Food Art.

 

Hunger and Food are Everyday aspects of our lives. Great loves and great wars have been made over food. When we write stories about food, we're also writing about love. We're writing about need, desire, ephemerality, mortality and our instinctual desire to preserve the impermanent. Which is why we create memories and metaphors.

Food is possibly one of the most delightful literary and visual metaphors for-- everything of the human condition. In love, you're a fried egg, sunny side up, melted sunshine. Out of love, you can't crack it open without getting eggshell bits in the mix. You're poached, you're hard boiled, you're secretive, you're young, you're waiting, you dream, you wander, hungry, waiting. It's all in an egg.

Our Food Art issue is about the natural world and the patterns that we impose on it. The issue spans a story about a broken relationship, revealed through a song and a Sunday brunch and the chef Ritu Dalmia's extraordinary ability to give at a moment where everything else feels taken; Payal Kapadia's playful animations tell a dark story about the war on GM foods evoked through an image of a bursting watermelon; Shweta Bhattad's performance, which pushed the limits of the body and its temporality, tells a story about the culture of starvation and desire and Mufaddal Husein's food events tell a story about living with food, anthropomorphizing it and letting it, ultimately, consume you and those that you love.

The mysteries of the color, shape, form of these natural art objects, and the deliberation with which we transform them, can only be indulged in on a full stomach and an open heart. So turn on the exhaust and let it stew.  We want you to feel the crunch, the crush, the bite, the munch and the metaphor.

In the tradition of slow food, we wish you a slow read, and hope it arouses, even for a fleeting moment, a little slow love.