Eating Architecture

by Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley, Eds
The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004
385 pp., illus. 97 b/w. Trade, $39.95
ISBN: 0-262-08322-1.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium

stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

It is not an obvious subject, but once you’ve come to think about it, the combination isn’t surprising either: food and shelter are as essential to the development of civilisation as fibre and fuel. Cooking and building both imply the transformation of (raw) materials applying energy while following rules to reach a final result: a meal or an inhabitable space. Time scales may be different, but if there is anything like coherence in culture, both activities must have at least some symbolic, structural, or metaphorical relationship. And that is exactly what the authors of this collection of essays are exploring or proving.

Jamie Horwitz of Iowa State University and Paulette Singley of Woodbury University serve the meal in four courses. In Place Settings, the connections between food and locale are explored. Each essay looks at food from a different angle: the locality or globality of its production, regional culinary identities, the ‘consumption’ of the colonies and the international tourist taste. In Philosophy in the Kitchen "the cleansing, cutting, and cooking of food form a routine that also doubles as a site for aesthetic experimentation. By drawing gastronomy out of the kitchen, the essays that follow shift the discussion toward the performative space of eating––a site that is inherently unstable, mutable, mobile and memorable" (p. 16).

Table Rules, with its striking reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ magnum opus, The Origin of Table Manners, effectively honours the founding father of structuralist anthropology without copying his themes or imitating his approach. It is in these five contributions that the close connections between practical day-to-day architecture and interior design and the social and cultural meaning of food are analysed. Watch out for ‘Food to go: the industrialisation of the picnic’ by Mikesch Muecke when you are next victimised by your fast food giant or when you’re committing another take away. Embodied Taste, finally, targets the tastebuds and its counterparts in the other senses. This is where art, architecture meet gastronomy and food production. Of course, George Battaille and Damien Hirst must pass in revue, as do Dali and Francis Bacon.

All in all, I found the essays in this collection of uneven quality but almost all of them inspiring and certainly thought provoking. I found it difficult to stomach Donald Kunze’s extravaganza on the Missing Guest but Susan Herrington’s cultural and culinary portrait of Canada is both palatable, hilarious, and wise. Daniel S. Friedman’s ‘Cuisine and the Compass of Ornament: A Note on the Architecture of Babette’s Feast’ offers a grandiose reading of this intriguing film and is as clear and sparkling as a glass of spring water and the closing essay by editor Paulette Singley made me think again of marble and pork and why I am not disgusted at either.