ABSTRACT
As artists in this new millennium expand their practice into social justice and community concerns, erasing traditional forms of expression while integrating new ones, the culture of food and its production has become part of a new vocabulary of experiential art. This art is twofold: on the one hand, it concerns food-making, and on the other, agricultural production. It is a type of creative practice that seems directly opposed to the traditional Western canon of representations of food in art, where luxurious edibles are portrayed as emblems of power, abundance, luxury, and, later, colonial conquests of foreign lands. And yet the materiality of food, as we see in the extreme art of painters such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo, has much in common with the agro-ecology of contemporary artists working in food. The human merges with the plant world, and the border between the anthropomorphizing of fruits and vegetables and the vegetizing of the human form disappears as new forms of art transform our notions of food and its production.
