Tag

review

Browsing



The Museum at FIT set out to the broad and vague endeavor of putting up an exhibition on Food & Fashion. I first thought that pulling this off would be an impressive feat because these two things seemed to me to have little in common. Where would they find enough material for an entire exhibition? But walking through the gallery revealed that the relationship between what we eat and what we wear is richly layered, like a creamy, meaty lasagna. The key is to look at these two things from a vantage point to include all perspectives: industrial production, social justice, consumerism, aesthetics. 

Food & Fashion exhibition view. © The Museum at FIT.

On Saturday, September 30, I had plans to make my way from Brooklyn to Chelsea to view this exhibition. My boyfriend and I stopped for pumpkin spice lattes before getting on the Manhattan bound C train.While we waited for our coffees I got a WhatsApp message from my sister, who was in my hometown of Bogotá, Colombia, asking me if she could call me. I stepped out of the pop-music-bursting coffee shop with my phone to my ear. 

My grandmother’s health has been decaying all year, maybe even before then. On a morning in July I had received a similar WhatsApp message and called my sister to find out my grandmother had a bad fall and was taken to the hospital. I’d never been so far away from my family, and whenever tragedy has struck, I’ve felt useful by physically being around them, even if I couldn’t really do anything. But this summer proved to be a test of living my life away from them, and accepting there was nothing I could do, even when I felt like they needed me. 

On that September Saturday afternoon, as I paced the sidewalk, the wind blowing against my trench coat, I wasn’t expecting any news about my grandmother. Then I heard the undertone of my sister’s voice, the one that told me she had bad news before she’d had a chance to actually say it. I realized the family group chat had been awfully quiet. My grandmother normally uses the group chat every day, even if she’s trying to communicate with one specific person. She sends things like “Me llamas?” (“Can you call me?”) usually meant for my mom, aunt, or uncle, and I’m never sure if they know who she’s reaching out to or if they all give her a call. In any case, it works. She also loves to send heart-shaped stickers on the WhatsApp group, or little gifs like a cartoon of a girl in bed with sheep hopping joyfully above her, to indicate its time for her to go to sleep. 

The news sounded bad. My grandmother had woken up that morning with half of her face drooping. She couldn’t talk or use her phone or swallow. My eyes filled with tears and I asked to talk to my mom. My mom explained that they believed she’d had a stroke. My grandmother, after recovering from the fall earlier in the summer, said no more hospitals. There was nothing they could do but wait. And the wait could be hours, or it could be days, or it could even be months. So there was no reason to fly out. If anything happened they would call me. But for now it was best to stay put in New York.

My boyfriend and I sat on a park bench instead of heading straight for the train. I took a sip from my latte, which I liked because it was like drinking a pastry, and after a few minutes decided that what I needed to do was go to Food & Fashion anyway. Sulking wouldn’t help. I wiped the tears with the back of my hand and said: “So, do you want to go look at some dresses?”

Food & Fashion exhibition view. © The Museum at FIT.

The Museum at FIT holds its temporary exhibitions in the building’s basement. The title Food & Fashion is printed on the wall by the door to the gallery, in chocolate brown cursive on a pink background, resembling icing on cake. A red carpet leads visitors through the door and down a flight of stairs, where more icing lettering greets them before entering the space, this time in funfetti. The space is dark, cool, and quiet, with the items on display spotlit, interrupted only by a few screens playing recordings of runway shows related to the theme (like when Moschino had its McDonald’s-inspired collection). The peace in the room, isolated from the chaos of the city, also calmed the chaos of my mind. Walls of gallery text explained the broad approach the curators took when creating the show, which made it feel well researched and academic, almost clinical. Clean. 

I found the exhibit to resemble a pie whose crust was baked playfulness, featuring Jeremy Scott’s Moschino and Junya Watanabe’s Comme des Garçons, two high end brands known for not taking themselves too seriously. The filling was a journey through everything you can think of relating to food and fashion: a key ingredient is cultural identity, featuring designers like Han Feng who printed Chinese tea box labels onto silk; or more problematically, Dolce & Gabbana, who printed pasta on dresses for their 2017 Spring collection on la dolce vita. To add a bit of spice, the exhibition looked at sustainability and farming practices, and how they relate to the production of both clothing and food, featuring Stella McCartney’s work on creating fabrics made out of avocado and apple waste, among others.   

Han Feng, silk jersey ensemble printed with tea box labels, spring 1998. Gift of Han Feng © The Museum at FIT.

But my personal favorite ingredient of this sweet and sour pie was the relationship between feminine dressing and baked sweet goods. The curatorial text reads: 

Magazines of the mid-twentieth century often presented cakes with the same flare as women’s fashion, highlighting their striking visuals and textural qualities. Sewing and baking are domestic activities traditionally considered a woman’s work, and as a result, there is a crossover in the language used to describe textiles and pastries. Terms such as red velvet and silk chiffon derive from the world of fashion and connect baking and clothing to women’s material culture.

Dresses that look like pastries. It’s perfect. It reminds me of my grandmother.

My grandmother took on the role of matriarch long before my grandfather passed away. She met him when she was fifteen and got married at nineteen. She had to get her parents’ official permission because at that time, the legal age to get married in Colombia was twenty-one. She dedicated herself to having and raising children, and then to raising grandchildren. And she baked a lot. She’d make scones for my grandfather’s breakfast which he ate every day with strawberry jam, homemade, and a cup of English breakfast tea. For every birthday she’d bake a special cake, different flavors for different family members, according to tradition and preference. When my sister and I visited our grandparents after school, which happened a few times a week, there were always sweet treats: brownies, cinnamon rolls, chocolate roll cake. Everything made from scratch. My best baking instincts I learned through watching her. Baking is science, but it’s also art, much like fashion. She said love was her “secret ingredient” and to her that’s what baking was: a love language.

My grandmother also fiercely knit clothing for children and grandchildren, even when we became adults. She made my mother a beautiful hooded red wool sweater that makes her look like Little Red Riding Hood, which I steal whenever I visit home and it’s a particularly gloomy day. She made dresses for the babies, booties, scarfs. She repaired socks and buttons, and kept the home together one thread at a time. She wore lots of pastels, especially knit sweaters, and often added a dash of jewelry, pieces gifted to her by my grandfather for the most part. Her rotating collection of shawls was impressive, and she always looked cozy, ready for a hug. 

Lucia Fainzilber, “The Cookbook” series prints: Pomegranate, Green, and Pink, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Praxis Gallery.
© The Museum at FIT.

Standing in a dark Chelsea basement, I thought of how my grandmother had embodied domesticity and femininity in the most traditional sense for most of her life. While there were many other interpretations of the relationship between food and fashion floating around me under glimmering spotlights, this exploration felt to me the most obvious, and yet I hadn’t considered it until it was right before my eyes. What I appreciated the most about the show is that it’s not all about crazy fun fruit and pasta prints or clothes shaped like food. It connects these two industries on all levels: economical, social, cultural, anthropological. And in this way, it makes it easy to start to see the relationship between the two in unexpected parts of your life.

When my grandfather passed away, my grandmother stopped baking as much. Arthritis has claimed her fingers, so she doesn’t knit much these days. But to my grandmother the kitchen has meant love. Maybe that’s why on Wednesday, October 4, when she was feeling a bit stronger, she made her way there and started making “masitas de plátano,” a kind of plantain pastry she’d make when her children were little. We don’t really know what is going to happen, or exactly what afflicted her that Saturday. But we do have her recipes and the clothes she made us that still fit. 


Food & Fashion is on view until November 26, 2023 at the Museum at FIT. In conversation with the exhibition, there will be a Food & Fashion Symposium on November 3, 2023 at the Fred P. Pomerantz Art and Design Center.


Laura Rocha-Rueda is a Colombian writer living in Brooklyn. Her work on the intersections between fashion, pop culture, and literature has appeared in Vestoj and HALOSCOPE. She has an MFA from The New School.

Growing up, I fantasized about dinner consisting of Chinese takeout eaten straight out of the takeout boxes—just like I saw on TV (specifically, I had my dreams of very Gilmore Girls-esque meals where my family and I would order a week’s worth of Chinese takeout, eat it out of the containers, and live off it for a week). 

However, I grew up vegetarian in a small town in Alabama, and there weren’t a lot of vegetarian Chinese takeout options—clearly an obstacle to my master plan. As a kid, I felt like I was missing out on a quintessential dining experience (we would eat Indo-Chinese food when we went to the city, and I absolutely loved it—if you’ve never had it, this is my plug for it). When I got older, I moved to bigger cities and my culinary world seemed to expand. Vegetarianism grew in popularity, and I started trying meat; I could finally live out my Chinese takeout dreams and it met every expectation and hope I had for it.

Courtesy of the Asian American Historical Society of Dallas.
Photo: Stephanie Drenka.

What I didn’t know was the rich history behind Chinese takeout and cuisine. However, Leftover: The Enduring Legacy of Chinese Cuisine in Dallas, a recent exhibition showcasing the city’s Chinese food culture, demanded my attention and my interest was piqued. The exhibit itself was thoughtfully coordinated by creative director Christina Hahn: it featured old menus from the historic Dallas Chinese restaurants (what I would do to pay $1-3 for an entire meal); replicas of restaurants; photos and videos from decades past highlighting the various restaurants and people who created them; and art installations created by high school students from the DFW area, including a mobile constructed of paper fortune cookies. The talent and depth that came through the student pieces was especially striking. It all told a complex but meaningful story as you walked through the rooms–imagining what this time in Dallas looked like through the lens of the Chinese American community in Dallas. Stephanie Drenka (who I had the opportunity to meet and let me just say that she is who I want to be when I grow up) and Denise Johnson started the Asian American Historical Society in Dallas to preserve the amazing history of the Asian American community in Dallas, and this was one of their first public exhibits.

You can feel the effort and pride in the Chinese restaurateur community throughout the exhibit. I came to learn that the history of this community was one that required fight. Around 1872, the first Chinese immigrants arrived in Dallas after working on the railroads. Ten years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed. By then, hate sentiment toward the Chinese community had already set in. Chinese Americans couldn’t get jobs outside the community, and many turned to starting their own businesses and supporting each other. Eventually, many established restaurants as a way to provide their cultural  food for the community. As restaurateurs struggled to access ingredients, as many ingredients had to be brought in from San Francisco, the Chinese culinary scene in North Texas continued to innovate; entrepreneur Buck Jung supplied wonton wrappers, fortune cookies, and noodles to the the Dallas Chinese community, and ultimately became a major supplier for the eastern United States, allowing for a more expansive map of Chinese cuisine. This was all a direct reflection of the community’s constant resilience in Dallas. 

That’s what showed in the exhibit and the work Drenka and Johnson are doing—resilience. The Dallas Asian American Historical Society hosted a private showing for the families of the restaurateurs who were such an essential part of this history, and according to Drenka, the sense of community that was in the room during the event was palpable. Even during my visit, family members were walking through the exhibit and you could feel the emanating pride. 

What to me was a dream based on TV and movies is so much more. It is a community that is resilient, that fought, that innovated—in the face of hatred. It is a community that has left its mark not just on Dallas but on the entire country. It goes beyond the food: it is a rich history that deserves to be highlighted and preserved. 

Courtesy of the Asian American Historical Society of Dallas. Photo: Stephanie Drenka.

I could sit here and tell you of all the stories, of all the people whose histories make up this exhibit, but that would do a disservice to the curation of art and artifacts at Preservation Dallas’ Wilson House, where these families and community members are telling their own story. Rather, I implore you to read the stories for yourself which are being highlighted by the amazing team at the Asian American Historical Society; or, for those in the DFW area, go to the exhibit before September 22 and feel the magic yourself.

The exhibit program rightfully says on the back: “The legacy is here” and I couldn’t agree more.

Leftover: The Enduring Legacy of Chinese Cuisine in Dallas” will remain on view at the Wilson House, located at 2922 Swiss Ave, through its closing event on the evening of Friday, September 22nd. For further information, please visit the exhibition page.


Shivani Patel is an attorney by day, baker and lover of all things food by night. She graduated from the University of Georgia with BAs in Linguistics and Public Relations and a JD. She currently lives in Dallas, Texas with her soon-to-be husband, and with this piece, she is fulfilling her dream of being a food writer. 

source
source

The GMO Deception: A Review

by Maeve McInnis

Do we want to live in a world where all of our food has been at one point genetically altered, where synthetic chemicals are sprayed on our food, and the corporations have complete control over all aspects of our food? Or, would we like to buy vegetables from our local farmer with the knowledge that the genetic makeup of the food is pure, that it has no synthetic chemicals in it, and where we have the freedom to choose GMO or non-GMO food products?

The intention of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk, a volume comprised of articles originally published in GeneWatch edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber, is to start a larger public dialogue on what they refer to as the deception of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). For anyone who has limited knowledge of the GMO situation in our society the Merriam Webster dictionary defines GMOs as manipulated, or altered organisms to contain specific desired traits not naturally occurring in that organism. The GMO Deception spans topics such as the health and safety of GMOs, labeling, ethics and their environmental impacts, along with other social aspects of the GMO debate. The article ‘Busting the Big GMO Myth’s’ by John Fagan, Michael Antoniou and Claire Robinson did exactly as the title states. “…GMOs could be allergenic. Similarly the toxicity of certain GMOs and the reduced nutritional value of other GMOs have been scientifically demonstrated…More and more evidence is accumulating, showing that GMOs can be harmful to health and the environment.” The article titled ‘Changing Seeds or Seeds of Change?’ By Natalie DeGraaf discusses how “[f]armers in rural India have noted instances of animals dying from grazing on GM crops and new reports are investigating the relationship between increased allergy prevalence and GM foods as well as transference of antibiotic resistance to consumers.” With these alarming reviews of the health concerns of GMO’s from the scientific community, one wonders if this is the sort of technology the global society should rely on to feed its population.

Around the world, from the Government Office for Science in the U.K. to the National Research Council in the United States to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., there is consensus: In order to address the roots of hunger today and build a food system that will feed humanity into the future, we must invest in “sustainable intensification”—not expensive GMO technology that threatens biodiversity, has never proven its superiority, even in yields, and locks us into dependence on fossil fuels, fossil water, and agrochemicals. (Grist, 2011)

The popularly held belief that GMOs will help feed a growing population, while highly contested in this book, also begs the question at what cost to our individual’s health and the health of the environment. Again Natalie DeGraaf addresses these health concerns by citing a “severe lack of unbiased research being conducted external to the reports issued by GM company laboratories.”  ‘Busting the Big GMO Myths’ by John Fagan, Michael Antoniou, and Claire Robinson quotes Oliver De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, “yields went up 214 percent in forty four projects in twenty countries in sub-Saharan Africa using agro-ecological farming techniques…far more improvement than any GM crop has ever done.”

The editors Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber, choose articles that exhibit how large agro companies such as Monsanto hide behind the intellectual property rights laws to keep impartial studies regarding their GMO products behind locked doors. The over-arching theme that unifies each of these pieces: how can a conscious consumer blindly take a company’s word on the safety of a product when the company’s goal is to sell you the product in question?

The GMO Deception’s argument is clear: unless the public takes a stronger stance on this issue, we may have no choice in the matter. It presents well-rounded, researched articles on the issues surrounding GMOs and why society must question their use in food products. “We have literally hundreds of commentaries that bear witness to the deceptions associated with the promoters of GMOs.” It offers arguments and insights into the realm of GMOs that are hard to attain due to corporations’ strangle hold on their intellectual property rights.

While full of insightful material on the subject matter, this book was not a page turner. It consists of short, individual articles by varying authors that, while interesting, did not lure me in enough to make the rest of the world stop in its tracks. It was more of the type of book that one would read a few chapters of and then put it away to thoroughly digest the material before reading on. Each author had such different writing styles that it was difficult to get into a steady rhythm. The articles are fairly academic in content. Therefore if the intention was to spark a wider discussion among the general public the information may fail to reach that audience. I also would have like to have more explanation of why these particular articles were chosen for each separate section of the book. Some of them were written back in the 1980s and, while important in the discussion, it would have helped to outline why they thought each of the articles were worth having in the book because often there was significant overlap in the general information.

Having grown up in a strictly organic and vegetarian household, my stance on GMOs is pretty clear cut. I want them to have absolutely no part in any aspect of my food. For most of my life this has been based on an intuitive hunch that no part of my food should ever set foot in a lab. Now, having read The GMO Deception, I take further comfort in my stance and feel content in backing up my choices with the science discussed in the book. I would recommend this book to anyone with a curiosity about GMOs. Its inaccessibility is worth penetrating for the information therein—just don’t expect to consume the information all at one time.


HeadshotMaeve McInnis is currently pursuing her Masters of Science in Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management with a specialization in Food Policy at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at the New School. She is the President of the Sustainable Cities Club and a member of the Student Advisory Committee with the Dean. She is an avid traveler and lover of food, culture and social justice. 

source
source

Fashioning Appetite: A Review

by Samantha Felix

In the three years my husband and I have owned and operated a small neighborhood restaurant in the East Village of New York, I have found that the single most important thing I can do to ensure our success is to properly train the front of house staff. But shouldn’t the food be the most important aspect of a restaurant? Well, yes. The food needs to be good, if not great, but the experience is what keeps people coming back. It is the job of the front of house staff to make sure diners leave not only pleased with the food, but pleased with themselves.

Joanne Finkelstein’s latest work, Fashioning Appetite: Restaurants and the Making of Modern Identity, seeks to understand this contradictory restaurant phenomenon through a study of the origins of restaurants and restaurant patronage. Finkelstein reveals society’s public/private relationship with eating establishments and the surprising role these establishments play in defining Western identity.

Within this framework, I like to think of the dining room as a stage. The service staff is the stage crew. And, the diners are our unpredictable cast of characters. It is our job to finely tune the restaurant atmosphere to allow diners to perform their private desires in a public setting. “The restaurant engineers circumstances,” explains Finkelstein. A statement that could not be more true. Even in a small neighborhood restaurant like ours, staging this intricate performance is integral to our success.

Finkelstein draws the reader into a world where restaurants are more than just the brick and mortar houses of food: she sees them through a social scientist’s lens. She wants to know why society is so attached to participating in this public display of private moments. In other words, how and why do restaurants “bring strangers together to pursue their own private desires”?

Everything from birthdays to engagements to funerals are acted out in front of a room of complete strangers. Diners are willingly manipulated by the orchestrated world of the restaurant, because, Finkelstein says, the act of eating out has been redefined as a form of “consumable entertainment.”

Finkelstein covers a lot of area in this book from history to obesity to social norms. In terms of both the breadth of information and the complicated sociological terminology, the book can at times be daunting, even to those of us who live and breathe the restaurant industry. But, Fashioning Appetite reminds us how intricately laced our happiness as diners is to the success of a restaurant. “The private and public are inseparable, and the personal pursuit of pleasure, as in dining out, regulates broader ideals of personal pleasure, happiness, a sense of virtue and success.” In other words, as consumers we have fetishized what it means to dine out to the extent that in order to be pleased with our evening and, frankly, ourselves, our restaurant experience needs to be stellar. Not just good, but exceptional.

As a restaurant owner, I can vouch that we willingly participate in this game too. Our identity and livelihood is dependent on our customers’ enjoyment, and we will do just about anything to make sure they have a great time. While gazing out over a dark dining room, packed with expectant faces and grumbling stomachs we take on the responsibility of confirming everyone’s happiness. There is a special pleasure in watching a patron depart drunk, happy, and full—but there is also the inevitable bad experience that leaves both restaurant and guest deeply unsatisfied and with a little less money in their pocket.

By applying new research on emotional capitalism to popular culture’s collective understanding of the dining-out experience, Finkelstein believes we have crafted a socio-economic understanding of restaurants by assigning meaning to each bite and sip consumed. We have essentially “aestheticized food” and molded it into a source of understood “entertainment and novelty.”

This original and inventive interpretation of how modern Western cultures experience restaurants gives a balanced description of society’s pursuit of collective experience through food. The prose is at times dense and a challenge to decode, but it is worth the work. Deep within these pages is a thoughtful and important narrative about the journey society has taken over the centuries to create a shared identity, and how food has delightfully punctuated that journey through moments of public solitude and entertainment.


 

Sam PhotoSamantha Felix is a freelance writer and the community editor for Substance.com. Her work has appeared on Huffington Post, Alternet, and Business Insider among others. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at The New School.