Food Is--

In the creation of Food Is-- I hoped to figure out a bit of what food meant to other people and to myself. To this end I went around and interviewed people I encountered with an audio recorder about what food was for them in a sentence, or even better, in a word. I was surprised and intrigued by the responses I received. 

The idea for the project came after I had an idea for some food I wanted to make--in this case, carbonated ice cream. I'd pitched the idea to a number of people; some told me it would work, some just sounded disgusted by it. It remained a vague project trapped in the "sometime I'll do this" category. It didn't seem feasible. A test batch at 1/3 my final batch seemed to prove it was too onerous for a large audience. Other ideas for the chat didn't appeal to me, unfortunately.

So I did it anyway.

The audio portion of Food Is-- I hoped would be something people would listen to and find something they identified with. After they had identified with something, they would also learn some of what other people felt and consider more deeply what food was to them.

I chose a basic French Vanilla frozen custard recipe from The Joy of Cooking. I like vanilla as a basic flavor. It gets a bad rap, but it’s a classic and is wildly popular for a reason. I love experimenting with other flavors—especially weird and crazy things—but decided while I was experimenting with the carbonation aspect of the ice cream I should probably choose a flavor I understood better.

Making the actual ice cream was something I hoped to do during my performance, but I instead chose to make it just beforehand, in order to make sure it remained carbonated for as long as possible, hopefully at least until people were able to eat it.

What I hoped to achieve by actually carbonating the ice cream—beyond just freezing it with dry ice for the novelty—was to play a little bit with people’s conceptions of a familiar thing—vanilla ice cream—and make it less familiar, to invite people to think about the food they were eating. This is an idea I have borrowed from haute cuisine restaurants such as Grant Achatz’s Alinea which plays not only with time-honored techniques but with molecular gastronomy. I consider Alinea the textual inspiration for this piece.

Were I to perform this piece again, I would give more thought to how I actually presented the audio and ice cream. I would have explained a little more, and while people were eating asked them to think about the food they were eating.

All in all, I really enjoyed my piece and was happy with the results. I especially enjoyed other people’s pieces and just had a good time that night.