Category Archives: Experience

Pictures of food

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, Experience, Information, Technology

I recently made bigos, a hearty Polish stew, using the recipe I got from my friend’s mother. I’ve loved bigos ever since I first had it at her house, back when I was studying abroad. The recipe has three ingredients: sauerkraut, ham hocks, and dried mushrooms. But bigos is a kind of kitchen-sink dish; you can add whatever you’ve got wilting in the fridge that you need to use up. Bigos really hits the spot for me, especially on cold winter days. But I wouldn’t call it pretty. 

As the bigos was cooking, I texted Sukrit. We talk about food a lot. He’d never heard of bigos. “My mouth is watering just looking at the recipe on Bon Appetit,” he said. Out of curiosity, I pulled up their recipe. Their photo looked nothing like my bigos, nor like any bigos I’d ever seen.

This got me thinking about photos of food. It’s beyond cliché that people of a certain age are wont to take photos of their food before eating it. (I wonder if there are more meals or selfies on Instagram.) We’re surrounded by photos and videos of beautiful food. 

Nowadays we hear a lot about how social media is making us more insecure about our faces and bodies. But what about our food? What is it doing to me to see, day after day, that so-and-so is always eating meals apparently plated by a Japanese Zen-master-cum-chef? And that this same chef works for all my friends?

I recently heard an interview on the Guardian Books podcast with Josh Cohen, whose book Not Working was just released. As an aside in the conversation, he mentioned this phenomenon of seeing amazing pictures of food on Instagram. He doesn’t like these pictures, he said, and he finds the phenomenon troubling. We can’t feel the texture or inhabit the lived quality of that food, thus digitized. All we can do is fetishize it and click the heart button. 

Years back, there was plenty of hubbub about the photo-manipulation techniques that McDonald’s et alia use to nip-tuck their food for advertising. I haven’t heard anything about this for the past several years, but the gulf between the Big Mac on the ad and in real life is just as wide as ever. Maybe we’re not outraged about this anymore because we’re all doing it. Now, I don’t think (m)any of us are photoshopping our food pictures, but we certainly do think about angles, lighting and filters, all of which are stops on Photoshop Road. And, to be sure, there are apps for on-phone photo editing specific to food.

But even beyond photo-manipulation, restaurants seem to be paying more attention to their plating and presentation these days, what with services like Instagram and Yelp in the cultural fabric. You just never know which customer is going to post a picture. Maybe that’s a good thing. Beautiful food certainly adds to the experience. And if the food also tastes great, then why not? One of my most memorable dining experiences was at Studio in Copenhagen, where every plate that came my way was consummately Instagrammable. Yes, I even posted a photo collage. (Importantly, the food had the taste to back it up.)

 

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But we humble home cooks are feeling the pressure, too, in these days of social-media perfectionism. If we spend the time to make some tasty and beautiful food, we seem to feel the need to document it. We want the photos to exude all the things we’re feeling about the food, so we worry about the lighting and backgrounds and plating and all that. 

I was with a friend once, and we were cooking an elaborate, multipart meal. If we’d planned better, perhaps everything would have been ready to serve at the same time. But as it was, it took a full hour between the first thing’s finishing and the last’s. Our plates looked wonderful in the photos. And don’t get me wrong: the food tasted fine. It’s just that everything was cold. We’re surrounded by these glorious pictures of food. And what sacrifices we make to contribute to furthering that glory—ad majorem cibi gloriam.

There’s a handful of cookbooks in my kitchen. They, too, are for the most part adorned with luscious photographs. When I peruse them, looking for a weekend project or something to cook for company, I even find myself skipping over the pages with no photos. Other times, the photos are intimidating. I might see a photo and think to myself, “That looks way too involved for me right now,” or, “I could never make it look like that,” which likewise makes me turn the page. It’s probably a familiar feeling. Like that pitiable and brave soul who tried to make Cookie Monster cupcakes, perhaps it makes you not want to try again. 

Last month I finally got the book Salt Fat Acid Heat, by Samin Nosrat, and immediately it struck me. There’s not a single photo in the book. But there’s plenty of imagery—illustrations, that is. They’re quirky, whimsical doodlings done by Wendy MacNaughton.

Caeser Salad, detail, © Samin Nosrat and Wendy MacNaughton

As you turn the pages, you’re met with drawing after drawing. Macerated red onions, dried beans in various states of rehydration, lifesize cuttings, hand-colored charts… There is something about the art in this book that is approachable and inspiring. Returning to Josh Cohen’s comment, illustration seems to show the lived quality of the food, even though it’s—by all appearances—much further from the food than is a photograph. Or is it?

From “Understanding Comics,” © Scott McCloud

This reminds me of something in the book Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. Good comic book characters are visually ambiguous, he says, which allows the reader to insert themselves into the story. If there’s too much detail, the character comes across as defiantly other. We can’t identify with such characters. Perhaps pictures of food are similar: Too fanciful a photograph, and you can’t enter in; but with heart and ambiguity, you can. 

A self-portraiture workshop: Documenting, exploring and healing

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, Experience

I’ve written recently on self-documentation, selfhood and freedom, and how art can help people cultivate moral knowledge. In my doctoral dissertation, I explored these topics in the context of artistic self-portraiture.

I settled on self-portraiture because I was looking for a personally meaningful, nonverbal form of document to bring information science theory forward. As it happens, the practice of self-portraiture has long been recognized and used for self-exploration, self-discovery, self-understanding, self-creation and self-care, as discussed variously in art history, art therapy, occupational therapy and other fields. When this is understood in the context of our current mental health crisis (increased depression, anxiety, suicide, and on and on) the practice of self-portraiture may be particularly useful—and urgent. In brief, I think many of our ills stem from a sense of meaninglessness, and so I understand our task to be a matter of rediscovering and cultivating personal meaning.

In this regard, the stories of self-portraiture that came out of my doctoral research were so powerful that I want to find ways to enable others to have such experiences. Self-portraiture is something that everyone can do. It’s a matter of engaging with an ancient technology, which sometimes in our high-tech world we forget that we have at our disposal.

This week I was blessed to host, under the auspices of the College of Computing & Informatics at Drexel University (i.e., my college), a closing reception for the art exhibition that came out of my dissertation.

I started with a few words about my project. Justin Tyner then spoke on his experience making his stained-glass self-portrait—which he summed up, poignantly, with a poem by Nanao Sakaki:

Look! A mountain there
I don’t climb a mountain
Mountain climbs me
Mountain is myself
I climb on myself

After that, I invited attendees to create their own self-portraits. The experience began with a short personal exploration worksheet, and then attendees had at a table full of art supplies for more than an hour. Finally, Emily Addis, another of the artists in my study, led the group in a discussion and debrief.

Attendees were invited to sum up their experiences in a word. We heard: tragic, celebration, collaboration, introspection, confusion, calming, and no-self. Many learned new things about themselves. Some people shared these with the group, and others simply said, “Thank you.”

Try it for yourself. Find the worksheet here, and get started!

Being, within and without literacy

by Tim Gorichanaz Experience
"Monk by the Sea," by Caspar David Friedrich
“Monk by the Sea,” by Caspar David Friedrich

If you’re reading this, presumably you’re literate. We it for granted: being literate, seeing things and knowing what they say, reading for pleasure as much as for taking part in society. According to Walter Ong, being literate also influences the way we organize our thoughts and communicate, even orally. And we rarely question those conditions that most closely define us.

Kafka on the Shore, like most of Haruki Murakami‘s work, is a slipstream novel that melds fantasy and reality, wakefulness and dreaming. Being literate is one of the recurring themes of the book, but not one that has been much discussed. After all, there’s so much to this book: the Oedipus complex, selfhood, coming of age…

In the story, the main character, Kafka Tamura, loves books. On his fifteenth birthday, he runs away from home, and he ends up taking shelter at a library, where he spends his days reading. In stark contrast to Kafka is another character, Nakata, who suffered a mysterious accident as a child and now “is not very bright,” as he says, to the extent that he can no longer read. (But he can talk with cats.)

Nakata’s experience throughout the novel shows how hard it can be to get by in the world when you can’t read. As Nakata tells one of his cat companions, “In the human world if you can’t read or write you’re considered dumb.” Being illiterate in a literate person’s world extends far beyond simply not being able to read—which would be bad enough. (Take a look around you right now and see how many examples of written language you can see without moving.) But what’s more, literacy changes our speech, too. As Nakata says, “If you can’t read TV doesn’t make much sense. Sometimes I listen to the radio, but the words there are also too fast, and it tires me out.”

Later in the book, Kafka has his own brush with illiteracy. In a dreamlike state, Kafka finds himself in a mysterious room:

As I gaze at the vacant, birdless scene outside, I suddenly want to read a book—any book. As long as it’s shaped like a book and has printing, it’s fine by me. I just want to hold a book in my hands, turn the pages, scan the words with my eyes. Only one problem—there isn’t a book in sight. In fact, it’s like printing hasn’t been invented here. I quickly look around the room, and sure enough, there’s nothing at all with any writing on it.

Given how much writing permeates our culture, how much it’s become part of us, it must be very jarring indeed to suddenly find oneself in a place where there is no writing. In this alternate world, Kafka soon discovers that libraries are very different:

“The library?” She shakes her head.

“No… There’s a library far away, but not here.”

“There’s a library?”

“Yes, but there aren’t any books in it.”

“If there aren’t any books, then what is there?”

She tilts her head but doesn’t respond. Again my question’s taken a wrong turn and vanished.

“Have you ever been there?”

“A long time ago,” she says.

“But it’s not for reading books?” She nods. “There aren’t any books there.”

Soon enough, Kafka winds up in that library. And indeed, there is “not a book in sight.”

What we come to understand is that this is a world of direct experience, instead of one of conceptualizing things through the written word. Rather, as Kafka’s interlocutor explains:

The most important thing about life here is that people let themselves be absorbed into things. As long as you do that, there won’t be any problems. … It’s like when you’re in the forest, you become a seamless part of it. When you’re in the rain, you’re a part of the rain. When you’re in the morning, you’re a seamless part of the morning. When you’re with me, you become a part of me.

Here the line between text and being is blurred. And though we generally equate “fiction” with “fake,” the real world is quite like this, too.

It reminds me of the wonderful book by Yun Lee Too, The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World. This book challenges our assumption that books make a library; rather, the library primarily constitutes people working together in a certain way. For instance, Too describes how certain educated people in Antiquity were considered to be “breathing libraries.” That is, texts can be not only in the form of writing, but also in the form of people who embody them. In other words, these people have “let themselves be absorbed” into the books.