Salmon: A Red Herring questions what colours we expect in our "natural" environment. It asks us to examine how our perception of colour is changing as much as we are changing the planet. Adapted into the eponymous Turner Prize-nominated exhibition at Tate Britain, this book launched an international campaign against salmon farming.

In 2018, the artist/activist duo Cooking Sections heard of a sparrow that had turned bright pink on the Isle of Skye. So began an odyssey-like investigation into where it went, who was responsible, and what it signalled about its surrounding ecology. The pair spoke to fishermen in Mexico, where shrimp are turning grey, interviewed beekeepers in Brooklyn, who reported red-coloured honey, and investigated the Nornickel factory in Norilsk, Russia, where blue fog and black snow are industrial byproducts. Their findings are presented as a detective story for the era of environmentalism: a wildly inventive book and an exhibition at Tate Britain.

The book, Salmon: A Red Herring, shows how design can address the fragility of our food systems and how colour configures our economies. It is a visceral and visual examination of aesthetic manipulation, industrial farming, and environmental degradation, a seminal intervention in colour theory. In turn, Cooking Sections—the recently announced winners of the Harvard Wheelwright Prize—use it to launch a new global campaign against fish farming.

As COVID makes visible the fragility of our food systems and the need for an overhaul of environmental regulations, this work is now more relevant than ever. The publishers describe it as "Michael Pollan meets Gilbert and George" and Cooking Sections say it is "intended as a Ways of Seeing for the era of environmental reassessment".

Cooking Sections examines the systems that organise the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual (born in 1984) and Alon Schwabe (born in 1984), their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation.

Forewords by Bruno Latour, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hannah Landecker, David Zilber.

There cannot be more possibilities and layers of complexity embodied in food throughout human development. On one hand, it constructed a system that assembles taste, cultural memory and historical movements; on the other hand, the correlation between food and geography provides a hidden motivation to examine human behaviours and social transformation.

This inaugural issue of te magazine adopts Ye Wuji's "The Lost Society" as the central theme. The term "lost" means ephemeral silence and enfeeblement rather than disappearance and extinction. This means that many cultures only dissipated temporarily, and some are metamorphised. Food happens to witness this transition, and the word "society" refers to a collective destiny. In this issue, we invited 13 creative practitioners of different disciplines — to bring in and reflect upon their respective expertise, knowledge system and research trajectories from and in anthropology, sociology, and contemporary art — to explore food as a multi-faceted intricacy, at the same time reconstruct the relationship between food and geography.

Home Works – A Cooking Book: Recipes for Organising with Art and Domestic Work, expands on cooking with art and food as a process for coming together and building collectivity. The book highlights the art and politics of eating together through a number of artistic, curatorial and tasty dinner recipes. Recipes that nourish and nurture conversations around domestic labour, collaborative practices and feminist politics, expanded upon through a series of essays and interviews.

The recipes were learnt during the cooking of Home Works; a research and exhibition programme investigating domestic labour and the politics of the home, hosted by the art space Konsthall C in Stockholm 2015-2017.

Home Works – A Cooking Book is a tool for everyone that wants to use art to challenge what work we value and how work is organised.

With contributions by: Samira Ariadad, Jonna Bornemark, Marie Ehrenbåge, Silvia Federici, Sandi Hilal, Dady de Maximo, Temi Odumosu, Jenny Richards and Jens Strandberg, Khasrow Hamid Othman, Halla Þórlaug Óskarsdóttir.

After three years online, the Berlin-based food culture magazine ‘famous for my dinner parties’ is going paper! For this first edition zine, the team selected their favourite stories, essays, fun facts and photo series of the last few years, and threw some new bits and bobs into the mix, too. It’s about fake news and futurism, fast food and food faux pas, food fights, furious foodies and the best film ever made. It’s about things that look good and things that taste good, and also about things that leave a bitter taste in one’s mouth.

famous for my dinner parties is a magazine and platform celebrating, portraying, questioning and discussing different aspects of the culture around food and eating.

An artist's book presenting a photographic study of onions.

On Onions is a photographic study of onions by artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry's selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry's first artist's book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fruitful use of "the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph" (as the artist has described his practice in general).

Composed by the artist and arranged by Stuart Bailey, the book includes an essay written by Angie Keefer about the effects of sliced onions on human tear ducts.

The 15-year history of the production of a "German scotch" Black Whisky, made by Dexter Sinister together with Stahlemühle, a distillery set up by former publisher, Christoph Keller.

The story is told in reverse, starting with the delivery of 342 bottles to Berlin in 2022, and ending with an interview with Christoph for the journal Dot Dot Dot in 2007, during which the idea began to germinate. A summary of the project is accompanied by photographs taken at the time, interspersed with five previously published texts (an essay, three conversations, and a statement of intent) written along the way.

Dexter Sinister is the compound name of David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey, collapsing together distinctions of editing, design, production and distribution into one efficient activity.

Charlotte Birnbaum meets with Gilbert & George to discuss The Meal—a culinary performance organized in 1969 by the British duo, with David Hockney as the guest of honor. Also included here are photos and memorabilia from the singular event (the sixth publication in the On the Table series, that explore the encounter between food and art).

Gilbert & George never cook and always eat out. Back in 1969, however, the artist duo hosted The Meal, an elaborate dinner party that included thirteen guests, Princess Margaret's butler, a chef who prepared a meal from a Victorian cookery manual, and the guest of honor, artist David Hockney. While the art world of the time was largely characterized by Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, Gilbert & George developed an entirely unique philosophy and combined their daily lives with their artistic vision; in short, their art and life are one! Charlotte Birnbaum took a trip to London's East End to visit the immaculately dressed pair to discuss The Meal and other curious projects from their fifty-year collaboration. Also included here are photos and memorabilia from the singular event.

An artist book by Luca Trevisani, overwriting in the mode of a palimpsest Piero Camporesi's Bread of Dreams, an Italian cult classic of "food" anthropology.

Walking loaves is a cannibalization of and tribute to Bread of Dreams, the masterpiece by Italian philologist, anthropologist, and literary critic Piero Camporesi. Originally published in 1980, Bread of Dreams is a book about bread as a cultural entity, about the baking practices and the rituals of the humans we have been, and the way we used to feed ourselves.

Seeking to crystallize in his sculptures the act of walking and the metamorphosis of the body, Luca Trevisani has dedicated several shoemaking exercises to bread—emphasized as a collective glue, material history, and biological writing.

After three years of plastic and editorial research on bread, Trevisani pays homage to Camporesi, grafting images of his works and handwritten notes onto its anastatic replica: a mutation grew in the crevices of another book with a gentle-aggressive gesture.

Luca Trevisani (born 1979 in Verona, lives and works in Berlin and Bologna) is one of the young Italian artists who came to prominence at the international level. His research ranges between sculpture and video, and cross border disciplines such as performing arts, graphics, design, cinema of research or architecture.

An exhibition guide for a multi-part show conceived by Reliable Copy in India, featuring a range of cookbooks, videos, and artworks around food, by a strong grouping of practices.

Approaching curatorial practice from the perspective of publishing, At the kitchen table looks at how food has historically been—and continues to be—inscribed through various conventional formats, as well as the channels and platforms by which it continues to circulate as material, trace, memory, and culture. Imagined as a show of documents, the exhibition brings together a selection of cookbooks, video works, and artworks.

The selection of cookbooks feature recipes and narratives compiled from artists and art-spaces, anthologies of recipes from literary fiction, cookbooks that function as historical records, and some that are self-published by individuals or community groups. The video works highlight and examine the well-worn format of the instructional cooking class and its associated performativity. Meanwhile, the artworks, which are presented via peripheral, referential, or stand-in documents, respond to (and often assume) the forms of the marketed consumable product, the stand-alone restaurant, the family archive, the recipe book, the menu, the assembly, and the feast.

The proposal, the script, the poster, the photographic documentation, the resource list, the newsletter, the Keynote presentation, and the audio recording—elements that are traditionally left out of the work's exhibition display, but that are often included in catalogues, monographs, or other publications around the work—become stand-ins for the artworks conceptually on display. Through this introduction of artworks via the documents that surround, engender, and represent them, the exhibition seeks to collapse the space between the exhibition and its documentation, the library and the gallery, and the event and its eventual publication.

At the kitchen table is imagined as a travelling, multi-part exhibition that will expand through its responses to the contexts, sites, and venues of its iterations, including those of a publication.

Works by Candice Lin, Carolyn Lazard, Chinar Shah & Nihaal Faizal, David Robbins, Fazal Rizvi, Gavati, Jason Hirata, Lantian Xie, Leone Contini, nonfood, Pushpamala N, Rajyashri Goody, Rasheed Araeen.

Books by Abby Lloyd, Archana Pidathala, Enid Blyton, Esther David, Felicity Dahl & Josie Fison, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Happy Potato Press, Mrinalini Bordawekar, Norah M. Titley, S. Meenakshi Ammal, Salvador Dali, Studio Olafur Eliasson, Suresh Jayaram.

This publication features a project by Leone Contini looking into the canned food available during the war of Caporetto in 1917 and especially its iconography. It brings together an essay by the artist along with reproductions of a selection of his drawings.

Leone Contini (born 1976 in Florence) studied philosophy and cultural anthropology at the University of Siena. His research unrolls at the intersection of anthropology, aesthetics and politics and his mediums include lecture-performances, collective interventions in public spaces, textual and visual narratives, drawings. His research is focused on intercultural frictions, conflict and power relations, displacement, migrations and diasporas, aiming to investigate, to question and to re-shape identity patterns and power relations.

The 1Shanthiroad Cookbook brings together a collection of recipes from the community kitchen of 1Shanthiroad Studio/Gallery, compiled and edited by the space's founding director, Suresh Jayaram.

Featuring recipes from over 70 contributors, including artists, curators, patrons, residents, and the extended family of friends of 1Shanthiroad, the cookbook serves as a portrait of an evolving cultural community. Emerging from and responding to the history and legacy of 1Shanthiroad - Bangalore's oldest running non-profit residency and arts space - the cookbook frames the kitchen as integral to the site and function of the space, mapping recipes across generations, cultures, and timelines, while anchoring itself in the cultural history of the wider city. 

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.

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

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. 

Mix & Stir, this book’s aim is an endeavour to understand art as being a panhuman phenomenon of all times and cultures; to steer away from the persistent Eurocentric/Western-centric viewpoint towards a transcultural and transnational interconnected model of exchange and processes of interculturalization. Mix & Stir wants to expand this landscape by bringing to the fore new, recalcitrant, queer, idiosyncratic practices and discourses, theories and topics, methods and concerns that open up ways to approach art from a global perspective.

Analogous to a cookery book filled with recipes and instruction, Mix & Stir explores new outlooks on contemporary art from global perspectives. It intends to encourage studying art beyond national constraints, cultural dominances, and hierarchies: a voyage similar to that of culinary discovery. The book brings a variety of tastes and flavours to the table, and breaks new ground by allowing innovative, contrary, queer, idiosyncratic practices and discourses, theories and topics, methods, and concerns to access art in its global dimensions.

Contributions: Thomas J. Berghuis, Elisabeth de Bièvre, John Clark, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Parisa Damandan, Wilfried van Damme, Sophie Ernst, Angèle Etoundi Essamba. Paul Faber, Claire Farago, Anne Gerritsen, Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Isabel Hoving, Stijn Huijts, Joo Yun Lee, Nancy Jouwe, Remy Jungerman, Sonja van Kerkhoff, Meta Knol, Frans-Willem Korsten, Katja Kwastek, Sybille Lammes, Charl Landvreugd, Gregor Langfeld, Chris Lee, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Virginia MacKenny, Sarat Maharaj, Tirzo Martha, Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou, Larissa Mendoza Straffon, Ni Haifeng, Stéphanie Noach, Anja Novak, John Onians, Rob Perrée, Georges Petitjean, Rosalien van der Poel, Jennifer Pranolo, Lize van Robbroeck, Pippa Skotnes, Henk Slager, Rudi Struik, Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Leonor Veiga, Leon Wainwright, James Webb, Janneke Wesseling, Helen Westgeest, Carine Zaayman, Kitty Zijlmans, Robert Zwijnenberg.