I am posting here several photos, some of which already found their way online via Facebook, that illustrate how I satisfy my hungers by painting with food. Let me explain. Later. Look at the images and read the captions, as well as more narrative text that follows below.
Painting a low calorie lunch in early January can inspire warmth, decadence, and satiation.
Koren-Inspired Pasta-Filled Cucumber Cups
Another painted lunch. I’m feeling full just looking at it.
Christmas dinner 2016; half a roasted Cornish game hen, beans, sweet potatoes, and stuffing.
The wanna-be chef preparing Cornish game hens.
The table sign identifying the soup we took (and who made it) to the Unitarian Universalist Christmas Eve soup dinner.
Cajun shrimp and sausage over fettucine.
Brazilian style rice, tomate recheado, and shrimp moqueca
Miso soup, as I like it.
You noticed, didn’t you, that I wrote of satisfying my hunger(s)? Plural. I do enjoy food and I love the fact that the way it is prepared and presented can paint moods and emotions. Food can set the stage for thought and ideas; it can serve as a man’s (or woman’s) artistic medium just as surely as acrylic and oil paints and watercolors can do for painters. Unusual treatment of food, like filling cucumbers with spiced pasta, triggers creativity; not just creativity in the kitchen, but in the inner recesses of the mind. Splashes of excitement, spurred by shocked and stunned synapses encountering the unexpected, erupt from the brain, spilling into every aspect of one’s experience. Possibilities never before imagined flood the mind with energy. Hope and belief in the possibility of world peace and harmony would be nice outcomes of unusual treatments, but I’m not counting my chickens.
Yet how many chicken would I have to catch to convince me that food is the salvation of the world? If I think hard enough about it, the certainty of its holy place in life cannot be subject to question. For, without food, what would happen to the world in which we live? We would never know, because we would starve and die. So, in a very real sense, food is our salvation. On the other hand, is it possible to live without Cornish game hens? Well of course it is. So, a chicken in every pot is not the sine qua non for existence. But food, in a broader sense, is necessary for life and for art. And food ought to, by all rights, be part of art, an active participant in helping the world understand creative peacemaking and delicious joy.
