[-empyre-] free food; resilience; eating the art...

Wed Mar 30 09:11:30 AEDT 2016

Art and Eating,

As I mentioned in my last post, one of the things that I am enjoying about this thematic is that we are hearing from so many artists who are sharing food and ideas, with generosity.

So as I read back over our posts, I want to return to one of my key inspirational cooks, writers and thinkers, and the person who perhaps most influenced my desire to combine my interest in an art curatorial practice with my interest in food systems: Gay Bilson.

I came across a fairly recent interview with her, by Tony Magnusson: http://www.aesop.com/usa/article/gay-bilson.html

One quote especially stood out for me, in light of the question Mary Mattingly raises about the possibility for food to be free and freely available. "She [Gay Bilson] expresses her dislike of the connection between money and food: ‘The older and crabbier I get, the more I think food should be free. And if it can’t be free, then good food should cost less than bad food – so McDonald’s should be expensive, and food that’s fresh, organic and mostly local should be cheap enough for people with very little income to afford.’"

Which made me really re:think Mary's question earlier on this month: "what if food was a public service?"

McDonalds (or any other fast, processed food) is not cheap because it is cheap to produce: the ingredients and the industrial processing methodologies are expensive, but incredibly highly subsidised and also produced at massive scale; and the people who are paid for their labour - the workers - are paid very poorly indeed. It's cheap because big-ag and the industrial food complex are heavily subsidised industries. 

There is quite a good summary of how these subsidies came about on in the USA on Grist: http://grist.org/food/our-crazy-farm-subsidies-explained/
And another in the economist here: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21643191-crop-prices-fall-farmers-grow-subsidies-instead-milking-taxpayers
(please forgive my US focus, but as I am working here at the moment, these are the sources that I have readily to hand: if people in other parts of the world have done similar research, I would be thrilled to hear about it!)

Organic, local food is not expensive because the costs for producing this food are high; on the contrary: the "ingredients" are not (or should not be) expensive (good soil, compost, water, saved seeds...) it is the labour to produce the food that is expensive, and unfortunately not because the producers are highly paid, but because the best local food is produced at a small scale.

But anyway, back to the work of Gay Bilson. I've been scouring the internet looking for documentation of her work. Unfortunately I am just not coming up with that much. One of the things that I always liked about Gay's projects is that they were often large, public, feeding events that she developed in and for local communities. For the Adelaide Festival 2002 - the Festival that I also worked on - there were two stand-out projects that Gay worked on (I won't here go into why several of her other projects were not realized; but the Festival experience was a complex one). 

One project was called NOURISH, and was a project Gay did with Hospital Cooks. It wasn't a ticketed Festival event. Instead, it was alternative menu for 83 patients in a large, local, public hospital, who volunteered to eat other than regular hospital food for three days during the Festival. Instead of an anonymous array of moulded plastic containers, lunch was laid on white linen serviette, and the menu devised was all local produce. But only the hospital patient got to experience it! 

Another was The Edible Library by Alicia Rios - a wonderous edible history of Spanish food, literally served up on the shelves of a local public library  http://www.alicia-rios.com/en/food/edible-representations/ediblelibrary.html

Gay went on to work with Alicia on another project, in Melbourne, Australia called The Edible City, an edible, community focussed, edible mapping project.

"Madrid based Alicia Rios worked with food and performance director Gay Bilson, director Robin Laurie and 35 community groups to create a huge 30 x 30 metre three dimensional scaled model of the Hoddle grid of Melbourne city centre in food related to the project participants culture and homelands. This edible city was presented to the public in April 2004 at Birrarung Marr and consumed by the public in a giant celebration of the unique contribution each community makes to Melbourne. Eating the City was a 12 month project that involved hundreds of community groups who used the preparation and shared eating of food as a key means of socialising and operating."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMwBc6FwOIk

In 2011, she also worked on a major "feeding" event as part of the programming for the Adelaide Film Festival. There's some OK documentation here, but again, the large outdoor public nature of the project is what I find so refreshinly generous:
https://ohfortheloveoffood.wordpress.com/2011/04/09/one-magic-bowl/
http://www.glamadelaide.com.au/main/one-magic-bowl/

Amanda

--
Amanda McDonald Crowley 
Cultural Worker / Curator
http://publicartaction.net

@amandamcdc