The Food Section

Eating Your Colors

Tattfoo Tan (below right) is the Malayasian-born artist behind the newly installed mural on Front Street in DUMBO. The mural is life size replica of a placemat he created as part of his Nature Matching System (NMS). The colors in the placemat are inspired from actual food colors and serve as a reminder to eat properly.

Free NMS placemats are available at Foragers Market (56 Adams Street) in DUMBO. To request an artist-signed copy, contact tattfoo@tattfoo.com (shipping and handling charges will apply).

What was your inspiration for the NMS project?

NMS was developed as a reminder to consume our daily recommended doses of color. The shades of color displayed at farmers’ markets are more than skin deep, reflecting the inner potential of every fruit and vegetable; intense colors might even be called nature’s nutrition labels. They get many of their colors from phytonutrients, compounds that play key roles in health and reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer. The more colors come together at a meal, the better. Sadly, marketers of junk food apply the same technique used by nature to pollinate seeds in order to sell their nutrition-deprived products. Color is a device that can either do good or be deceptive and even ensure the "pollination" of unhealthy eating habits. The colors on the placemat are all actual food colors, taken from photographs of various fruits and vegetables. Match your meal to the placemat -- it is truly a rainbow connection.

The mural is expected to be taken down in January of 2009. What will happen to it afterwards?

It is temporary, like most of my public art projects. It is ephemeral and could be seen as a public intervention and not a monument. I hope that NMS will remain in the memory of people touched by it and will serve as a constant reminder to eat fresh and colorful fruits and vegetables.

Students at Brooklyn's P.S. 307 helped paint the color panels that appear in the mural. How was it working with the schoolchildren?

The kids at P.S. 307 are amazing. I wish to start their education about healthy eating while they are young. NMS is a fun project to do with children, combining art, science, and education.

Would you even consider mass-marketing the placemats to bring awareness of "eating your colors" to a wider audience?

Sure. I'm waiting for the right museum or producer to take on the project.

Food is present in much of your work. Is there a common thread?

Food and eating are universal. It transcends cultural and geographical boundaries. It is part of our daily needs and rituals, as seen in [my projects] The Residue of an Omnivore or Cuisine du Jour. It nourishes the mind and body. How many times does one visit an art gallery compared to a restaurant? How cool is food as an art medium? I think it is, like in Bread Rock and Eat Draw Play.

Want more of Tattfoo? The artist’s next project, Share-A-Prayer, will appear at the Queens Museum of Art as part of the upcoming exhibition "'This Case of Conscience':  Spiritual Flushing and the Remonstrance." For the project, he collected prayer requests from various religious establishments in Flushing, Queens. The prayer requests are placed on soda can and snacks which are then available in vending machines. The exhibit runs from April 6 to June 29.

Images: Tattfoo Tan.

History in Menus

The newly launched New York Public Library Digital Gallery contains over 275,000 images that have been digitized from the the library's collections. The wide spectrum of images range from New York cityscapes to 19th century portraits of inmates at Dublin's Mountjoy prison.

You could spend hours poring over this rich database of photographs, prints, and ephemera, but in the interest of gastronomy, I direct your attention the Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, which contains more than 5,000 menus dating from 1851 through 1908.

According to the New York Public Library Web site, Miss Frank E. Buttolph was "a somewhat mysterious and passionate figure" whose mission in life was collecting menus. She donated her massive personal collection to the library in 1899 and continued acquiring menus on behalf of the library until her death in 1924:

Her principal method of acquisition was to write to every restaurant she could think of, soliciting menus. When letters failed, she often marched into a restaurant and pleaded her case in person. She also placed advertisements in trade publications like The Caterer and The Hotel Gazette, but just as often, published news of her collection prompted outright contributions of specimens from around the world. Three times between 1904 and 1909, The New York Times wrote about her and the collection, noting once that "she frankly avers that she does not care two pins for the food lists on her menus, but their historic interest means everything."

Related:
» "Chop Suey Sundae, Anyone?" [The Food Section]

Image: Detail from "Dinner in Honor of Cornelius Fergueson [held by] Lobster Club [at] Fort Lowry Hotel, Bath Beach, NY" (1905), Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, New York Public Library.

Tangerine Dream?

 

Would this be a New York blog without the obligatory post of photos of The Gates?

Admittedly, this post comes a little late, as The Gates exhibition closed yesterday. I only saw them for the first time last Friday, when I took these pictures early in the morning when the sun was bright and the ground had a dusting of fresh snow.

Although the color of the fabric was billed by artists Christo and Jeanne Claude as saffron, to my mind it was much closer to various hues of orange than mellow yellow. The shade of The Gates did change depending on the intensity of sunlight and its direction (as you can well see in the above photos), but, as has been noted on blogs and in the New York Times, the fabric's actual color might have been better described by other food items:

It's not that I don't love saffron. Truth is, I'm just mad about saffron. (heh.) But what I saw was tangerine. Miles and miles of tangerine. Flattened Clementines strung up in sheets. My eyes thus attuned to the color, I saw it everywhere for the rest of the afternoon. Tangerine scarves, tangerine subway seats, tangerine balloons and sweaters and traffic cones. [Hedonista]

As dazzling as The Gates is/are, there’s no way the color can be described as saffron, as every reporter who doesn’t know how to spell sunrise seems be doing reflexively. If the light is hitting the fabric just right, the proper word is clementine. [Gastropoda]

"Saffron produces a golden color, like a taxicab," said Ed Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant and an expert cook who lives in Brooklyn. Like many other cooks, he was surprised that the artists called the fabric saffron. "This color is orange - more like a persimmon than saffron," he said. [New York Times]

As The Gates are taken down today and become just a memory, what food do you think best describes their color?