Earlier this week, I read a wonderful piece in Vittles by Virginia Hartley on the perils of regarding food as art. She observes a potential danger in the distance of a gaze towards food; the more we look at food and hold it up as art, the further away we feel from it.
She talks about this as a former copy writer at a produce company, where she was often tasked with storytelling the product itself. With this distance between herself and food, her disordered eating was colored with a greater hue of isolation. Now, she worries at how we often “aesthetize our food to the point that it is no longer food, but instead becomes a means of decorating our table.”
I’ve been thinking about the question of the Table, more specifically the Tablescape. How the root of the word ‘scape’ can mean scene, picture, or view.
I think of this piece in Dirt (who I also wrote a fun thing for!) by Ana Kinsella on “The flat era of fashion” aka fashion that is marketed and bought on Instagram. When we look at clothes, worn on real bodies, as exclusively images, we experience something of a collective disembodiment. She writes, “When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.”
Both pieces do a good job of articulating something about the over-aesthetic dampening our sense of vitality. The internet is infinite and I often encounter a very specific type of paralysis: so many options for how to perform online that I do not perform at all. Or I will and then I’ll stop and then I’ll start again. As chef, I always feel a mixture of failure and defiant resistance because I don’t post images of what I cook every day. If I started to actively make my cooking practice an online being, I feel like I would not be able to stop and also nothing would get eaten.
But ‘the grid is dead’ as they say, with the rise in Reels and Tiktok and everything Live. And part of me respects that. With the end of Twitter, it does feel like a bit of a changing of Media Seasons. So let’s think about what table trends we’ve been looking at as art aka buying inspo from aka scrolling through, so that we might look towards the future.
Table of Millennial Abundance
This one often has to do with the Hand craze that came about at the same time as Alison Roman and Bon Appétit and Blue Apron and a neo-traditional interpretation of Hosting and Making and Cooking. These are bright, vast aerial shots where everyone’s hands are busy doing… something! One guy always has a hand tattoo. No one is eating anything YET and also everyone has it together so much that there is so much food but nary a hint of mess.
These images can be lively, of course, and kind of satisfying to see. But I am always amazed at the suggestion of some wealthy anticipation. Everyone is wearing Le Labo and the food is getting cold.
Beautiful Minimalist is the next one I think about.
These scenes are dainty and doily, muted in pinks and creams, refined and always implying glamour. While I imagine vinyl playing in the background of the Abundant Millennial table, these scenes seem to take place in a quiet room, maybe with classical music on.
^oh! A potato and pet-nat. Of course!
This image is from Gohar World, which I subjectively and actually think is beautiful. Do I think that you’re supposed to eat the food? I… don’t know about that. It is more about vision and some gorgeous restraint.
The last one I am going to talk about is: Everything Looks Like Flowers
Full transparency: I am SO complicit in this one! Sue me! Most of my plating is messy and ‘romantic’, but there is a fine line.
Here, I’m talking about this sort of floral mess with things strewn about. The above image is a Butter Board (don’t get me started on that one… a Very Babyish trend, to say the least) with figs and radish and mushrooms? But the point is the edible flowers. It is very cool that edible flowers exist, but we definitely should not be sourcing as many of them from online as we do when we do Flower Food. Often I’ll see boards like this and think about how many beautiful radishes oxidize quickly and then get thrown out at the end of the night and how people think that the flowers are cute but rarely actually eat them… and then I get sad. The plants deserve better!
This is a photograph. These images of food are beautiful and they’re also advertisements and they’re also art. When we explore the chasm between two-dimensional and three-dimensional, intention becomes blurry. I operate mostly on a sense of wistfulness and sentimentality, so I get taking pictures, looking back at them, celebrating memory. I also love treating food with aesthetic reverence. But it’s important to imagine how this 2D tablescape culture might affect us. Scrolling through tables where no one is eating, we risk our embodiment, utility, presence, and transparency. I think about the Kevin Morby song “This is a Photograph” where he looks at old photos of his mom and dad, repeating at higher and higher urgency:
There’s a lot to be said about The Table, but I think about the art work of Kenji Kawakami and I feel a sense of relief.
In the 90’s, Kawakami invented the absurdist Japanese trend Chindōgu. He also is anti-Digital Age, with minimal online presence. Chindōgu is kind of translated to ‘un-useless’. These are objects that operate as some contradiction. Inventions, often strange, to help us do things.
Noodle fan! Butter stick!
These are silly but I always find them poignant. They are thoughtful of the human existence and mindful of the detailed nuances of the body, the physicality of temperature, texture, and the potential for grace. How to make a body more at peace as it moves, which it does, and which it must.
I’ll leave you with the main tenets of Chindōgu, which I think are quite a valuable framework in and of themselves.
A Chindōgu cannot be for real use.
A Chindōgu must exist.
There must be the spirit of anarchy.
Chindōgu are tools for everyday life.
Chindōgu are not for sale.
Humor must not be the sole reason for creating Chindōgu.
Chindōgu is not propaganda.
Chindōgu are never taboo.
Chindōgu cannot be patented.
Chindōgu are without prejudice.