Do you fancy a piece of chocolate.... sofa?

At first sight food and art may not have that many common elements. But don't be fooled by appearances...

... or maybe you should...

Antony Gormley Bed

Wayne Rooney made of cheese and tomato sauce by Prudence Emma Staite

Biscuits and other teatime treaties i.e. Anne Robinson by P.E. Staite

Georges-Pierre Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres and smarties by  P. E. Staite

Untitled by Kader Attia made of couscous

Bompas & Parr  St Paul's Cathedral out of jelly

Tate Modern Turbine Hall Porcelain Sunflower Seeds by Ai Weiwei

All of the above images can be used as a warm-up exercise. Together with the text that follows they may raise a few questions, and eyebrows, or even both....

The text is a shortened version of an article about Cake Britain, an edible exhibition  organised in Future Gallery, London in 2010. It featured works (among others) of Prudence Emma Staite, a leading food artist.

To get a taste of it click on the link below:

 bon appétit!

The article prompts us to think about the relation between the taste and the visual aspect of what we eat (how about eating insects made of sugar?), about a very ephemeral nature of these works, their (un)ethical side, the different viewpoints that artists themselves have on their works (those who want their creations to be eaten as opposed to those who would like them to be treated as "proper" works of art) or about the two issues we have been stuck with for a good few years now, that of junk and slow food....



Next weekend, a huge multi-level garden of exotic and colourful flowers, all made out of icing sugar, cake and marzipan, will form the centre piece at Cake Britain – the world's first entirely edible art exhibition.
The show at London's Future, celebrates a nascent British art scene that uses jelly, cake, candy or other fare instead of paint or canvas. Everything produced by artists and confectioners will be devoured within 72 hours of the exhibition opening.
The garden is going to be a little bit macabre, with beautiful flowers covered with insects and flies that you can eat. The idea being to play with perceptions, creating things that look repulsive but taste delicious. The aim is to trick (=duper) the viewer into a cerebral sense that what they're looking at is inedible; meanwhile, their mouths are made to water by the sweet smells it gives off.
Gloucestershire-based "food obsessed" artist, and maker of the world's first chocolate room, Prudence Emma Staite, is one of the big British names involved in Cake Britain. During the election, she produced accurate pizza portraits of the party leaders out of dough, basil, mozzarella and pasta.
Food is used by many artists because it is a useful and playful medium with which to represent something else. Choosing liquorice to make a pair of shoes, as in Yoder's case, seems wonderfully appropriate as the dark, shiny confection is a stylised approximation of shoe leather. But Yoder, Attia and Gormley would most likely be appalled (=horrifié) if someone viewing his shoes was to take a bite out of them. There is a stark (= frappant) dichotomy between artists who use food because it is an interesting material, and those for whom the eating of the art is simply the fulfilment of its purpose.
Staite, for example, wouldn't be satisfied if people didn't eat her work. "I really like seeing people eating the art," she says. "It's like a final journey. I often spend months making something and then it's put on display and chomped up. Eating Obama's face made out of cheese is just so much more interesting than having a normal block of cheddar."
"The art is about putting the magic back into eating. So that when someone sees a life-size chocolate sofa they'll think 'wow, that's amazing'. So that next time they eat chocolate, instead of just gorging on it and throwing away the wrapper, they'll take a bit more time to think about their food."
Eating art is satisfactory because it uses taste, touch and smell as well as being a visual feast. Eighteenth-century exponent of haute cuisine, Antoine "King of Chefs" Carême, famously remarked: "There are five fine arts – sculpture, painting, poetry, music and architecture – and the confectioner is the only artist to have mastered four of the five."


If you need to entertain your students a bit you can have a look at this video of Staite making animal sculptures in Covent Garden

chocolate sculptures


or a pizza prepared for the wedding of the royal couple (I know, it happened  a g e s  ago)

The lesson on food could lead us to unusual materials that artists, in general, use.
It allows students to talk about their own experiments in this field (coffee grains, raspberry tea, blood? - Victor Hugo style....)

There is a good lesson on food in Inside Out intermediate, chapter 12, have a look at the Incredible edibles on page 105, useful if you want to talk about texture and taste (crunchy, chewy, bland...),
as well as unusual foods; roasted cockroaches, fried grasshoppers, deep fried Mars Bars (yes, you are not mistaken).

Grammar corner:

Food marries itself well with countable and uncountable nouns, yet again I will refer you to Inside Out page 101, a full page of exercises, as always with Inside Out, the number of exercises is just right, not too many, not too few.

Since we are talking about C/U nouns, let me mention another exercise; write uncountable words on the board: music, power, happiness, money, information, news etc, students work in groups, choose a word, and prepare a one-minute presentation about it. It is a sort of a brainstorming exercise, as they can talk about anything they want as long as there is a link with the word. It happens to be a good practice of their oral and vocabulary skills, and an opportunity to see whether they have grasped the idea behind the C/U nouns: killing three birds with one stone should never go amiss....

wishing you a tasty lesson with a song


I am in the mood for food