Food & Cooking

Photographer Olivier Degorce brings together a series of fridge photographs shot from 1993 to 2017: Beyond the obsessive nature of the project lies the sheer diversity of individual eating habits in the form of contemporary still lifes.

The photographs presented in Fridge Food Soul were shot from 1993 to 2017, for the most part on the spur of the moment, using all sorts of analog and digital devices ranging from the most sophisticated to the most rudimentary cameras. In most cases he took only one shot of each fridge. The serial collection of these snapshots in a single book testifies to the systematic, even obsessive, nature of this project.

The first English language translation of Robert Linhart's The Sugar and the Hunger, originally published in 1980. Includes afterword by Luiz Renato Martins, and other materials.

Widely acclaimed for his engaged social analyses of proletariat and peasant struggles around the world, Linhart's inquiry into the sugar regions of North-Eastern Brazil, juxtaposes heterogeneous traits of the impoverished workers' stories into a vivid cinematic montage.

Alongside the translation, the book also includes 'The Third World, Investigations, Social Analysis', an unpublished interview with Linhart from 1980 made by Jean Copans, giving an insight into the political and theoretical background of his investigation in Brazil.

The afterword by Luiz Renato Martins, an active Brazilian Marxist art historian and journalist, further contextualises the importance of Linhart's book. Renato Martins who recently directed a documentary film Conversations With Robert Linhart discusses The Sugar and the Hunger against the backdrop of today's world where the practices of expropriation of land and food from peasants and urban poor, which Linhart examined in 1980 on a laboratory-like scale, have now become common global practices, endlessly producing legions of uprooted and hungry refugees.

Translated by John M Floyd and Emilio Sauri, the book includes rare photographs taken by François Manceaux in Northeastern Brazil in 1979.

Robert Linhart (born 1944 in Ixelles) is a French sociologist, philosopher and political activist, known as one of the founders of the Maoist movement in France, most famously for his 1978 autobiographic book L'Établi.

This book is a colourised version of the 1828 “Pâtissier Pittoresque”. First published by french pastry chef Antonin Carême, it gathers more than a hundred sugar sculptures, all served on the buffet table of Emperor Napoleon I and king Louis XVIII.  

Known in the cooking world for their elegant sobriety, the blueprints of these sculptures were, as of today, always published in black and white. Yet, the author refers to more than thirty of them in his introduction, instructing how the sugar paste and biscuit should be coloured to create the desired effect. Thinking himself more as an artist than as an artisan, this new colourised version is a testament to Carême’s effervescent creativity.

Colourised by Robin Bantigny and Jérémie Rentien Lando.
Co-published with Jan Van Eyck Academie

The Soft Protest Digest centre ses recherches sur l'histoire de l'alimentation, de l'agriculture et des liens sociaux et politiques qui constituent une culture alimentaire. Le collectif croit en l'utilisation de la narration comme moyen de créer ou d'adapter des traditions alimentaires, des recettes et des façons de se nourrir qui tiennent compte de l'héritage culturel et des liens émotionnels entre celleux qui mangent et la gastronomie locale, dans une quête de résilience alimentaire.

Gufo a souhaité rencontrer les membres de ce collectif afin d’explorer les nécessités alimentaires dans lesquelles s’inscrit The Soft Protest Digest. Et puis, très vite, une intrigue s’est créée autour du nom de ce collectif : qu’est-ce qu’une douce manifestation ? Quels sont les liens avec l’alimentation ? Pouvons-nous doucement contester ? C’est-à-dire sans frustration ni violence ? Ce nom a fait écho à une édition dont j’ai imprimé le titre il y a quelque temps, il s’agit de “Radical softness as a boundless form of resistance”* ( dont la traduction pourrait être Une douceur radicale comme forme infinie de résistance). Pouvons-nous associer douceur, résistance, radicalité et alimentation ? Gufo vous invite alors, à lire nos conversations qui divaguent mais surtout à imaginer des banquets partagés dont la joie et les ventres pleins seront les témoins d’onctueuses révoltes.

In her debut cookbook, acclaimed chef Angela Dimayuga shares her passion for Filipino food with home cooks.

Filipinx offers 100 deeply personal recipes, many of them dishes that define home for Angela Dimayuga and the more than four million people of Filipino descent in the United States. The book tells the story of how Dimayuga grew up in an immigrant family in northern California, trained in restaurant kitchens in New York City, learning to make everything from bistro fare to Asian-American cuisine, then returned to her roots, discovering in her family's home cooking the same intense attention to detail and technique she'd found in fine dining.

In this book, Dimayuga puts a fresh spin on classics: adobo, perhaps the Filipino dish best known outside the Philippines, is traditionally built on a trinity of soy sauce, vinegar, and garlic, all pantry staples, but add coconut milk, vinegar, and oil, and it turns lush and silky; ribeye steaks bring extra richness to bistek, gilded with butter and a bright splash of lemon and orange juice. These are the punches of flavor and inspired recipes that home cooks have been longing for.

A modern, welcoming resource for this essential cuisine, Filipinx shares exciting and approachable recipes everyone will wholeheartedly embrace in their own kitchens.

To write, to boil, to cook ideas, stir them all, spice them up with some references and again write and knead the dough out of it. To what forms can recipes lead? This is the central question of this thesis. Recipes follow a certain literary genre. Whether carved on stones or written along the horizontal edges of a notebook, they all conform to a specific structure. In the text I analyse these structures, to show the way in which the recipe itself unveils its deeper meanings, concerns, and secrets. Why, when, who and how are fundamental questions I ask, while I read out loud a recipe about macaroni from the 1495 – or when I look at a Sumerian tablet where a Cuneiform system of writing states that epilepsy is a tease of the demons. Material form, literary form and social interaction are the flavors I want to bring up from each recipe I use as an example, hoping to find a way to understand how these three elements are melted together to form an interconnected circle.

Published Nov, 2021. 

Last year, on a summer night in Marseille, someone, within all the hungry people I am meeting during my dinners, specifically set her attention on my projects. Later during the fall I received a call from Austė ZDANČIŪTĖ, the cultural attache at the Lithuanian embassy in France, who introduced me to Kamilè Krasauskaitè. Since that fall, we kept on exchanging and making future plans in France where she would have a residency. The more we chatted, the closest we began. Kamilè is a almost-thirty-years-old Lithuanian artist that has been including sourdough bread in her work and builds a poetic and mesmerising world around that dimension of food, fermentation, senses, environment, rituals...Through our communication I decided to share that encounter that we managed to welcome in Marseille. We kneaded some bread together, shared it in a forest of Marseillais sunflowers, walked the streets, met people, questioned and compared artists' lives in Europe. This issue might be an excerpt of all the long conversations we had, it was hot and sunny in Marseille, it was in June.

Enjoying Wild Herbs: A Seasonal Guide brings Hackney Herbal’s Nat Mady and illustrator Catmouse together to introduce the wonderful world of herbs. Asking important questions about the nature of public and private space, of how we live alongside plants, how we use them, how we gather them, this is a treatise on how foraging and the knowledge that underpins it can be a radical act—an act that informs much of our attitude to the natural world, to the food we eat and to how we value the multitudinous life that surrounds us.

Published Spring 2021. 

Horticultural Appropriation is a conversation between an organic food grower and an artist about the possibility and necessity of bringing a decolonial lens to the practice of horticulture. Taking place within West Dean Art College and Gardens, the exchange explores how attempts to decolonise collections and spaces currently happening in arts and cultural institutions might inform the interrogation of the colonial history at the heart of Britain's gardens and gardening.

Published Spring 2021. 

This publication critically assesses and illuminates ways in which the arts can confront food-related issues, through the contributions of artists, anthropologists, activists, agronomists, and chefs.

The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of artists and artist collectives interrogating the global politics and ethics of food production, distribution, and consumption.

As an important document of new research and thinking around the subject, this book, co-published with Delfina Foundation, contains reflections on food by prominent artists, anthropologists, and activists, among others. Interviews with chefs, policy makers, and agronomists critically assess and illuminate the ways the arts confront food-related issues, ranging from the infrastructure of global and local food systems, its impact on social organization, alternatives and sustainability, climate and ecology, health and policy, science and biodiversity, and identity and community.

Contributions by Kathrin Böhm, Center for Genomic Gastronomy, Leone Contini, Cooking Sections, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Amy Franceschini & Michael Taussig, Fernando García-Dory, Melanie Jackson, Dagna Jakubowska, Nick Laessing, Jane Levi, Candice Lin, Poppy Litchfield, Christine Mackey, Taus Makhacheva, Elia Nurvista, Senam Okudzeto, Thomas Pausz, Daniel Salomon, Vivien Sansour, Standart Thinking, Serkan Taycan, Lantian Xie, Raed Yassin.

ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive. 

Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

Recipes for you: A vegan and gluten free recipe and story book with additional life skills is a new cookbook and survival guide by artist Holly White. Rather than selling an aspiration, the book looks honestly at our conflicted relationship with consumption. White intersperses recipes and self-sufficiency notes with prose, as the contributions collected on her food blog (http://holly-white-food.tumblr.com/) spark imagined and remembered references and memories.

Mistress Rebecca is approached by a 34-year-old Tory who works in a corporate field of creativity with a feeding fetish. Such mundanity is outrageous – until he declares himself as a female supremacist. Over the period of two evenings and one afternoon in three different chain restaurants in central London, Mistress Rebecca explores Humpty Dumpty’s beliefs then pushed his adoration of humiliation and his facade of female empowerment to its limits.