Salon.com > Food Art

Our government’s terrifying food ads

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:02:00 +0000

There's nothing more appetizing than giving human characteristics to the food you're about to eat. That's why we always see pictures of pigs with bibs on at rib houses; because for some horrible reason we feel better about eating Porky if we convince ourselves he's a cannibal.

I always wondered where that strange impulse came from, and now thanks to a new exhibit, "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam?" at the National Archives, I think I know. The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about the show, which focuses on posters, videos and other media from the Department of Agricultural, spanning all the way back to the revolutionary war.

The most fascinating of these photos is called "Pig Cafeteria":

The caption reads:

"The Pig Cafeteria" was an exhibit produced by the Department of Agriculture to educate farmers about new methods of farming and raising livestock — specifically, what to feed pigs so that they would be healthy and profitable.

The five most egregious quotes from Gwyneth Paltrow’s dinner party article

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:20:00 +0000

Gwyneth Paltrow, stop it. I am begging you. You are making me look bad in front of all of my friends. Here I go, trying to defend your bourgeois reputation with a (fairly) nice review of your cookbook, calling many of the dishes unpretentious and easy to make.

You must have hated that. I almost can see you, queen-like, reading Salon (as you do every day) in the print form we give to celebrities, reading that article with your lovely eyes widening before crumpling it into a ball and throwing it across the steam room where you are currently enjoying a reflexology massage.

"Get me the New Yorker!" I hear you screaming at your personal assistant/GOOP editor (?)/Chris Martin, "I will teach them who is the most grandiloquent food celebrity of modern culture!"

And congratulations, Gwyneth. You did it. Lizzie Widdicombe's article "Gwyneth’s World: Gwyneth Paltrow, Movie Star and Domestic Goddess"so turgidly describes your latest dinner party with Jay-Z, Michael Stipe, the Seinfelds, Christy Turlington and a bunch of other famous people that I wanted to crumple up my edition of the magazine and throw it across a steam room. But I can't. Because I don't have a steam room, and also I don't have a copy of the New Yorker. Some of us aren't made of crisp, lemon-scented money, Gwyneth!

Magical Kate Middleton jelly bean to be auctioned on Ebay

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:46:00 +0000

It used to be that people would travel thousands of miles to see the faces of religious figures appear in food. Now if you want to see the mother of Jesus on a slice of toast, you can buy it on Ebay. Sure, it will probably be a hoax, but at least you didn't have to buy an airplane ticket to Mexico to find that out.

But it does take some of the miracle-y-ness out of iconographic food products when you know they can just be shipped to you after you outbid everyone else on the Internet. Still, that probably won't deter thousands of people from bidding on this jelly bean, which a trainee accountant from Somerset discovered looked just like the royal-to-be Kate Middleton. Wesley Hosie and his girlfriend now plan on selling the magic bean on Ebay with a starting bid of $1,000.

Salon’s Great Coffee Art contest

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:01:00 +0000

Update: So sorry if the entry you sent to coffee@salon.com bounced back. Everything's fixed! Please give it another shot.

Latte art, pouring "textured" milk into espresso to create designs -- and in some cases full drawings -- is one of the branches of the barista's discipline. We've enjoyed our milky coffees topped with hearts, roses and leaf shapes for years, but a recent smiley bear face finally got all of Salon to wonder, How does that work?

"The point is to learn to control everything at the coffee bar -- the beans, the roast, the right grind, the water, the timing, the machine -- everything. So part of that means learning how milk behaves, and how to control it," says Ken Nye, owner of Ninth Street Espresso, and the man many credit with popularizing latte art in New York City.

What it’s like to eat only potatoes for 60 days, Part 2

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 01:20:00 +0000

When we last left our hero/culinary guinea pig Chris Voigt, executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission, he was nearly halfway done with his 60-day all-potato diet, a feat intended to demonstrate the vast nutritional powers of the potato. Because if there's something that will sell you on a food, it's some guy going, "Watch me eat tons of this all the time and not die!"

Even after a month he was energetic and spry, with remarkably lower cholesterol, but, as you might expect, matters of the body and matters of the mind are not so simple. That is to say, he was going bonkers from eating nothing but seven pounds of potatoes each day, desperately finding no-calorie ways to flavor them and hitting bottom when he stole a co-worker's packets of Taco Bell hot sauce. He posted on his blog distressing cries for help like, "One of those days where you really wonder what the heck you're doing. While I know I love potatoes, it was hard to keep eating them. I hung in there but I was the star of my own little pity party yesterday."

This is what it’s like to eat only potatoes for 60 days

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:02:00 +0000

First there were hunger strikes to protest brutal injustices. Then there was "Super Size Me," an all-McDonald's regimen captured on film to show us what fast food is doing to us. But now Chris Voigt is bringing the extreme diet noise to … promoting potato sales.

For 60 days, all the executive director of the Washington State Potato Commission will eat are potatoes, seven pounds a day of them, to demonstrate that potatoes are so nutritionally whole that you can live off them for months. Sure, his body might live, but what about his mind and spirit? I don't know, but when our friends at Eater.com referred to Voigt's potato-diet blog as a document of "an increasingly broken and desperate man," well, we had to take a look at the slow-motion car crash.

He's nearly halfway through his challenge, which began on Oct. 1, and reading his posts is a little like reading diaries from the Donner Party, eerie announcements from a mental state slipping further and further away. It's amazing. We've combed through his record (sorry, there are no links to individual posts) to help tell his story (in a form edited for space). Enjoy, and maybe shed a tear for Chris Voigt.

Looking into the soul of fruit with MRI scans

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:11:00 +0000

A few years ago, I found myself tucked into an MRI scanner, slightly terrified, listening to the machine look deep into my guts. A quiet lurker it's not; lying still in its claustrophobe's nightmare of a tunnel, you hear nothing but the scanner clanging and pinging like Marley's angry ghost dragging his chains. I wanted to be let out, and while I understood that the doctors needed to see what was going on inside me, the furthest thing from my mind was how beautiful the pictures might be.

Presumably, Andy Ellison's artichoke didn't feel the terror I did when he laid it down to a nice magnetic resonance bath, but the images he got of it -- and 14 other fruits and vegetables so far in his project Inside Insides -- are stunning.

Working as a technologist at a research lab (don't worry, no patients were made to wait while he rummaged through his shopping bag for a melon), Ellison started the project inadvertently. Needing a test subject to tweak his machine's settings, he grabbed an orange. But then, he says, he was "blown away by the incredible complexity that began to show itself so quickly as I went through the slices of the orange."

New Orleans bakes BP a thank-you cake

Fri, 21 May 2010 13:15:00 +0000

Let's say that you live in a city. Let's say that your city is still trying to pull itself out of the rubble of a disaster that nearly literally wiped it off the face of the earth. Let's say that your city's economy and culture depend in large part on a large body of water nearby. Let's say that BP has an epic fail just around the way and springs an oil leak so big you can see it from space. What would you and your neighbors do?

Probably whatever you would do, unless you live in New Orleans, would not be nearly as awesome as what someone at a neighborhood grocery store called the Breaux Mart did: make a cake for the BP oil leak.

The weird world of food obsessives

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:20:00 +0000

For anyone with an unfulfilled dream of holding a world record, Ken Bannister is offering the deal of a lifetime. Tuesday's Wall Street Journal reported that the Hesperia Recreation and Park District is evicting Bannister's International Banana Club and Museum after housing the museum, rent-free, since 2005. Bannister is the founder, curator and self-proclaimed "top banana" of the museum, and holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for the "world's largest collection devoted to any one fruit." Now he's put his entire collection of more than 17,000 banana-themed curios for sale on eBay.

Bannister isn't the only one with a food fixation so singular that a private collection balloons into a homegrown museum. Here's a look at some other self-made curators whose devotion to edibles has gone a little nuts.

View the slide show

What Biggie Smalls’ lyrics taught me about food

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:10:00 +0000

I didn't think much of Biggie Smalls while he was alive. He had a few hits, he had ridiculous sunglasses, he was the opposite of a handsome man and he rapped about his girl-stealing suavity with a mushy mouth. But after he died, after I wondered why there were marches in the street for him, after my friend Eric handed me a cassette with the words "Best of Big" scrawled on the label, I came to love him, in that way where the best artists become, you hope, a part of you. He rapped about the life of a street hustler-turned-playboy, about blunts and broads and sex in expensive cars, but along the way he taught me who I would be as a writer on food.

Biggie's rhymes hum with complicated life. He took the invisible details of his world -- the cry of a killed rival's baby daughter; a lover's orgasmic shouts of "You chicken gristle eatin' motherf**ker!"-- and made them glow so that, in between head-nods to sick beats, anyone could see his stories. And for me, never having killed a man, never having had sex good enough to require that kind of name calling, it was the little things Biggie shared that invested me in the lives lived in his rhymes. "Born sinner, the opposite of a winner, remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner," he rapped in his breakout hit "Juicy." The scenes and characters he crafted were vivid and real.

Winner: Forget the sandwich cookie, make way for the cookie burger

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:20:00 +0000

This winning entry for the Salon Kitchen Challenge -- in which we asked readers to improve on Girl Scout Cookies -- comes to us courtesy of Annie Wang. Check out this week's Challenge here.

Inspired by Girl Scout Thin Mints, Trefoils and Lemonade cookies, I introduce to you:

The GIRL SCOUT COOKIE BURGER

makes over a dozen cookie burgers with some burger patty leftover

Burger Patty (Thin Mints, revised from Bon Appetit):

1 ½ cups all purpose flour
¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
¼ teaspoon salt
¾ cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1 teaspoon peppermint extract
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup sugar
1 large egg

Napalm drinks, melting ketchup and other delights

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:15:00 +0000

Class is starting, and Dave Arnold has a cocktail in one hand and a stirrer in the other. Only, since Dave is the French Culinary Institute's director of culinary technology, that stirrer is a metal rod so hot it's red to the core. "Folks at home might not want to do this," he says, plunging the poker into his glass, barely moving to avoid the flames shooting back at him. "There's a perception that it's unsafe," he cracks as I watch fire singe his hair.

He's calm, swirling the poker in the liquor inferno like he was stirring sugar into midsummer iced tea. "The intense heat allows you to actually caramelize the sugars in the drink," he tells me, which is something you could never do by heating it on a stove without boiling off all the water, which, you know, wouldn't make for a very liquid drink.

I take a sip. It was right tasty before, a bright mix of ale, cognac and lemon, but now it's incredible, totally transformed, tasting of toast and butter, darkly complex with a subdued sweetness. Still, mixing a drink with a flaming sword is not among the most technologically advanced of Dave's tricks.