whenever anyone asks me about healthy eating, I direct them to this blog, My New Roots. Her blog is a cornucopia of seasonal super-healthy, highly seasonal, mostly plant-based recipes. Her passion for and vast knowledge of nutrition is evident in every post, and she regularly gives in-depth profiles of the benefits of particular ingredients and techniques. Sarah is a first line crusader of the healthy food movement, and her enthusiasm is genuine and inspiring. I have so much admiration for her - if I could choose anyone to be my personal chef, it would be Sarah B. Heck, I'd like to be her, full-stop.
I feel that if I knew Angela in real life, she would be a cool aunt, the kind you visit without warning, and not only is she delighted to see you she also just happened to have baked a fresh batch of delicious vegan cookies. Angela Liddon started a business making healthy muesli bars, Glo Bars, before becoming a full-time blogger and cookbook writer. With a bestselling cookbook rated 4.8/5 stars on Amazon, and with blog that boasts a huge list of awards, full of recipes that are also tested and rated by readers, her plant-based (and often gluten/soy/sugar free) recipes are reliable and her writing is a joy to read. Unlike many ‘health’ food bloggers, she seems so normal, and has replied to my comments despite having over 200,000 followers on Instagram. Respect.
A Sweet Spoonful - Megan Gordon is a baker whose recipes focus on whole grains and seasonal ingredients. She’s the queen of breakfasts - her cookbook is called ‘Whole-Grain Mornings: New Breakfast Recipes to Span the Seasons, and she runs a cereal business called Marge Granola.
Oh Lady Cakes - Ashlae is my spunky vegan soul sister. She bakes sweet treats, runs every morning, travels the world, and swears like a sailor. As well as recipes her blog is full of delicious slices of life, captured in her beautiful writing and photography, with a focus on interior decor and exotic travels. My Darling Lemon Thyme - Emma is a kiwi mum living in Australia. After studying professional cookery and working for 8 years as a chef, she has written a cookbook and posts on her blog regularly, and her recipes are all vegetarian, gluten free and dairy free. I first encountered her recipes while visiting a friend in Wellington, who showed me Emma's cookbook and raved about it, and I can see why, having followed her blog ever since.
All of the above blogs create a pretty good overview of my food preferences. They share an unprocessed / plant-based/ whole-grain focus. They also have a shared 'comfort food' vibe, with lots of baking and hearty, cooked recipes. They're mostly from Europe and Canada. Many of the writers are parents. Almost all of them have published cookbooks, which is great since it usually means their recipes have been properly tested, too.
Note that weight and appearance aren't part of any of these above blogs. I think the joy and pleasure of food blogging becomes corrupted when weight loss is a focus, rather than health and wellbeing and sustainability and deliciousness. My biggest turn-off are bloggers that post a lot of photos of their bodies. My view is that weight loss should not be anyone’s primary goal: that’s treating the symptom, not the cause. The key is finding and maintaining a good life-long diet, and keeping at a healthy weight is just one benefit of that pursuit.
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So how about the other side of the coin. Which food blogs don't I like? (Besides Madeline Bourne…)
- Deliciously Ella: is about to release a cookbook even though she has only been cooking for a couple of years. This girl sends my alarm bells ringing because of her too-good-to-be-true story and all the marketing on her website.
- Chocolate Covered Katie: this girl seems really sweet - no pun intended - but I'm not a fan of her collection of recipes, primarily because of the blog's emphasis on low-calorie foods, and the use of dubious artificial sweeteners like xylitol. Her approach is about making 'healthy' versions of every type of processed candy under the sun by substituting every normal ingredient, implying (falsely) that a good diet is about replacing all your favourite treats with sub-standard healthy ones rather than just having them less often or not at all.
I also get peeved off by anything to do with the paleo diet. Although I agree with many of its philosophies, such as cutting out processed foods, I see this movement as the diet of the priveledged. It is ethically dilemmatic and environmentally unsustainable to consume large amounts of meat, as many paleo advocates do. If you think about it, a real 'paleo' diet wouldn't be bacon and eggs for breakfast and chicken for lunch and steak for dinner. It wouldn't include any meat grown on a farm at all: it would focus on more gamey types of meat and involve eating every last organ, not just the prime cuts.
Considering that paleolithic people ate whatever they found growing/living in their local environment, the paleo diet has an ironic dependence on specific exotic super foods (almonds, avocados, chia seeds, quinoa, coconuts…) with no regard to the significance of food miles. I'm not sold on that.
Finally, cutting out grains and legumes is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Rather than demonising carbohydrates and grains, I wish people would try using a variety of whole grains and sprouting them before cooking.
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But this brings me to another point that I'm fascinated by: the placebo of diet. We feel better by doing whatever we think / have read will make us feel better. There is enough research out there to skew and support whatever dietary viewpoint you choose.
For example, a hardcore vegan reads about a study showing that consuming animal products lead to sluggishness and various medical problems. They read that a vegan diet is more nutritious and leads to abundant energy. They will feel that their vitality comes from their vegan diet, and find other things to blame for any tiredness or sickness.
On the other hand, a paleo-dieter reads about a study that a high-carb diet leads to energy crashes, whereas a paleo, protein-heavy diet leads to health and abundant energy. They will attribute their vitality to cutting out grains, and find other things to blame for any tiredness or sickness.
Both diet philosophies are backed up by oceans of valid research… but which online circles you navigate and what information you choose to read creates self-fulfilling prophecies.
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This is the internet. Information is free. We’re all here to share.
And the most amazing thing about healthy food blogs is that there are JUST SO MANY OF THEM.
Why do so many people have food blogs? I think that healthy eating involves a lot of the ‘pink cloud syndrome’. It’s not enough just to have a healthy diet, you then want everyone to know how great it is, and feel the need to share it with the world.
I’m sure that up to a point, this is well-intended. If you think you have found the key to healthy living, you instinctively want to tell other people how and why to do the same. Which unfortunately leads to a lot of preachy, shameless self promotion from healthy-food-types. In this way food blogging becomes not so much a good-natured network of recipe sharing as a platform to show off one’s perfect diet (the way some use Facebook to show off their supposedly perfect social lives.)
It annoys me because it’s so unnecessary and it makes the world of healthy eating seem like a clique, a fashion, an exclusive privilege of the elite and attractive. In truth, all the information we need to eat healthy is totally accessible, and most of it just comes down to common sense and will power - which we all have, but it is often trumped by things like convenience, taste, habits, comfort. We don't need more time, we just need to slow down and think.
The secret is that there is no secret. And I think that’s the magic of healthy food. What’s healthiest for the planet is also what’s healthiest for us.
But this technique for picturing food is not a recent revelation born out of Tumblr or Instagram. In 1960, Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri constructed his first snare pictures: assemblages of objects like plates, coffee cups and ashtrays glued on to tables from restaurants and domestic spaces, recreating the exact arrangement of how the items were found. Spoerri, who identifies as a “paster of found situations,” sources these assemblages from specific and personal instances. For example, when his girlfriend Kichka left her breakfast dishes and dregs in the kitchen one morning, Spoerri attached the readymade composition of leftover eggshells, coffee pots and cigarette butts to a wood panel and titled it Kichka’s Breakfast I.
In this process, Spoerri turns meal into memory. When Spoerri installs his work, he attaches it to the wall, facing outward. These foreshortened, wall-bound objects read as rectangles, inviting the audience to approach the pieces as two-dimensional surfaces rather than as sculptures. Spoerri’s snare pictures challenged the conventions of traditional still-lifes, notable in oeuvres ranging from Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s to Wayne Thiebaud’s, long before the advent of the Internet.
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These one-trick ponies are the dispensable images that inundate our contemporary visual culture and cloud our understanding of the nuanced difference between an aesthetically pleasing picture and a compelling photograph.
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If we, as photographers or viewers, assume the point-of-view of God (or the Cloud, whichever operates at the center of your personal belief system), we expose our own buried desire to have complete control over the food we consume.
....we are programmed to be enchanted by an aerial viewpoint that perceptually flatters our innermost ambition to be omnipotent.
Jon Entine in Forbes: "Seralini's research is anomalous. Previous peer-reviewed rat feeding studies using the same products (NK603 and Roundup) have not found any negative food safety impacts. The Japanese Department of Environmental Health and Toxicology released a 52-week feeding study of GM soybeans in 2007, finding "no apparent adverse effect in rats." In 2012, a team of scientists at the University of Nottingham School of Biosciences released a review of 12 long-term studies (up to two years) and 12 multi-generational studies (up to 5 generations) of GM foods, concluding there is no evidence of health hazards."[74]Andrew Revkin dubbed it another instance of "single-study syndrome", and contended that the study was in support of an "agenda"
Yes, it could be sensationalism. But if there are so many flaws in this research, as its sceptics are quick to point out, why haven't there been more studies like this?
Between 1992 and 2002—the period over which GMO crops moved rapidly from test plants to farm fields to dinner tables, the USDA spent about $1.8 billion on ag-biotechnology research—of which about 1 percent went to safety testing, a Union of Concerned Scientists analysis shows. Meanwhile, the ag-biotech industry uses its patent power to maintain tight control over who researches what—and dominates the research agenda at America's main ag-research universities. When we eat GMOs, as millions of Americans do every day, we're still eating in the dark. The French study didn't fully illuminate the situation, but it's a start.
Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio traveled the world documenting that most basic of human behaviors — what we eat. Their project, “Hungry Planet,” depicts everything that an average family consumes in a given week–and what it costs — laid out in thought-provoking detail.
Why Men Are Afraid of Going Vegan: "Refusing meat in our culture is never simply about just refusing a product… It’s about refusing everything it represents."
Millenials: A food obsessed generation "Millennials – those of us born between 1982 and 2004 – seem to be driven by the intense social media activity surrounding food, and continue to search for a better or more unique food experience than our peers."
"Monsanto tells us that their products are about the best thing to come along since sliced bread. For years they’ve been promising that Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) would reducepesticide use, increase yields, reduce water consumption, and offer foods that are more tasty and more nutritious.
I wish they were right.
But in the 20 years since GMO crops first came on the market, studies have found that they have led to higher pesticide use, and no meaningful improvement in flavor, nutrition, yield or waterrequirements. Instead, what they’ve created are plants that are engineered to withstand massive dosing of toxic herbicides, and plants that function as living pesticide factories. Monsanto’s Bt. corn, for example, is actually registered with the EPA as a pesticide."
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Some kind soul left this DVD on my desk last week.
Grandin, who has autism, “is Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, and is one of the world’s leaders in the design of livestock handling facilities. She has designed livestock facilities throughout the United States and in Canada, Europe, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and other countries. In North America, almost half of all cattle processing facilities include a center track restrainer system that she designed for meat plants. Her curved chute (race) systems are used worldwide and her writings on the flight zone and other principles of grazing animal behavior have helped many producers to reduce stress during handling.” - Grandin Livestock Handling Systems
Quotes from the film:
Of course they’re gonna get slaughtered. You think we’d have cattle if people didn’t eat ‘em everyday? They’d just be funny-lookin’ animals in zoos. But we raise them for us. That means we owe them some respect. Nature is cruel, but we don’t have to be. I would'nt want to have my guts ripped out by a lion, I’d much rather die in a slaughterhouse if it was done right.
They’ll be very calm. Nature is cruel but we don’t have to be; we owe them some respect. I touched the first cow that was being stunned. In a few seconds it was going to be just another piece of beef, but in that moment it was still an individual. It was calm… and then it was gone. I became aware of how precious life was. I thought about death and I felt close to God. I don’t want my thoughts to die with me. I want to have done something.
You know, the slaughter plants, I’ve worked with them in the '80s; they were absolutely awful. I developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants where you just measure outcomes: How many cattle fell down? How many cattle got poked with the prodder? How many cattle are mooing their heads off? And it’s very, very simple. You directly observe a few simple things. It’s worked really well. I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that, and a lot less abstract stuff.
Intermarché launched Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables to highlight the absurdity of throwing away perfectly edible produce due because they don’t look ‘perfect.’
Each week the contents of our weekly rubbish bins contain a large amount of food waste. Some of this can’t be avoided, such as tea bags and orange peels. But much of it can be – in fact 25% of the contents of our garbage bins is made up of avoidable food waste – food that was purchased with the intention of being eaten but was instead discarded. Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign that aims to raise awareness about avoidable food waste.
This is all very well, and it is very important that we all try to reduce food waste in our own homes, but what about all the large corporations - cafes, bakeries, supermarkets - that throw out MASSIVE amounts of perfectly edible food on a daily basis? And, in some cases, lock up their skip bins so that no one can benefit?
It’s the equivalent of individuals making small efforts to conserve power and water - turning off the lights when we leave the room, or turning off the tap while brushing our teeth, or taking the bus instead of driving - efforts which fade into insignificance in comparison to the extravagant energy + water + oil/gas consumption of large industries and corporations. What can we do?
GERMANY - On a recent visit to the University of Leipzig to review the latest research there, the agriculture minister has called for a practical method to determine the sex of chicken embryos in order to bring to an end the culling of male layer chicks by the end of 2016. Mr Schmidt said that, by the end of 2016, there should be prototypes of a device that determines the sex of chicken embryos at just three days of incubation and then sorts the eggs automatically by gender. He added that, when such a device is available on the market, there will be no need for the nation’s hatcheries to kill male chicks, a practice that will soon belong in the past.
Peter Singer, the groundbreaking ethicist whom The New Yorker calls the most influential philosopher alive teams up again with Jim Mason, his coauthor on the acclaimed Animal Factories, to set their critical sights on the food we buy and eat: where it comes from, how it is produced, and whether it was raised humanely. The Ethics of What We Eat explores the impact our food choices have on humans, animals, and the environment. Recognizing that not all of us will become vegetarians, Singer and Mason offer ways to make healthful, humane food choices. As they point out: You can be ethical without being fanatical.
A cyanobacterial bloom on the Klamath River near Copco, California, swirls around the boat of a sport fisherman, who told the photographer, “Anyone who sees this [photo] is gonna say, ‘That guy’s stupid,’ but they ought to come up and try it. The algae provides a cover for the fish.” However good or bad cyanobacterial blooms may be for fishing, they also produce toxins that can irritate eyes, skin, lungs, and the gastrointestinal tract, and may even cause nerve damage or death at high exposures
An interesting (however unprofessional) website full of photos and factoids about the darker side of NZ’s “clean and green” image. There are some really striking photos in the slideshows, especially of cow herds under the heading ‘dirty dairying’.
