Fallen Fruit is an artist collective out of San Francisco. They have an amazing and wide ranging cross-breed of issues that include urban and community planning, design, fine art, and grassroots movement. Fallen Fruit is part of that special category of artists who give people courage (despite their hilarious yet kitschy German black lettering). Artists who give us courage are those who make us feel like simply, “I Can.” They are the creatives who give back to us on-lookers, participants, and community dwellers where we may even be inspired in our own work with new ideas. Courageous artists are the ones who start the cycle of giving back and are invaluable to us.
“Public Fruit” is the concept behind the Fallen Fruit, an activist art project which started as a mapping of all the public fruit in our neighborhood. We ask all of you to contribute your maps so they expand to cover the United States and then the world. We encourage everyone to harvest, plant and sample public fruit, which is what we call all fruit on or overhanging public spaces such as sidewalks, streets or parking lots.
We believe fruit is a resource that should be commonly shared, like shells from the beach or mushrooms from the forest. Fallen Fruit has moved from mapping to planning fruit parks in under-utilized areas. Our goal is to get people thinking about the life and vitality of our neighborhoods and to consider how we can change the dynamic of our cities and common values.
-Fallen Fruit is David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young
Fallen Fruit is an artist collective out of San Francisco. They have an amazing and wide ranging cross-breed of issues that include urban and community planning, design, fine art, and grassroots movement. Fallen Fruit is part of that special category of artists who give people courage (despite their hilarious yet kitschy German black lettering). Artists who give us courage are those who make us feel like simply, “I Can.” They are the creatives who give back to us on-lookers, participants, and community dwellers where we may even be inspired in our own work with new ideas. Courageous artists are the ones who start the cycle of giving back and are invaluable to us.
“Public Fruit” is the concept behind the Fallen Fruit, an activist art project which started as a mapping of all the public fruit in our neighborhood. We ask all of you to contribute your maps so they expand to cover the United States and then the world. We encourage everyone to harvest, plant and sample public fruit, which is what we call all fruit on or overhanging public spaces such as sidewalks, streets or parking lots.
We believe fruit is a resource that should be commonly shared, like shells from the beach or mushrooms from the forest. Fallen Fruit has moved from mapping to planning fruit parks in under-utilized areas. Our goal is to get people thinking about the life and vitality of our neighborhoods and to consider how we can change the dynamic of our cities and common values.
-Fallen Fruit is David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young
I am really excited about The Gatherers: Greening our Urban Spaces, the current show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Here’s their blurb:
The Gatherers is an exhibition that brings together a diverse group of practitioners who combine art with cultural activism to explore questions of how we ensure sustainability for our growing urban populations. Since our relationship with nature varies so much from one culture or locale to the next, The Gatherers provides an opportunity to explore not only the differences, but also the similarities, of their attempts to green our urban spaces. In doing so, it touches upon a broad range of interlinking matters, from environmental issues to urban spatial justice, through interactive programs, urban interventions and public dialogue.
One of the most interesting pieces being done is by the National Bitter Melon Council, an artist collective out of Boston whose motto is “better living through bitter melon”. The group worked with local youth to identify sites in the South of Market neighborhood that they associated with bitterness. For each site picked, they made a salt shaker with the name and memory associated with the specific place. Yerba Buena takes gallery-goers on a guided tour of the salt shaker spots. Each member of the tour gets a memory salt shaker and corresponding stops are made along the tour to each site. At each site, after the memory is read, everyone gives a shake to their salt on the sidewalk.
Exhibition is from Oct 31, 2008–Jan 11, 2009
I stumbled across a great online community called Visual Think Map the other day. I definitely started nerding out over the visualization of everything from how the DJ of GirlTalk mashes up hundreds of songs into one new one, to a typography of place portraying the Mississippi River in text, to a visualization between wine varieties and flavor components. What?! Amazing. It was created by Carl Tashian for a class at NYU called Visualizing the Five Senses. So great! Click on the image to go to the homepage of this and click on different options from the list to see what the difference in taste between a Merlot and a Pinot Noir are.
Sweet Tastes: butter, wheat, mangos, rice, bananasThese posters are part of a project I am working on with the sixth grade class at Jackson Middle School, a Bernstein Arts School. As their Artist in Residence, I put together a week long experience-based-project based on the cultivation of civilization through food.
The first day’s activity includes a Taste Station Rotation. Six stations around the room are going to be set up based on the six tastes of the tongue: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and astringent. Each poster (24×36) has a newly drawn map by myself, images of the tastes in their original form, and a geographical component where students would have to locate where that food was grown based on the coordinates given. The students are then going to be asked to locate the country of the foods origin, to taste each item on the table, and reflect in the Notice Wonder Feel chart. The other activities include an exploratory categorization of foods based on taste, smell, touch, and color; a maza-plate party where students would help with simple activities in putting together foods to make a “plate” such as a couscous salad, a cilantro chickpea yogurt salad, hummus and mixed olives on crackers, and pomegranate seeds sprinkled over blood orange slices; and a metaphorical cookbook of the student’s life, relating the projects experiences around taste, touch, smell, and color to their own lives through writing, poetry, collage, drawing, painting, all pages then being bound into a book by myself. This should be really fun! My friend Leela Ross has so graciously offered her assistance in photographing one of the days for me, so I will post those pictures as well. Cheers!
Sour Tastes: lemons, limes, soy, yogurt, apple cidar vinegar
Salty Tastes: sea salt, table salt, pickles, potato chips, sea weed
Pungent Tastes: garlic, onions, ginger, black pepper, nutmeg
In the past week, I have been informed of two new books coming out in December. Both are through European publishers, Gestalten and BIS. This is so exciting because they both are about the “cutting-edge field” of food, eating, and design! Below is the book jacket blurb from creEATe:
Food is not just a hot topic in design and cutting edge creativity today but also an enormous industry with changing standards and perceptions. crEATe investigates recent trends and visual developments within food, design, hospitality and packaging design. Based upon research by trend analysts Chris Sanderson and Martin Raymond from the London firm The Future Laboratory, this sourcebook documents and illustrates manifold examples and concepts that are the driving forces in contemporary food, both influencing and inspiring today’s visionary chefs, designers, and consumers.
Six extensive chapters shed new light on the central topics and various approaches relevant in contemporary food with incisive texts including profile features of visionary creative’s accompanied by visuals. It starts by examining the treacherous landscape of food politics with environmental and production concerns in “Food Activists”. The return of “Wholehearted” home-style cooking is addressed as well as the sophisticated choices of nutritional “Smart Food”. “Packaging” confronts new challenges in delivering high impact aesthetic and brand experiences while being cost effective and sustainable.
The concepts and interior design approaches of “Food Spaces” are also evolving into luxurious canteens, cooking laboratories and store designs. The various attitudes of how people are embracing food are defined in “Typologies”. Finally, crEATe further explores “Future Solutions” by illuminating emerging trends that will follow illustrating how food will look as well as how we will respond to it emotionally and aesthetically.
The multifaceted examples in this informative volume are diverse. Portrayed in striking ways, they range from product design, industrial design and the interiors of restaurants and hotels to branding and consumerism. crEATe surely indicates how food is gaining new meaning in our lifestyle as well as in top-notch contemporary design. –crEATe
Below is Marije Vogelzang’s (of Proef restaurant and taste laboratory) first book, Eat Love!
After her graduation from the Design Academy in Eindhoven in 2000 Marije Vogelzang has been designing eating concepts. Her interest is in the verb ‘to eat’. Not only does she think deeply about what is on the plate (if there is a plate at all), but she also thinks about everything that surrounds the act of eating. The atmosphere, the people involved, the stories behind the ingredients, the taste and texture, sound, smell and colour of food and the way it is prepared and served. She explores the intimacy of design that actually goes inside your body and follows the journey of food from seed all the way to poop.
Thinking about all this and working and experimenting in her studio and restaurant and by creating eating experiences for her clients she has developed her own unique way of looking at eating from a psychological, cultural and design point of view.
This book makes her vision and spectacular eating concepts available for the first time for a large group of people who are interested in food and the culture and experience of eating.
The introduction is written by design critic Louise Schouwenberg and places Marije Vogelzang’s work in context of Dutch design, international design and trends in food, eating culture and society.
“Uprooted” is a conversational dinner event exploring a group of people’s views on the only true American holiday. Each participant has been asked to send me his or her favorite Thanksgiving holiday recipe. The recipes will act as an entry point for people in conversation, finding differences and similarities not only in the ingredients but where they came from and how they are used. This will be the personal history and memory that people will bring with them, manifested through a recipe, articulated through conversations with the other guests.
There will be surprises throughout the dinner, food infused with language literally ‘talking’ to the guests. I am excited to see how the guests respond and articulate their own relationships to the experience as it happens and how their personal history emerge.
The goal of “Uprooted” is explore two intertwining histories: the personal and the foods’. The story of what’s on the plate juxtaposed with the guests individual memories and perspectives will create a layered experience. Taste will be linked to a story, the story to a place, the place to a community, the community to a collective and individual memory.
The points I started with while thinking about/creating this event:
1. To think about the tradition of Thanksgiving as we have known it.
2. To look at how those traditions differ/are the same.
3. To talk about the origins of the only tradition we as Americans celebrate as a nation—and its basis around food.
4. To examine how we foresee this tradition shifting with the future based on current economic and social issues.
5. Locavorism—what is it and how it is shaping how we eat.
6. Connecting with people through the common denominator of food.
This is the manifestation of a concept I have been working with for the past week. After having my Fulbright interview, I did some serious brain-digging about where all my ideas were coming from. It is important to me, which I know, but how can I convey that to others? It started with getting back to something that has been in my family for generations. My great great grandmother’s Apple Kuchen recipe. How can I translate this memory for others to be able to partake and enjoy or even just connect with? So I wrote Why Taste Matters: Where it Began, and printed it on the parchment which I also screen printed the Taste Matters logo onto, wrapped the Kuchen in, and gave it to members of the Fulbright committee who interviewed me.
The interview was a stepping off point. A place where I realized there needs to be concrete material to serve my bigger ideas of taste, memory, history, place, and community on. Taste Matters, or TM, also means Trade Marked and Tricia Martin. I like the layered effect that this design can have with the food it will envelop and eventually become a stepping off point for others to share with each other. Watch out, next comes an entire brand, a space and interior, and a whole sustainable design philosophy to boot. 
Why Taste Matters: Where it Began
As I walked from the room, I felt my ears still burning. I felt deflated but not defeated. This was a welcome critique of an idea, a metaphor, and an exercise that I was working to find a language for and put into practice for the past month and a half. Now, I am even more convinced about my ideas concerning taste, place, history, memory, and community. I am passionate about design as a sustainable practice, people, and food. In spite of this, I have realized my passion was not enough. Passion that is well articulated, however, can be powerful.
Growing up, I spent my formative years in the kitchen. My grandmother used to watch my younger brother and I while my parents worked. I remember days coming home from kindergarten to the smell of her sweet rolls, jealous that I was left out from helping make them. But she always saved the apple kuchen to make on days when it was just the two of us. Step by step she would show me how to sift the flour with the baking powder, how to cream the butter and the sugar, and to slice the apples just so. After each step, we would taste. ‘Is this right? ‘ she would ask wanting me to think about what I was tasting.
It was the apple kuchen that was the first thing that came to mind as I sat quietly contemplating what had happened during the interview. This recipe is one of the only traditions left from the “old country” of Austria. It survived covered wagons in their move along the Santa Fe trail, and became a staple of the “new country” farm my grandmother grew up on in Oklahoma. It was a source of pride for my grandmother to say this is what our heritage tastes like. I, in turn, feel a similar pride in sharing this with you.
So I went home and I made it. I made it as a call of support from the generations of women before me who went through the same motions to make this cake. I take comfort in knowing I am partaking in a generations old ritual and experiencing my personal history through taste. I was able to refresh my memory to the taste of the first batter I remember making, taking as much as my small five year old finger could hold and eating it. Most interestingly though, I made it as a way to ground myself and to bring myself back to the earliest days of this tastes memory.
What you are about to eat is dense with personal history and layers of memories from generations past. This kuchen is something that I can make no matter where I live, just as my ancestors did. By eating this piece of cake, you have become part of a greater community through my family’s apple kuchen recipe. Not only are you sharing in this taste with me and a few other people today, you are participating in a centuries old ritual this recipe has created.
This is the power of taste. As a member of the community, an artist, and designer I want to transcend this experience of taste, opening up the doors for honest conversation. In turn, this conversation can lead to a mutual understanding between the taster and the originator, finding a common ground through food.
As many of you may know, I have been hunkered down applying for a Fulbright scholarship for the past month. This experience has been wonderful in how I have been forced to focus and start to build a language around food, design, and social practices in relation to my own process of creativity. Below are two pieces I had to write for the scholarship: a personal statement and my statement of purpose. They have become the springboard for which I am building my creative practice on and foresee many new and exciting projects, ideas, and design concepts emerging from.
PERSONAL STATEMENT
As an urban planner, I felt that I constantly had my hands tied, powerless to events unfolding before me. I distinctly remember a proposal for a new development that would not only eradicate protected wetlands along the Potomac River but also encourage rapid gentrification and higher property taxes for a neighborhood heavily populated with Mexican, Nicaraguan, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Ethiopian immigrants. My fellow planners and I sat across the table from the confident and ever-persuasive developers; fully aware this was a lost cause. The vote was unanimous amongst the confused, non-English speaking community members. The pretty pictures of new schools that their children would unknowingly never attend had won out over the practical advice the planners were unable to communicate effectively. This was a turning point for me, realizing the necessity of creative and empowering social interaction as a non-exclusionary mode of communication.
I began to really question the whole notion of communication and how effectively it is done on a day-to-day basis between people. What brings people together, what divides them, and on what terms are they most comfortable openly communicating? During my undergraduate studies, I was part of a select group awarded the honor of working for two and a half months on planning issues on Crete, Greece due to the upcoming summer Olympic games. Food was a major presence in social and even professional engagements. It was the barrier-breaker between cultures that everyone on both sides found conversation and common ground. Food became the “in” to experiencing true Greek daily life that we otherwise would have been denied because of our cultural differences.
However, these experiences and the underlying questions about social interactions still burned strong. They led me to pursue my Masters in Fine Arts degree at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where I was awarded the Presidential Merit Scholarship. Last year I was awarded a travel scholarship to Tokyo, Japan to attend their design biennial. Over my short two-week stay, the most engaging moments I had were with local Japanese and their friends, sharing a bowl of steaming noodle soup or drinking hot tea. The language barriers seemed to melt away and a newfound mode for communicating was discovered on both ends through the comfort of local cuisine.
I decided to experiment in my own community about my notions of food as a facilitator in empowering social interaction. In August, I orchestrated a community-wide event called Pietopia. A unique call to entry was put out to the city of Portland: How would your thoughts, joys, or concerns transform into the All-American pie? Entirely advertised through word of mouth and local posters I had made, there were more than 50 entrants from as far away as Seattle and San Francisco who submitted a pie recipe and 300-word story to explain the ingredients. The five winners brought their pies for a community wide tasting. Winners ranged from a recent mastectomy and cancer survivor to a young Latino homosexual in search of his ancestral roots. The community responded with tremendous enthusiasm and an article was written about the event in Portland’s newspaper, The Oregonian.
My experiences as an urban planner and traveling abroad have helped formulate my concerns and approaches to genuine community interaction. Through my experiences, food as the common denominator has allowed for more open and honest communication. Fulbright would be the ultimate opportunity for me to immerse myself in a foreign culture and community, allowing for an in depth exploration of food as a medium for exploring personal history through taste and memory.
STATEMENT OF GRANT PURPOSE
Eating Design
In the past few years the United States has taken part in a widespread resurgence in traditional foods, local and organic production methods, and sustainable agriculture. This food revolution has not taken hold in mainstream America due to complex socio-economic issues. For those living on tight budgets, the cheapest foods are often the most processed and farthest away from their natural sources. The politics of food are of great concern to me and I have begun to use my expertise in design to formulate solutions for these issues. By asking, for example, what does it mean when corn, mango, or meat is on your plate? Through peeling back layers of modern American culture, my goal is to revive one root of America’s culinary foundation as originated in the European tradition. The aspiration of sustainable eating can be brought to the next level through the creation of a place for innovative community interaction and exploration of food as identity, memory, and history.
Throughout my recent investigations in food and especially my work on Pietopia, an event centered on people’s personal experiences as translated through pie, I came across the work of Marije Vogelzang, a Dutch designer and creator of Proef. Proef, meaning to taste and test in Dutch, is a taste laboratory and restaurant in both Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Vogelzang’s projects explore how food is made and consumed, taking the everyday act of eating and turning it inside out. Working with the Historical Museum of Rotterdam to recreate a meal for World War II veterans, Vogelzang reconstructed a moment that the veterans had not experienced since the war. The emotional attachment to the food was strong and a true testament to the powers of taste and memory.
In the spirit of Proef, I hope to create a place where cultural and community issues can be addressed openly through the medium of food. I would like to open my own taste laboratory and restaurant as a community platform for discussion and problem solving. I am interested in design as a sustainable practice, not focused only on object making but as an approach to critical inquiry. Food acts a window into a particular culture and way of life but is also the common denominator amongst people.
Eating as design is a new topic of inquiry dominated by European thought and perspective. It is an essential part of my inquiry to go and study with a forerunner of this new and exciting practice in design. Vogelzang engages the public through unique avenues and unexpected encounters with food. Through my apprenticeship with her, I will be able to bring back my experiences and research that will help shape a unique approach in creating my own food laboratory. Utilizing food through design is exciting because everybody eats it and is inclusive by nature. It embodies the forward thinking direction that design is heading: design as a mode of thought and action, creation with a heart and mind approach, and a primary focus on human concerns and sustainability.
I am interested in how food can be infused with meaning, the history of foods in relationship to culture and the body, and food as a representation of individual and collective memory. Integrating food into design through culinary and community-based activities is a search for meaning and contributes to a specific line of design-based inquiry. I am challenging the notions of art making by working through a rarified realm of social practice to create a venue that connects people in an authentic, community based experience.
While in the Netherlands, I hope to promote mutual understanding between cultures through everyday gestures of generosity such as cooking meals with local people, creating discussions around cultural identity, and fabricating a forum for exchange. The methodology to my practice includes working with local and seasonal foods and engaging the community through meals, cooking together, and discussions. I would like to host a series of events centered on cross-cultural communication through food. In the spirit of several projects completed within the past year, my aim is to dissipate cultural barriers through food based exchange. I want to gain a deep understanding of the Dutch community through discussion about their views of American identity and the constantly changing place the United States holds on the world stage.
Despite cross-cultural influence, the Netherlands has had it’s own struggles with cultural differences as exemplified in the 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh. His death spoke to Americans because it represented the clash between Western and Eastern practices as is happening all over the world. Perhaps through food the accepting and open-armed spirit so deeply ingrained in Dutch society can be used to promote a greater understanding between cultures. Multi-cultural differences are a part of daily life for both the US and the Netherlands. However, they are both dealt with differently.
I am applying to volunteer with the John Adams Institute “Americans in the Schools” program to help facilitate the meaningful connection with the Dutch community that I am seeking. I plan on starting my apprenticeship in late June 2009, staying through the allotted nine months until February 2010. This timeframe includes three seasons: summer, fall, and winter. I will be exploring what foods are available there for each particular season as well as traditional and new ways of preparing them, what they have meant historically vs. now, why they have been made that way, how they have been integrated with new cultural influences. I want to explore the relationships individuals have with the food itself via taste, place, history, and memory.
Food is a major part of a culture and says a lot about it. The Netherlands has deep and rich traditions in agriculture and specifically in cheese making. Traditional cuisine is simple fare, with a strong focus on food as a necessity rather than a luxury. However, the country’s cultural diversity and receptiveness to foreign influences has had impact on everyday food culture. Like in America, the Dutch national cuisine has become a melting pot of flavors and influences from Indonesia and Suriname to Turkey and Morocco. Food has become a way for cultures to distinguish themselves as globalization continues to threaten homogenization of the world’s diverse ethnicities.
Through study in Holland, I will not only gain invaluable design skills, I will be able to learn how another culture is dealing with these differences. Juxtaposed with my cultures’ coping mechanisms, I will create ways of expanding beyond the notion of tolerance to really understanding and accepting another people through food which is the most basic and accessible format. This project at the forefront of design and is utilizing innovative modes of design as a sustainable practice from two different cultural perspectives for a global approach to problem solving.
