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Vittles X Magma Poetry Special

This Monday’s newsletter is a collaboration with Magma poetry magazine’s 86th issue on the theme of FOOD, edited by Ella Frears and Sean Wai Keung. These poems were selected from the issue by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, and Jonathan Nunn. For more exciting food poetry and prose, get a copy of Magma #86 here.

The London launch will be happening on the 4th July at Malt Bar on Maltby Street, and Vittles editors Sharanya Deepak and Rebecca May Johnson will be in conversation at the event, alongside poetry readings. 

The Glasgow launch will be a potluck event at Mount Florida Books on the 13th July.

Crêpe / Mien Mui Jin

The tang of quartered tangerine
awakes the palate.
I take the fancy restaurant spoon
and cut into the crêpe
folded like thin, warm blankets
on a lazy Sunday morning.

The sauce it sits on,
buttery with a hint of liquor,
does not remind me of you.
It is the earthy sweetness
of pan-fried batter that hits home.

You have taught me
something simple, something
universal with eggs, flour,
sugar, and water. Afternoons
whiled away with plates
of broken, uneven pancakes.
Their Hokkien name,
something close to mien mui jin,
eludes my tongue.

It takes miles away from home
to know the appetite is its own country:
you never like me going abroad.
Yet, you always haunt the cites I live in,
cites you haven’t been to—

as I crush mint and dried peel
into a dollop of cream, I swallow
the sound of your name: 婆婆, 婆婆,
sorry if I have been a bad grandchild.

Tim Tim Cheng

Almost Like Being in Love

The Swiss soufflé of the evening expanding into— possibly— night.
The prudent response is to retire homewards, to the skipping-rope of one’s bed.
I have never been one for a prudent response.
I have always been one for a prudent response.
My lies are like currants sprinkled through the yeasted dough of a confession.
A confession is formed by twisting a story into a spiral and pinching the ends shut.

The Swiss roll of the evening not holding its shape correctly.
It might collapse into a semi-rectangular mass (like a bed). Nowadays new mattresses arrive rolled up in a bag, like the truth.
When they spring open, that’s when the lies get in.
My lies might be the cream in a Swiss roll holding the sponge of truth together.

The Swiss steak of the evening slowly braising in its own sauce.
The layers of the steak are bookends holding the feelings in.
Once a sauce sets, the feelings can’t be changed.
It’s not like a confession where I can make it fit into any old bed.
My thoughts are the miniature pearl onions swimming in a sauce of lies.

The Swiss cheese of the evening melting partially into night.
A rectangular slice of time lying atop an open-faced sandwich.
The sandwich is the rest of the night, like the sandwich’s filling is my thoughts. Sometimes I lie awake in a bed like a trap waiting to be sprung.
The holes in a slice of time are where the truth oozes out.

Jane Yeh

Emulsion

While cooking Rebecca May Johnson’s recipe for kale, garlic, chilli and parmesan emulsion

1

Approaching the solstice, my body made no sound.

In the kitchen, kimchi fizzed alive in a jar.

to recover – to return / to regain / to make up for a loss

Outside, adolescent swans dropped dark-cloud feathers one by one into the pond.

2

Hints of burnt sage / citrus peel scraped clean.

I pressed record.

I washed kale leaves in the sink, saved the pale green water to feed the prayer plant.

to be recovered – to be well again / to be re-discovered / unlost

The winter light would not be caught, could not be melted in a bowl.

3

Rebecca’s recipe instructs me to keep tossing the pan, to not stop moving.

This is how the emulsion occurs –

The constant pulling motion of my arms and hips against the counter while the tap drips.

recovery – a return to a normal state / the process of regaining control /
(in swimming) the act of returning the arm or leg to begin a new stroke

My worries disperse in slow motion, splintering outwards in the shape of a star.

4

I listened back. Butter softens, froths in a pot.

A drawer opens / a border seals itself.

An oceanic sunrise / a panful of green.

recoverable – (of something lost) able to be retrieved / (of an energy source)
extracted economically from the earth

In the recording I begin to hear myself – the liquid soundscape of my body –
I stir and stir.

Nina Mingya Powles

How to Win Best Courgette

Long before she was my grandmother
Celia loved a horse.
She rode her bicycle to visit the horse –
a famous horse as big as a shed.
She petted its nose, inspected its nostrils,
felt the twin snorty blasts.
She couldn’t ride it; she fed it apples.
She liked the crashing sound as the teeth came down
on the flesh and the juice.

Celia could lie, if a lie were needed.
She could steal an apple from its pantry nest,
avoid her father.
I never saw her near a horse myself,
only once in a field where a horse had been,
putting her blade through the crust of its dung,
opening the green interior.

Juliet Antill

POULTRY ANATOMY

The preparation started days before the operation.
My mother supplied anatomical plates,
divided the work into four.

We used lancets, knives, aluminium basins,
secateurs, copper cauldrons,
childbirth instruments.

We remained confined in the basement
for three days like alchemists
preparing their potions.

I.

I learned what to remove, where
to make an incision, what to do if a knife slips.
I rehearsed and calculated how to remove the liver.

My mother assisted me for my first time:
I incised the lower part, separated meat from flesh,
used the secateurs to break the thoracic cage

and practise a whimsical caesarean.
After the extraction, I removed the veins from the lobes.
I became a surgeon for Christmas dinners.

II.

My mother sectioned the head and the base
of the neck with a cleaver, removed the trachea,
vertebrae, and the corn seeds pouring from
the oesophagus like a broken pearl necklace.

She filled the neck with a stuffing made up of
breadcrumbs, eggs, minced duck meat and shallots.
She rolled back the neck’s skin and sewed it
like a needlewoman working on a mat.

My mother used to sell foie gras in supermarkets.
She often recalls the customer who refused to buy
Eastern European foie gras because she feared
transportation would stress the ducks.

III.

My grandmother was assigned to clean the gizzards.
She was always assigned to clean things up:
giblets, children, incontinent elderly people
– all the thankless tasks others didn’t want to complete.

Before the men became cursed and died,
she used to wash the hearts
her husband cooked in duck fat
like a wizard intending them for dark magic.

IV.

The meat must stay covered with coarse salt
to drain the water for forty-eight hours.

My cousin chops pieces of skin,
minces the meat left over

to make chichons,
a very salty duck pâté.

The smell of fat permeates the basement.
She uses salt to purify the place, to heal wounds.

Julie Irigaray

Handover

Joan: food preferences:
notes to live-in carer, February 2021

Lunches, small portions. Mum likes especially:

Egg and chips
Bacon
Lamb steaks
Cauliflower cheese
Steak pie and other ready meals
Salmon
Smoked haddock, poached in milk
Chicken in all forms
Beef casserole
Cottage pie

Shepherd’s pie
Pie from the bakers on the Broadway shops
Roast dinners of any kind
Pork steaks
Chipolatas
Jacket potatoes with baked beans and or bacon
Little gem lettuce
Tomatoes

Doesn't eat desserts but sometimes will have ice cream
Has gone off chocolate but like spoiled sweets and fruit jellies. No toffees. Sometimes has a cake, a jam doughnut, fruit scone, iced bun or custard tart around 4 o'clock. And I offer her a cup of tea then, but she doesn't often want one.

Mum gets very dry lips, she has a chapstick on her trolley

Penelope Shuttle

Credits

The FOOD issue of Magma poetry is edited by Ella Frears and Sean Wai Keung.

Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Her collection Shine, Darling (Offord Road Books 2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She hosts Tears for Frears on Soho Radio.

Sean Wai Keung is a Glasgow-based poet and performance maker whose work often explores concepts of mixed-ness, identity and migration. His first full-length poetry collection, sikfan glaschu (Verve Poetry Press 2021) was subsequently shortlisted for the 2022 Kavya Prize.

The Poets

Juliet Antill lives on the Isle of Mull. Her poems have been published in The Dark Horse, Poetry Wales and New Writing Scotland.

Tim Tim Cheng is a poet and a teacher from Hong Kong, currently based in the UK. Her pamphlet Tapping at Glass (Verve 2023) explores womanhood, multilingualism and psycho-geography. She also edits and translates from Chinese to English. timtimcheng.com

Julie Irigaray is a French Basque poet. She has published Whalers, Witches and Gauchos (Nine Pens). She was commended in the 2020 Ambit Magazine Poetry Prize and selected as one of the Best New British and Irish Poets 2018.

Nina Mingya Powles is a writer, zinemaker and librarian from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently living in London. She is the author of several poetry pamphlets, zines and poetry books, most recently Magnolia 木蘭 and a collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water.

Penelope Shuttle lives in Cornwall. Her 13th collection, Lyonesse (Bloodaxe 2021), was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022. She is a contributor to The Verb, and her radio poem, Conversations on a Bench, was broadcast on Radio 3 in March 2022. Forthcoming: a pamphlet titled Noah (Broken Sleep Books, December 2023).

Jane Yeh's collection Discipline (Carcanet 2019) was chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She was named a Next Generation poet by the PBS for her previous collection The Ninjas (Carcanet 2012).

Illustrations are by Klaussie Williams, a painter, drawer and ceramicist based in London. You can find more of her work on Instagram and https://www.klaussiewilliams.com/shop.

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

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Back before WhatsApp, you really had to work to convince someone to come to your house for dinner. No one worked harder than the Roman poet and proto-shitposter Catullus, who turned a dinner invitation into his celebrated poem that starts ‘Cenabis bene, mi Fabulle, apud me’ – You will dine well my dear Fabullus, at mine – before revealing that the precondition is that Fabullus has to not just bring a bottle of Falernian natural wine from the cornershop, but also a pretty girl, banter and the entire meal. Catullus –  alas! – has no money and no Ottolenghi cookbook, but he will provide the company that only true friendship can bring.

Catullus’s mock invite, with its early twist, finds a companion across space and time in the work of the Arab poet Kushajim, whose poem ‘When Will You Come To Eat?’ also invites a friend to dinner but provides the entire meal in vivid Nigel Slater-esque couplets, towering dish on dish and building towards a final twist. Kushajim’s friend is lonely, you see, as solitary an eater as the narrators of the other three poems in today’s selection – Teemu Helle, Lee Jenny and Federico García Lorca – who all record a hunger for something more than food. I, myself, am often a solitary eater too,  and I enjoy it – the personal ritual, the time taken to feed oneself. I have eaten Helle’s TV dinner, Lee’s corn soup, and watched boys eating brown bread like Lorca. I have rarely been Kushajim, though I am trying; he knows that all the details of a dinner you have invited someone to must be exactly right so that they forget them, like so many endless couplets, until all that is left is the fact of the invite itself, and of a solitude, momentarily, forgotten. JN

Thanks so much to Modern Poetry in Translation for initially publishing these poems. You can buy the latest issue on food here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/

When Will You Come to Eat?

Poem by Kushajim. Translated by Salma Harland from Classical Arabic

When will you come to eat?
The table has been set
And the chef has adorned it
How rain dresses gardens in marvels.
It is spread before us,
Heaped with delectable dishes:
A roasted kid
With ‘usban,
Garnished with minted legumes
And tarragon;
A plump-breasted pullet
That we selectively bred;
Grouse and chicken
Braised in a tagine;
Fried samosas
Overlapping with tardin;
Red-dyed eggs
Served with olives
Palm pollen like strings of pearls
Nestled in a jewellery box;
Open-faced sandwiches
Brushed with an oily relish
That whet and tempt
Every indulgent appetite
With bites like pearl shavings
Kneaded with ambergris
A sharp cheese
For a filling spread
An ornate knife
For cutting and slicing;
Vinegar that flares up noses
Even before it is unsealed;
Aubergine burani
That will enchant you;
Asparagus unlike any other —
And I know you have relished many;
Musk-scented lawzinaj
Doused with sugar;
Cooked wine that comes
In dastija jugs and bottles;
A dimple-chinned cupbearer
With voluptuous promise,
Fiery eyes
And honeyed words;
And a singer who coos like a turtle dove
sweet runes never heard before.
So why would a jilted lover
Far from his love’s abode
Rather drink himself out of his senses
Than come join us?

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On Mornings I Drink Corn Soup

Poem by Lee Jenny. Translated by Archana Madhavan from Korean

On mornings I drink corn soup I
need a table
so it may as well be a round and warm table and I
need a chair
so it may as well be a round and warm chair and I
need a bowl
so it may as well be a round and warm bowl and I
need a person
so it may as well be a round and warm person and
the corn kernels are yellow
kernels kernels kernels bob-bob-bobbing in the soup and
with every kernel I think of faces dead disappeared erased and
now they’re gone the kernels I eat
round and warm kernels I eat
there’s soup too the soup’s good too
the corn kernels are yellow
kernels kernels kernels please don’t spill
kernels kernels kernels spill and I’ll be sad
like a kernel I care about what I say
even now in the morning I write in my notepad a list of all the kernels
I ought to care for
how can I already know these kernels I’ve never once seen?
kernels kernels you can see the kernels
because you believe you can see the kernels
kernels kernels kernels corn kernels are yellow
round and warm kernels kernels kernels
I want to believe maybe I’ll see them some time
I do miss them a bit the kernels kernels kernels

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Saddle

Poem by Teemu Helle. Translated by Niina Pollari from Finnish

I opened the door and let in the darkness.
It collapsed on the couch,
lifted its feet on the table and sighed:
‘Got anything to eat’.

I took a plastic tray down from the fridge’s top shelf
and brought it to the living room, where the darkness
watched, enchanted, a documentary about horses.
I lifted the dome: light in a dessert dish.

The stale earth stank. The darkness
consumed light like a fallen apple
and bemoaned not understanding
how a horse could transport
such a heavy load with its skinny legs.

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August

Poem by Federico García Lorca. Translated by Yolanda Morató from Spanish

August.

Peach and sugar
Against the sunset,
An afternoon with the sun inside
like the stone in any fruit.

The ear of corn keeps
its yellow, hard grin intact.

August.

Boys eating
brown bread and rich moon.

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Credits

Modern Poetry in Translation is literary magazine and publisher based in the United Kingdom that specialises in translated poetry. To buy their latest issue on food in poetry, please view their website here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/

Lee Jenny is an acclaimed South Korean poet. She made her literary debut in 2008 and has since published four poetry collections. Most recently, Lee was awarded the 2021 Hyundae Munhak Prize. She resides in Geoje Island.

Archana Madhavan is a literary translator from Korean into English. Her first book-length work is a co-translation of Glory Hole by Kim Hyun (Seagull Books, 2022). Her poetry and prose translations have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, The Kenyon Review, Columbia Journal, and more. In 2022, Archana was selected as the Korean poetry mentee for the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program. Her work can be found online at archanawrites.com.

Teemu Helle (b. 1982) is a Finnish poet and the author of 7 collections of poetry.

Niina Pollari is a poet and Finnish translator. She is the author of the poetry collections Path of Totality and Dead Horse, and the translator of Tytti Heikkinen's The Warmth of the Taxidermied Animal. 

Kushajim (c. 902-970) was a celebrated Arab Shiite poet, master chef, and polymath. His works vividly chronicled Abbasid court life at the heart of the Islamic Golden Age.

Salma Harland is a British-Egyptian literary translator who works between Arabic and English. Her translations have appeared in the National Centre for Writing's Emerging Literary Translators Anthology (2022), The Massachusetts Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, ArabLit Quarterly, and elsewhere. In 2022, she was one of the American Literary Translators Association's Virtual Travel Fellows. She is currently preparing to pursue a PhD in literary translation.

Federico García Lorca (Granada, 1898-1936) poet, playwright, and one of the most internationally celebrated Spanish authors, was murdered in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.

Yolanda Morató is Senior Lecturer of English at the University of Seville, Spain. She has an MA in Modern Literatures from Birkbeck College (U London) and an MA in Translation and Intercultural Studies (U Seville, Spain). She obtained her European PhD in Philology and was awarded a University Arts & Humanities distinction. With over twenty translated and edited works from French and English into Spanish, in 2007 she won the “Tormenta en un vaso” Translation Prize for her annotated edition and translation from French into Spanish of Je me souviens, by Georges Perec. In 2008, the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN) distinguished her translation of Blasting and Bombardiering, by Wyndham Lewis, with their annual award. She is the author of Libres y libreras. Mujeres del libro en Londres (El Paseo, 2021), a non-fiction book on women booksellers in London. 

The illustration is by Klaussie Williams, a painter, drawer and ceramicist based in London. You can find more of their work on https://www.klaussiewilliams.com/shop and Instagram.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles, which you can read on the Vittles back catalogue.

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In 2021, I travelled to rural parts of Marwar, a region in India’s mammoth, desert-clad state of Rajasthan to research the histories of cyclical famine; what people of the region call ‘akal’. Too harsh to memorialise, too brutal to recount, ‘akal’ in the region turns up most frequently in rhymes, songs and ‘muhavras’ or metaphors that make-up everyday speech. Throughout my trip, I heard poetry recited of lightning-like floods that washed away livestock. I heard stories turned to song, of how the nomadic tribes of the region survived harsh climates and harsher neglect from imperial governments and rich kings. But I also heard other tales that told of resilience: a rhyme about how to sour milk in a large mud pot, of short instructional couplets that held fleeting balms for great hunger; like foraging wildflowers, cooking tree barks into bread.

When I first read these four poems that make up today’s ‘Food and Injustice’ newsletter; I thought about the people of Marwar and their songs of survival. I thought about how history only honours the powerful and buries harshness in order to serve capital greed. But in these poems today, injustice is articulated — the greed of corporations, the desolation of land grabs and forced conversion, the neglect of those that grow our food everywhere is remembered and spoken aloud. But even so, within them, there is hope. It is the hope that comes from remembering, from making histories and weaving them into time. Within them, there is a resistance to forgetting and being forgotten about. SD

Thanks so much to Modern Poetry in Translation for initially publishing these poems. You can buy the latest issue on food here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/

Smokestack

Poem by Jhio Jan Navarro. Translated by Eric Abalajon from Hiligaynon.

1 .

Three sugar mill smokestacks stand sentry in Central Ma-ao.
Like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, watching over
people from Elga up to La Plata, from Kawilihan down to Guba
reminders of a time past when in the lands of the Araneta clan,
‘Money can be picked and shoveled from the ground’.

2 .

The smokestacks are giant cigars made of rolled brick
wrapped with iron sheets. But the foundation
that sucks and puffs out has long run out of breath.
Thus, as clouds are widowed by smoke,
the towers are being married by rust.
And in the lands of the Araneta clan it has long been accepted
that, ‘For money, even the pick and the shovel must be pawned’.

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I Suspect I Am Bipolar

Poem by Lupita Perez. Translated by Ryan Van Winkle from Spanish.

Some days
life fits into a coffee cup

Some days
surviving the streets
is good enough
I pay my rent and eat
a couple times a day

Sometimes, some days
the sun shines slick as a self-help book
people challenge their fate
and injustice, corruption,
exploitation, starvation
are distant as an eclipse

But, by only my third sip I insist
the cup is already half empty

I cry
for no reason
for the coffee going cold
and the skinny kid
picking beans
serving the corporation
the slumlord of our world

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Hunger Strike

Poem by Abdellatif Laabi. Translated by André Naffis-Sahely from French.

Let’s talk about this hunger strike
It’s a form of resistance
that men in my situation
have experimented with throughout the long history
of mutilations
Sure it’s a passive act
but when you’ve got nothing but your naked chest
against Fascist arsenals
the only weapon we have left
is this irrepressible
breath still inside us
which we push to the furthest of limits
risking its death
to safeguard our dignity

When you’re hungry
the sun looks bleached
and the sleepless nights are freezing
We think about so many
weighty or funny things
When I was less serious I admit
I was tormented by the idea of earthly delights
I imagined such a bunch of tasty treats I could eat
that I ran through the gamut of my gastronomical knowledge
but there we have it, I’m not ashamed of such thoughts
because what prevails
during this wait
this journey towards the unknown
is the feeling of immense strength
at the heart of weakness
how he who resists is superior
to him who oppresses
Yes life is a formidable weapon
that will always frighten
the armies of cadavers
Once again what prevails
is the brotherhood of sufferings
What tortures the hungry
is this vile putrid taste in the mouth
those cold bulging eyes in the fog of the day
the despairing emptiness
that makes the guts clench and twist
Once again what prevails
is the brotherhood of sufferings
The ideas that cut through the night
become tangible things
they belong neither to me
nor the other, not to another still
but are the property
of all those excluded from the light of the sun
Once again what prevails
is the brotherhood of sufferings
because our hunger
isn’t conjured by mirages of El Dorados
isn’t the lust for supercities that kneel
before the golden calf and debauchery
our hunger belongs to a new world
peopled by new men
to a sun that is shared
without thought of profit
to an irreversible sense of peace
to the chagrin of the builders of inequality
Furthermore
during these days of abstinence
it makes me proud
that going hungry
means I get to unsettle
the perverse complacency
of those who starve my people

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Mulberries

Poem by Sabeer Haka. Translated by Nasrin Parvaz and Hubert Moore from Farsi.

Have you ever seen
mulberries,
how their red juice
stains the earth where they fell?
Nothing is as painful as falling.
I’ve seen so many workers
fall from buildings
and become mulberries.

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Credits

Modern Poetry in Translation is literary magazine and publisher based in the United Kingdom that specialises in translated poetry. To buy their latest issue on food in poetry, please view their website here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/

Jhio Jan Navarro was born and raised amid the sugarcane fields of Brgy. Don Jorge L. Araneta, Bago City, Negros Occidental. He writes poetry in English, Filipino and his mother-tongue, Hiligaynon. His works have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, TLDTD, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere.

Eric Abalajon is currently a lecturer at the UP Visayas, Iloilo. His works have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Tiger Moth Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and Footprints: An Anthology of New Ecopoetry (Broken Sleep Books, 2022).

Abdellatif Laâbi is a Moroccan writer and translator. In 1966 he cofounded the journal Souffles, which considerably influenced the b by cultural world of North Africa. Politically engaged, Laâbi was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for over eight years. When he went into exile in France in 1985, Laâbi developed a writing style marked by great humanity and devotion to the struggle for justice and freedom. Laâbi conceives of poetry as the ultimate weapon to express dignity and bear witness. He received the Prix Goncourt de la Poésie in 2009 and the Grand prix de la francophonie de l’Académie française in 2011.     

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, including works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Abdellatif Laâbi, Ribka Sibhatu and Tahar Ben Jelloun. His writing appears regularly in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, The Baffler and Poetry (Chicago), among others. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis in the US and the editor of Poetry London in the UK.

Sabeer Haka was born in 1986 in Kermanshah, Iran. He is a worker and lives in Tehran. Two of his collections of poetry have been published in Iran and in 2013 he won first prize in the Iranian Workers’ Poetry Competition. ‘I’m tired,’ he says in an interview, ‘I’m very tired. My tiredness goes back to before my birth. I was a worker since my mother carried me in her womb while working, and I felt her exhaustion. Still her tiredness is in my body.’

Nasrin Parvaz became a civil rights activist when the Islamic regime took power in 1979 in Iran. She was arrested in 1982, tortured and spent eight years in prison. Her books include ‘One Woman's Struggle in Iran, A Prison Memoir’, and ‘The Secret Letters from X to A’, (Victorina Press 2018). Nasrin’s poetry, stories and translations have been published in different anthologies. Among other writings, Nasrin published a novel in Farsi about the massacre of prisoners in 1988 in Iran, to which she was an eye-witness. She has given talks on the violation of human rights in Iran, both in Farsi and in English, in a number of countries. Her paintings were accepted for inclusion in the exhibitions, Calendar and for postcards. She studied for a degree in Psychology and subsequently gained an MA in International Relations. She then completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Systemic Theory at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, where she worked in a team of family therapists for some time. http://nasrinparvaz.org/

Hubert Moore is a widely published British poet whose 13th collection entitled ‘Hello dear’ appeared in April 2023. 

Lupita Perez is originally from the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. She has lived in Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo Leon state, for decades. A postgraduate in Public Management and Human Resources by UANL, Mexico, Pérez is a poet, cultural promoter, university professor and a member of CONARTE, an association of Mexican writers. She has participated in numerous literary festivals and conferences in México, the USA, Spain, Chile and Colombia. Her work has been included in important Mexican and foreign anthologies. She has published two books of poems “El Demonio y Otros Amores", (2011) and "Reincidencias" (2016)

Ryan Van Winkle is an author, artist and producer based in Edinburgh. His second collection, The Good Dark, won the Saltire Society’s 2015 Poetry Book of the Year award.  He is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh and the Schools Writer in Residence for the Citizen project at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and New Writing Scotland. He was awarded the Jessie Kesson fellowship at Moniack Mhor in 2018. You can find him on Twitter at @rvwable

The illustration is by Klaussie Williams, a painter, drawer and ceramicist based in London. You can find more of their work on https://www.klaussiewilliams.com/shop and Instagram.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles, which you can read on the Vittles back catalogue.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

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In this final week of Season 6 Vittles presents poems selected by Sharanya, Jonathan and me from the latest issue and the archive of Modern Poetry in Translation. It feels appropriate to close a season about food and art with a literary form characterised by semantic openness, border-melting collaboration, and playful energy. We will publish three thematic selections of poetry on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week; the first of which is love. 

How to describe love? Its excess, disarray, quietness, oblivion, strangeness, revulsion, tragedy, and insatiability? For such range to be expressed in language, love wants an object to cleave to. Food gives this mad and various emotion a presence in both space and time – descriptions of texture or colour, the affecting appearance of seasonal delicacies, the gestures that produce a meal can convey a slice of love. 

Love is getting entangled like intergalactic pasta in ‘Humanspaghetti’; maternal love as hard boiled eggs in ‘A Menu for Mother’; ghee on steaming rice in ‘My Family by the Haor’, and arriving too late for tea to still be hot in ‘I Wanted’. Poetic form, liberated from ‘making sense’, allows writers to produce juxtapositions in language which on first reading bear the unforeseen intensity of a new flavour or a new love. RMJ

Thanks so much to Modern Poetry in Translation for initially publishing these poems. You can buy the latest issue on food here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/

Humanspaghetti

Poem by Şafak Sarıçiçek. Translated by Csilla Toldy from German

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A Menu for Mother

Poem by Aw Priatmojo. Translated by Ian Rowland from Indonesian.

1. The White Jenang and the Red

In that pot Mother cooked up her prayers
The rising smoke accompanying her wishes.

Father was the white jenang.
And with a splash of palm sugar
the red jenang was Mother.

The dining table was where all dreams were sown.
And all memories stored.


2. Gudeg

Memories floated in the coconut cream
among jackfruit green. Seeping into
the hard-boiled eggs, until I swept off to the city.

They were in the fast-food chicken and
the coffee shop drinks too.

Her prayers had followed me to town.
swaying among the vehicle fumes.

Jostling for space in
the rush hour trains.

3. Lemper

The scent of shredded chicken rose
from the ledgers
whose figures stuck like sticky rice.

I flipped the numbers
in the books

to show:
the furthest distance between me and her.

I wanted to wrap it in banana leaves
pinning both ends
with palm rib slivers.

Carry them to work each day, for lunch.


4. Wajik

I built this home from sticky rice
with pandanus-scented walls
and sticky stains of remembrance on the table.

I say to my wife who stirs the pan at the hearth:

‘Even in that flaring flame I see her’.

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My Family by the Haor 

Poem by Zafir Setu. Translated by Mohammad Shafiqul Islam from Bengali.

As you pour ghee on the plateful of steaming rice,
an astounding love billows.

Steam rises from rice, and I deeply feel you.
When you stretch on the yard to clasp a cow.

I feel I love both equally.

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I Wanted

Poem by Ro Mehrooz. Translated by the poet from Rohingya.

I wanted to share a cup of tea and sit with you,
A tough green, saturated, sugared tea.

The wrong path carried me on its back; pulled me away,
Far off, I couldn’t tread the right path.

I wanted to share a cup of tea and sit with you,
A tough green, strong, hot tea.

Tea leaves, sugar, cow’s milk, everything I bought
But being late, I couldn’t drink it hot.

The leaky kettle, the husk gas stove turned off,
A decayed coconut of fate; only the shell remains.

I wanted to share a cup of tea and sit with you,
A tough green, saturated, sugared tea.

I wanted to leave my lip kissing the cup
But, the air of fate swung left, what must I do?

Winter, snow, passing. I didn’t drink my tea.
A sweet smile, a whisper in ear, I couldn’t hear it.

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Credits

Modern Poetry in Translation is literary magazine and publisher based in the United Kingdom that specialises in translated poetry. To buy their latest issue on food in poetry, please view their website here: https://modernpoetryintranslation.com/magazine/wrap-it-in-banana-leaves-the-food-focus/

Şafak Sarıçiçek is a law clerk in the Karlsruhe district. He’s published five poetry books, and won various literary awards and scholarships, most recently the Klagenfurter Literaturkurs of the Bachmann Prize.

Csilla Toldy is a writer and translator from Hungary. Her writing and translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies and in book form in three poetry pamphlets: Red Roots - Orange Sky (2013), The Emigrant Woman’s Tale (2015) and Vertical Montage (2018), as short fiction in Angel Fur and other stories (2019, Lapwing) and as a novel with the title Bed Table Door (2023, Wrecking Ball). Csilla creates film poems as a visual artist. Her award-winning work has been screened at international festivals.  www.csillatoldy.co.uk

Zafir Setu, Professor of Bengali Literature at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh, is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. He has authored more than thirty books of poetry, short stories, novels and essays.

Mohammad Shafiqul Islam (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9880-4645 ) is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Inner State, and the translator of Humayun Ahmed: Selected Short Stories and Aphorisms of Humayun Azad. His work has appeared in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Critical Survey, Massachusetts Review, Poem: International English Language Quarterly, Journal of World Literature, South Asian Review, English in Education, Journal of Poetry Therapy, English: Journal of the English Association, Modern Poetry in Translation, Comparative Literature: East & West, Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Modern Poetry in Translation, Dibur, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in a number of books, including The Book of Dhaka: A City in Short Fiction, The Best Asian Poetry, Poems from SAARC Region, When the Mango Tree Blossomed, An Ekushey Anthology 1952-2022, Of the Nation Born, Meet Human Meat and Other Stories, and Monsoon Letters: Collection of Poems. Currently at work on his third collection of poetry and a few translation projects, Dr Islam is Professor of English at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Aw Priatmojo is an Indonesian author whose poetry and short stories have been published on various platforms. He is one of the founders of Nyalanesia, a platform for promoting literacy in Indonesia.

Ian Rowland translates Indonesian literature into English, including short stories by Hadi Winata in Portside Review and Sugar Nutmeg, and by Pratiwi Juliani in BODY journal ; and poems by Erni Aladjai in Chogwa zine, Hadi Winata in the Oxford Anthology of Translation, and AW Priatmojo in Modern Poetry in Translation.

Ro Mehrooz is a young Rohingya poet, translator, award-winning photographer, and professional interpreter. He was born in late 1999 and is originally from Arakan (now Rakhine State) in Myanmar. Growing up under the oppression of the Burmese regime, he fled his country at the young age of sixteen to avoid arbitrary arrests. Primarily writing in Rohingya, he started writing in early 2016 about the longing for his homeland and the plights of his Rohingya community. However, his poems were first published in 2019 in the anthology "I am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond" (Arc Publications, 2019). His poems have also been featured in "Modern Poetry in Translation" (Summer 2020), "Border Lines: Poems of Migration" (Everyman's Library, 2020), "No, Love Is Not Dead" (Chambers, 2021), and "Adi Magazine" (Spring 2021).

The illustration is by Klaussie Williams, a painter, drawer and ceramicist based in London. You can find more of their work on https://www.klaussiewilliams.com/shop and Instagram.

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

Subscribe now

European museums and galleries can often feel alien and lonely to those who aren’t used to them. At least that is how I felt, when I visited them in my mid twenties for the first time. There were beautiful things everywhere, but I felt confused in these authoritative islands of glass, where looted beauty was exhibited as if to re-establish cultural control. I remember cowering under large canvases of imperial sea voyages and flitting around nervously until suddenly, something – an elusive Modigliani of a sad man sitting in an armchair; a rough sketch by an artist that illuminated a youthful earnestness – felt worthwhile. If intimacy is so rare in these spaces, it is unsurprising that when these gallery walls dissolve, it is noted with a success akin to being revolutionary. Take the instance of Thai artist Rirkit Tiravanija serving thai curry and rice to an audience in his 1992 artwork Untitled (exhibited in different iterations since) so viewers could be ‘within the artwork’ instead of outside it. Tiravinija’s work was celebrated widely even though and especially because it did something natural and instinctive. Because it brought undecorated interaction into the gallery’s tall, white walls.

Today, food is often the way to change the dynamics of art making and viewing. Since eating and cooking are approachable things, it is claimed that the quotidian humanity infused within food is the reason these artworks matter. Even so, my own favourite food as art is the one that resists this easy translatability — like when the Nigerian chef and writer Tunde Wey asked white diners to pay 100 USD for a piece of chicken in his dinner series Hot Chicken Shit as an “outrageous solution to the outrageous problem” of gentrification in the US. Or several instances of the artist Rajyashri Goody’s work, which destroys the caste hierarchy of food in India and takes back from dominant-caste violence on Dalit communities the joy of food as a right. 

In today’s compilation, five writers think about five artworks in the genre of food and meals as art. Their arguments are as diverse as the artworks they pick, looking at how food is used to interrogate dominant status-quos, and when food is used as a tool for resurrection, bridging divides between the world inside the gallery and the one outside it. As these short essays exemplify, food in and as art is a vast, expansive world, and the works made within it can take several forms and aim to accomplish different things, with little clasping them together aside from the fact that they invoke food as a part of their process or result.  Even though the artfulness of food seems to be most discussed when it is the babyish delights of the rich (like white-ribboned 300 dollar baguette bags), both food and art are really meaningful when they resist their most commodifiable tropes. And especially when they divert from that painful tendency to morph wonderful, everyday things into inaccessible luxuries, insisting that these are the only cases in which food, or anything else, becomes art. SD

A restaurant can be art, but can an artwork create community?, by Daniel Neofetou

In September of 2021, I attended a friend’s birthday dinner in the garden of a restaurant in Stoke Newington. It was in the early days of our collective emergence from over twelve months of pandemic restrictions, and every social event still seemed infused with a deep sense of conviviality borne of people relishing face-to-face human contact. The meal itself, however, was probably one of the most underwhelming I have ever had. It was a three-course set menu, with a courgette and green bean salad as a starter, a main of rice with fresh herbs and caramelised onion, and a panna cotta and mixed-berry coulis for dessert. It was ostensibly incredibly cheap, at £7.50 per head, but the portions were smaller than airline food and, egregiously, the rice was so undercooked that it was crunchy. The restaurant, however, was not simply a restaurant. Instead, it was an artwork entitled Shamiyaana by the Karachi-born, London-based artist Rasheed Araeen, first exhibited at the 2017 Athens documenta. 

The notion that a restaurant can also be an artwork might seem strange to people not well-acquainted with the art world, but it should be mundanely familiar to those that are. The first well-known examples of restaurant meals being presented in an art context were probably Daniel Spoerri’s Restaurant Spoerri in Düsseldorf, founded in 1968, and Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard’s FOOD, which existed in New York’s SoHo from 1971–73. These were restaurants run by and for artists, rather than explicitly artworks themselves, but these categories were decisively conflated in the early 90s, when Rirkrit Tiravanija’s series of canonical relational artworks commenced with pad thai (1990); here, the artist cooked and served food for visitors to the Paula Allen Gallery in New York. These works, and works like them, always seem to rest on two central ideas: the (mostly implicit) idea that a meal becomes art rather than simply a meal because it has been prepared or commissioned by an artist, and the (explicit) idea that the object of the artwork is to bring a community together. 

I won’t go into the first assumption at length, but it does raise the question of whether food can be appreciated as art qua food. Meals in an art context are not removed from their functionality in the world to the extent of a ready-made or found object; one cannot urinate in Duchamp’s Fountain (without getting kicked out of the gallery) but Tiravanija’s pad thai was there to be eaten. Nevertheless, there is the sense that food in an art context is primarily ‘interesting’ insofar as it is afforded the status of art, tacitly superseding its status as mere food. An interesting corrective here is the conception of ‘Kochen als Kunstgattung’ – which translates as ‘cooking as an art form’ – that the avant-garde filmmaker and keen chef Peter Kubelka has been propounding since 1967. Kubelka does not think cooking needs to be validated by art, arguing instead that food is ‘the mother of all arts,’ capable of informing and illuminating all other artistic practices.

As for the notion that food in an art context serves to bring communities together, this was true in the case of the interventions by Spoerri and Matta-Clark, Gooden and Girouard, which fostered and were completely embedded in collaboration between artists. In my personal experience, this has also been true of culinary projects within pre-existing DIY art scenes, such as chats cafe, run by Leah Walker, Berry Patten and Dannie Russo, whose residency at the project space Jupiter Woods in London’s South Bermondsey is for me inextricable from memories of the summer of 2018. However, in terms of works which are in commercial galleries or commissioned by international art festivals, this aim becomes the ostensibly more noble one of creating a community. According to Araeen, this was precisely the intention of Shamiyaana. In an interview with the Guardian promoting the restaurant, Araeen used terms which made it sound more like a community centre, affirming that with the project he intended to cultivate a space for ‘making, reading, playing, eating together and talking together’. 

Now, unlike the blue-chip gestures of artists such as Tiravanija, Araeen has at least attempted to extend the reach of Shamiyaana beyond disparate art-world punters. In its first iteration as part of documenta, Shamiyaana was located in a central square in Athens, and provided free meals indiscriminately at a time when Greece was at the centre of the migrant crisis; in its location in Stoke Newington, free takeaways were given to people from the neighbourhood. 

Yet, in both instances, Shamiyaana could be accused of tacit complicity with forces which dismiss or even erode already-existing communities. The Athens documenta was widely criticised for taking advantage of low wages and free or very cheap buildings eagerly proffered by Greek institutions, with little regard for the city itself. In an interview with Yanis Varoufakis, the curator and writer iLiana Fokianaki recalled that invigilators were ordering hungry Greek pensioners to give up their seats to students when they were deemed to have occupied them for too long, because Shamiyaana was, according to invigilators, ‘not a food bank but an artwork.’ And in the case of Stoke Newington High Street, the road has undergone intense gentrification in recent decades. While it was definitely not the intention of Shamiyaana to hasten this process, it begs the question of why an imposed artwork-restaurant might serve the function of bringing a community together better than local eateries which are already there. 

Here, we might recall Kubelka’s notion of ‘cooking as an art form’ and ask whether the intersection of food and art praxis should occur at the point of artistic production at all. Instead, perhaps we should treat food as always-already art, and thus the contextualisation of food as art – that is to say, its appreciation as an aesthetic phenomenon in a particular historical and cultural context – should occur at the point of reception. And we might conclude that this work is already underway, and has been for quite some time, under the name ‘food criticism.’

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Ceci n’est pas un cafe, by Rachel Karasik 

I became disillusioned with the art world early on in my curation degree. Between lectures with titles like ‘The Death of the Country House’ (more of a lamentation of a bygone era than a critique of colonialism) and a brief weekend job invigilating at a famous gallery that wouldn’t let you speak or sit down during shifts, I quickly developed the jaded opinion that while anything can be art, not much art is good and, like with many creative industries, what is good is not necessarily what succeeds. By the end of my degree, I’d distanced myself as much as possible from the art aspects of my curriculum, finding solace in my love of food and convincing my lecturers to let me write about Come Dine with Me for my dissertation. 

In 2012, a year after graduating, I was working far from the art world in social innovation and very much figuring out what it means to be an adult. Some colleagues invited me to see Jeremy Deller’s retrospective, Joy in People, at the Hayward Gallery in London. Deller, a Turner-prize-winning English conceptual artist, creates work which often focuses on the social and political, frequently collaborating with communities to create installations and performance pieces that celebrate and honour the histories, as well as the playfulness and melancholy, of everyday people.

Valerie’s Snack Bar sat in the middle of the gallery space, like a set for a play, brightly lit and filled with visitors milling around, sitting in booths or queuing, while a gallery assistant served complimentary mugs of black tea (with milk or sugar) from behind the functioning counter. Framed by wooden posts, a big glowing sign above beamed ‘Snack Bar’ and beckoned visitors into the installation. Classic red plastic bucket seats bolted to the floor, four to a table, filled the compact front, while behind the counter, where the tea was served, neon handwritten signs shouted the imaginary menu specials of the day. The installation would have been inherently familiar to anyone who has stepped foot in a British cafe, but was uncanny in its placement within a vast gallery space. I was instantly taken, and the story behind the piece made me love it even more. 

Created as part of Procession, a commission for the 2009 Manchester Art Festival, Valerie’s Snack Bar started as a float in a parade celebrating ‘public space and the people occupying it’. Sitting alongside smokers, carnival queens and Big Issue sellers carrying union-style banners, Deller’s work was an almost life-sized recreation of a real cafe located in Manchester’s Bury Market (stall 49, for those interested) which was then hoisted onto the back of a lorry, filled with regulars who joyfully waved to onlookers, and driven through town. Apart from the fact that this piece of art was three-dimensional and dared to take up a large share of the gallery space, it celebrated the cafe as an inherently positive part of the social fabric of a city, inviting visitors to become part of the work. 

I had seen art depicting everyday cafes and social dining spaces many times before, mostly in paintings – the isolated diners in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks; Toulouse-Lautrec’s bustling swirls of absinthe-soaked cafe dwellers. I wrote an essay at university about a painting depicting a man gruesomely devouring a fish at a restaurant akin to Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son. The cafe or dining space is secondary to the characters and actions within these pieces – a backdrop that in turn reflects the moral or social standing of the scene. Meanwhile, Deller puts the cafe front and centre with Valerie’s Snack Bar, both literally and metaphorically. In its original form in Procession, it, and its regulars, were the queens of the parade, and in its static form in the gallery, the piece invites visitors to celebrate and experience the cafe as a cultural artefact in and of itself. 

In the hands of the wrong artist, Valerie’s Snack Bar could have easily felt like a parody of working-class culture for the delight of the artistic elite, but instead, Deller’s brand of ‘social surrealism’ resurrected a fragment of daily life into the gallery, familiar in its textures even though it was far from the din, smells, and bustle of its actual locale. Deller is an artist known to be inherently collaborative and political, one who embeds humanity in his work. With Valerie’s Snack Bar, and indeed the entirety of Procession, Deller centred the people and places that make up communities, and it’s a piece that I’ve referenced and returned to again and again in the decade since. 

As I wandered around and through Valerie’s, sipping my tea and waiting for a spare booth, there was a buzzing energy made up of chatter, slurps and excitement at being granted permission to climb into, and become part of, a piece of art that felt so familiar to anyone who had even eaten a fry-up.

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Wrapper Resurrection, by Ruby Tandoh

The first time I saw Michael Rakowitz’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, it felt familiar, even though I didn’t know what I was seeing. His work included a reconstruction of wall relief panels from an ancient Assyrian palace – the Northwest Palace of Nimrud – in a colourful, textured papier mache. There were figurines, pots, coins, urns and votive objects, each one a small riot of colour. These works, which formed part of Rakowitz’s ever-evolving project The invisible enemy should not exist (2006–), were reimaginings of treasures looted or destroyed in Iraq. The artefacts were made not from stone, metal, clay or wood but from ephemera: scraps of print media and, very often, food packaging. Here was a Maggi logo; over there a glimpse of a date syrup can. Fragments of Arabic script stuttered across the collaged surfaces. The gallery became a resurrection of looted artefacts through the visual language of the supermarket.

Even when it is doing the job it’s supposed to do, food packaging is seldom just itself. In Rakowitz’s visions of a lost Iraq, wrappers are evocative fragments of lives half remembered and others that could have been. As Iraqi Jews living in Baghdad, Rakowitz’s grandparents were born into a dynamic community that was quickly dispersed at the onset of the first Arab-Israeli war. They made their way first to Mumbai, then eventually to the US, where they settled in Long Island. Rakowitz’s relationship to his own history is disjointed: he is both Arab and Jew, part of an Iraqi family living in the US in the wake of the Iraq War. There is longing here, as well as heartbreak and futility; as his mother shared with the New Yorker, in his work Rakowitz ‘tries to bring forth something that is dead’. One of his largest resurrections, May the arrogant not prevail, is a reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate: once a processional route into ancient Babylon, it stands in what is now Iraq. Rakowitz’s miniature Ishtar gate is five metres high and six metres wide, the shimmering blue bricks of the original fashioned from hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of Arabic Pepsi and bottled water labels. The gold detailing that traces the edges of the arch is now created from Lipton Tea packets.

This resurrection isn’t just about the splendour of the gate itself but also about what has been lost in translation. The original gate was constructed before 500 BC by King Nebuchadnezzar II. It was then lost to history, before being excavated and partially, poorly rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin in the early 1900s. (Germany has since declined to repatriate the ruins.) In the 1950s, a small reconstruction was erected once more near the ruins of Babylon, though by the turn of the century this too had been misappropriated, becoming a backdrop for photos of American soldiers stationed on a nearby military base during the Iraq War. Rakowitz’s gate is a reconstruction many times over, made from food packaging that was sourced from Arabic stores in the same Germany where the original ruins are being held captive. Approached from the front, this structure is spectacular. From the back, it is unadorned, rickety, its structural beams showing and its paper-thin veneer exposed for what it is. ‘It’s performance,’ Rakowitz has said of his work. ‘It's the projection of magical meaning onto objects.’

By dressing up ancient monuments in the wrappers of daily diasporic life, Rakowitz unveils the authority of the everyday. He shows that especially in times of war, especially when far from home, even inexpensive, mass-produced foods can take on an other-worldly aura. It isn’t that food packaging is uniquely meaningful: we can find meaning anywhere, but very often this ‘anywhere’ is the home – where we start from – and the ordinary mess it contains.

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‘Please, take this’ by Louis Shankar

Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) is an esoteric, shape-shifting sculpture: a pile of multicoloured, individually wrapped sweets that can be arranged and displayed at the curator’s discretion. The piece has an ‘ideal weight’ of 175 pounds – this was the weight of the eponymous Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’ boyfriend and the love of his life before he began to lose weight due to AIDS. ‘There was no other consideration involved except that I wanted to make an artwork that could disappear, that never existed, and it was a metaphor for when Ross was dying,’ Felix explained in an interview.

​​Felix Gonzalez-Torres was a Cuban-born American sculptor and installation artist whose sexuality informed his work in covert and conceptual ways. His art took a variety of forms, and he worked with assorted and eclectic mediums: billboards; stacks of posters; beaded curtains; strings of low-watt light bulbs hanging from walls or ceilings. 

His most idiosyncratic and celebrated works are surely these ‘candy spills’ (‘candy’ works much better than ‘sweets’, don’t you think?). These pieces – nineteen artworks first exhibited between 1991 and 1993 – include chocolates and fortune cookies. Visitors are invited to take the sweets; the gallery is instructed to replenish the supply, although curatorial discretion can be applied as to when and how. 

Felix didn’t merely reject the maxim of the gallery – ‘Do not touch the artworks’ – but reversed it, too: ‘Please, take this’. How many do you take – just the one? Or a cheeky handful, to share or save for a later date? Chocolates wrapped in foil; boiled sweets or bonbons: a minor gift from the absent artist. The small sweet treat dissolves, slowly, inside you. It becomes a part of you; the sugar flows through your blood, fuels you. A sweet treat on your tongue: you salivate and swallow. It’s childish and, simultaneously, somewhat erotic, sensual. This candy is part of a portrait of Ross, after all. 

This act of anonymous sharing had heightened implications at the crux of the AIDS epidemic, before an effective drug treatment had been developed. People erroneously feared HIV could be spread by touch or through kissing. ‘Please, take this’.

These works survive and persist, creating a community – everyone who has ever, over thirty years and counting, taken and eaten a sweet is a part of something shared, part of Felix and Ross’s legacy. I’ve not yet visited or seen one of the candy spills. I have pages from two of Felix’s poster stack works rolled up in the corner of my living room. I still want a candy, though (well, two: one to eat and one to keep; a multisensory memory and a souvenir). 

Recently, the Art Institute of Chicago – where the piece is kept – came under fire for removing reference to Ross and AIDS from the artwork’s caption. ‘How can the Art Institute engage in such a brazen act of queer erasure?’ Zac Thriffiley asked in the Windy City Times. Responding to the criticism, the Art Institute has since amended the text, once again including reference to Ross and his diagnosis with AIDS. Affirming their memory – both Felix and Ross – in the face of such erasure is vital. 

This candy is more than just spilled confectionary. ‘It’s also about excess, about the excess of pleasure,’ Felix explained. ‘It’s like a child who wants a landscape of candies. First and foremost it’s about Ross. Then I wanted to please myself and then everybody.’ Felix died in Miami on 9 January 1996 due to complications arising from AIDS, aged 38. 

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Habit of Hands, by Megan Luddy O’Leary

Throughout the pandemic, I was surprised that the deepest grief I felt was not for the things I thought I would miss most – clubbing, sharing drinks at house parties, breathing communal air at sweaty gigs. Instead, what I yearned for above all was gathering friends around a table and cooking with them: watching them smash garlic, chop onions; talking as they cooked dinner, elusive subjects emerging with the steam from boiling pots. And so, when we emerged from a third lockdown in the autumn of 2021, I decided to examine the act of women cooking together in an artistic project titled Habits of Hands. I wanted to capture the act of the ‘habit of hands’ as discussed by the French philosopher Luce Giard – a way in which cooking becomes an act of communication between women in kitchens hazy with smoke, with the intimacy that cannot not be recreated over a video call. 

I found inspiration in the Irish artist Jennie Moran, whose project Luncheonette I knew well, as it lived in the basement of my college, the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin, where I spent every day from 2018 to 2021. Luncheonette wasn’t a short-lived installation – it was a functional canteen. In it, Moran provided warm porridge, cheap coffees topped with oat milk, raspberry scones, cheap soups topped with orzo, and Gubbeen cheese sandwiches to students, staff and wanderer-bys who climbed down into her refuge. I loved Luncheonette during my time in NCAD. My eventual college friendships grew out of the hospitality which Moran provided, over bowls of her roasted red-pepper soup. When I spoke to Moran in March 2022, she described how she imbues lifeless spaces with ‘dust’ – or a beautiful energy – by serving communal meals in them. Luncheonette was dynamic: it was built by everyone who entered it, creating and recreating itself every day. 

Growing up, I routinely cooked in my family home, but once my sibling developed a life-threatening eating disorder there was no longer any magic in cooking. Instincts for taste became dulled in favour of brokering peace around meals. But through watching my friends cook during my time in college and eating at Luncheonette, my intuitions around cooking and eating were rewired. I absorbed not only cooking skills from my female friends but a belief that I should be nourished. A friend made me pasta. I watched her make a full bowl for me, because she cared about me, and a full bowl for herself because she cared about herself. And it was this language – the selection of the friendliest bowls, the chat around a kitchen – that I wanted to transmit into my project. 

And so, in the spring of 2022, I made artefacts that reflected my personal history of cooking and the broader legacy of women cooking for one another. I embroidered a tablecloth with dinner conversations about cooking I had with my female friends. I created a ceramic series illustrated with information about the collective innovation of Mediterranean cuisines, which come from peasant women perpetually developing and passing on recipes. I conducted interviews and made oil-pastel drawings, all of which I gathered into an animated film. The film begins with a quote by Giard and moves on to conversations I shared – with my grandmother, friends and Moran herself – about relationships to domesticity and cooking. The looping of my hand-drawn animations reflects the beauty of this kind of cooking, which is always passed through family or friends like seamless legacies. 

To watch The Kitchen Table, please scroll up to the start of the newsletter and press play.

To watch the animation Habits of Hands, please see below

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Credits

Daniel Neofetou is a lecturer in critical and cultural studies at the University of Northampton. His most recent book Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War was published in 2021.

Rachel Karasik is a former chef and current freelance project manager and producer working across food, tech, social innovation and systems change as part of the collective Iris+Birch. She also spends a lot of her time making both practical and impractical ceramics, which you can check out here. 

Ruby Tandoh is a writer on food and culture whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Vice, Taste, Eater, Vittles and more.

Louis Shankar is a writer and researcher focussing on queer life and culture based in London. They have recently started a PhD at UCL focusing on the work of the artist David Wojnarowicz. 

Megan Luddy O’Leary is an award-winning freelance illustrator and artist from Ireland. She draws, paints, animates, writes, and makes things out of clay, collage and embroidery. Her work has been featured by Gill books and VIBE Magazine. Find her at meganluddy.cargo.site

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, and Jonathan Nunn and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles, which you can read on the Vittles back catalogue.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

Subscribe now

During the mid-19th century, a tendency emerged in British design that prioritised traditional methods of craftsmanship, looking back to previous trends in architecture, pottery, and weaving, as well as rural folk methods, to revive what its adherents considered to be a moribund discipline. It was called the Arts and Crafts Movement, and its motivations were Newtonian in the sense that its reach behind into the past was equal and opposite to the Industrial Revolution’s jump into the future, and the exponential increase in mechanised production that came with it. As the Industrial Revolution accelerated the British economy from one which was predominantly based around domestic agriculture to one that centred on the factory and imported agricultural goods, there was a vast migratory upheaval: in 1800, 70% of people in Britain lived in the countryside; just a century later this was 20%. 

It would not be an exaggeration to say that all British food writing that has come after this has been a process of dealing with this enormous rupture. Either you are an Arts and Crafter, idealising the foodways of the rooted peasant, yearning for a life that has been lost to you by making pesto from scratch, or you’re a factory apologist, romanticising an increasingly industrial and homogenised food system. Or you’re a mixture of both, but you still have to have an opinion. The genius of writers like Elizabeth David, Primrose Boyd, and Patience Gray is that they romanticised the peasants of other countries while they still existed, so the food with cultural capital went from grande cuisine to Mediterranean peasant food, from consommés to pottage (with Heinz in a can looked down on in both hierarchies). But soon, as the peasantry of France and Italy disappeared, and countries around the world have industrialised, every country has had to reckon with their own culinary rupture. 

It’s now China’s turn. China’s mass industrialisation happened after Britain’s, so it’s no surprise that it’s only now having its own moment of peasant nostalgia. At the tip of this trend is the subject of today’s newsletter by Barclay Bram, the TV series A Bite of China, which is less a show and more of a phenomenon. Over a decade after it was first filmed, its startling how almost everything now looks like A Bite, from the American TV shows which lovingly film a table spread as if it were the Turin Shroud, to the TikTokers who – misleadingly or otherwise – monetise their own life in the country via ASMR and unnecessarily complicated cooking projects. In a Filipino restaurant recently, I couldn’t help but notice the YouTube video playing on the wall was of a woman in camo walking through a forest to forage for roots. Some of these videos have the feel of doomsday preppers, but they are reminders, as Bram notes, for ‘involuted city dwellers of where they came from’, a glimpse from the factory window on a world whose time is about to set. JN

The rural nostalgia of Chinese cottagecore, by Barclay Bram

A Bite of China (舌尖上的中国) opens in a forest, where a young Tibetan woman called Zhuo Ma climbs a steep hillside with her mother in search of highly prized matsutake mushrooms. For each kilometre of mountain she climbs, she will find only one mushroom, she says. Then the camera cuts to an extreme close-up of a cleaver slicing a matsutake into thin slivers. We are told that in the top restaurants a plate can fetch up to 1600元 (or £160 in 2012, when the show was shot). We see a chef in a tall hat, a steel grill between him and the camera, burning perfect griddle marks on the mushroom. But we don’t know who he is, or which restaurant he works in, because a few moments later we’re back with Zhuo Ma and her mother as they drive their moped in the early dusk. They’re going mushroom hunting again. 

It took a team of some of China’s greatest filmmakers – eight directors, fifteen cinematographers, three researchers – thirteen months and over seventy different locations to film the first season of A Bite of China, which was produced by the state broadcaster CCTV. When the series landed it was a revelation, soon hailed – by both Chinese and Anglophone media – as the best documentary series the country had ever produced. Each episode takes a central theme, like ‘Gifts of Nature’ or ‘Secrets of the Kitchen’, and then travels to different places where a particular food speaks to that topic. You’ll like A Bite of China if you like the idea of moonlight dancing on the edge of a cleaver, or the hiss of oil, or if you want to dwell on the obsidian quality of soy sauce. It is so beautifully shot that its closest analogue in the west wouldn’t be a food show, it would be the BBC series Life or Planet Earth. (After people watching the third season noted that some of its scenes were eerily reminiscent of Planet Earth, one of A Bite’s directors sheepishly admitted that some of the season’s B-roll had, in fact, been licensed from the BBC.)

That first scene demonstrates how A Bite of China thinks about food. The show is interested in the hidden masters that exist throughout society: the grandmothers who know exactly how much salt to rub into a leg of pork to make ham, or the banquet chef in Shunde – one of the last remaining – who is able to build giant ovens to steam whole pigs for a festival. If there is one thing that is repeated over and over in A Bite, it’s that China is a land of traditions. The subtext to this, and the thing that cemented the show’s popularity, is that those traditions are disappearing. 

But more than a focus on tradition, A Bite of China shone a spotlight on the food cultures of the periphery. Sometimes this literally meant the country’s edges – like Hainan, Xinjiang, Yunnan and Dêqên Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture – but wherever it was, it always privileged the rural over the urban. As one commentator wrote, the show is ‘a helpless elegy of the traditional Chinese rural world sung in the face of the impact of modern civilisation.’ In 2012, this expansive vision of Chinese food stood resolute against the economic headwinds that blew so intensely towards the supposedly urbanised and modern future of China. The show renders Zhuo Ma more worthy of screen time than the chef who griddles her mushroom because she represents a lineage of foragers. The chef, meanwhile, is part of China’s urban core, an individual node rendered nameless in a consumerist chain.’

For the stressed-out, glued-to-their-screens city dwellers of 2010s China, there was something utterly transporting about the type of food that A Bite of China showcased. When I lived in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and home to 20 million people, I lived with a retired chef known as Brother Bing. At the spring festival Brother Bing had to borrow a table from his friend to accommodate all the food he’d cooked. He then made so many dishes that they overflowed even that table, so plates ended up stacked on chairs. Afterwards, bellies full, we lolled around on the sofa. We put on A Bite of China, fighting fire with fire, as acid reflux gave way to vistas of mountains and sea. I watched Brother Bing watch the show, saw his eyes widen as a grandmother in Jiaxing, her hands gently quaking, wrapped glutinous rice in a bamboo leaf. He was rapt. The show’s subtle transgression was that it held up the rural not as somewhere backwards and undeveloped, but as a container of unremarked-upon – and rapidly fading – beauty. 

Brother Bing was from the city. He was born during the Cultural Revolution, in the late 1960s. In 1978, two years after Mao Zedong died, the government had radically changed tack, dismantling the staid Soviet-style planned economy of its predecessors. At that point, urban residents like Brother Bing made up only 18% of China’s population. Over the next 40 years, as the economy exploded, cities swallowed up the rural population like hungry mouths. By 2012, the urban population had increased to 700 million people – 52.6% of the total population. By 2022, 65% of China was urban – some 920 million people. 

In Brother Bing’s lifetime, Chengdu and other Chinese cities had gorged themselves on the surrounding villages and towns. With all of this development and urbanisation came a series of propaganda campaigns and slogans. Deng Xiaoping, the economic liberaliser who succeeded Mao, said that it would be necessary for ‘one segment of society to get rich first.’ By this he meant coastal urban areas; China’s rural interior poured into the cities at the coast. The cliché of a city of 14 million like Shenzhen, across the water from Hong Kong, blossoming out of rice paddies was an image that replicated itself in various forms across China. 

As one segment of society grew richer, the rural areas became demographic quagmires. People of working age went to seek fortunes (or at least, something more), leaving their children behind with elderly relatives. (Another slogan at the time: ‘Development is a hard truth.’) As China’s urban population rapidly increased, and the fruits of modernisation were made concrete by the whirring cranes and constant construction in cities, the rural fell ever further behind. The irony that Mao’s agrarian communist revolution had come to this, so shortly after his death, was not lost on some people. But the ‘hard truth’ was that, for China to claw itself out of poverty, it would have to do so unevenly, and in cities. 

The relatively recent transition from the rural to the urban is why A Bite broke through in such a powerful way. Most people in China still had a strong connection to the countryside, whether through close relatives or land, but they’d also just seen decades of media mythologising the modern glory of cities. A Bite of China  switched focus, taking as seriously the culinary traditions of the tiniest villages as those of major cities, and seeking to rebalance the story. If development was a hard truth, then there were soft truths nestled in the far-flung mountains of Yunnan, the ice-lakes of Jilin and the lush forests of Guizhou. The lengths to which the researchers went in order to find these stories was immense. In the second season, Chen Xiaoqing, the director of the whole series, apparently forbade his sub-directors and producers from driving to locations; instead, when they went scouting they had to do so via public transport, in the hopes they’d strike up the kind of conversations that would lead them to their subjects. 

Chen Xiaoqing is, by all accounts, a humble guy whose love of traditional cooking is not affected. I spoke to Chuang Tzu-i, a food writer from Taiwan who consulted on one of Chen’s projects. Chuang had been introduced to Chen Xiaoqing through the publisher they share (Chen published a book, also called A Bite of China, to sit alongside the series), and Chen invited her for dinner: here was one of China’s biggest food personalities potentially taking a prominent food writer from Taiwan out on the town in Beijing. But instead of taking Chuang to a restaurant, he took her for a bowl of noodles prepared by the mother of his friend. He said he knew he could have received special treatment in any of the restaurants they’d gone to, but he just wanted Chuang to eat something simple and made with love. She watched, mesmerised, as the mother created a bing from scratch in fifteen minutes, somehow handling dough made sticky with boiling water without resting it. 

Of course, A Bite of China was not without its controversies. Some netizens baulked when it first aired, calling the show a fairy tale that whitewashed the legions of food scandals happening in the country at the time (this was shortly after tainted milk poisoned 300,000 children, and 18 tonnes of pig carcasses washed up on the banks of Shanghai’s Huangpu river, among other tragedies). Some also missed the point, arguing that to spotlight these fading traditions was to ignore how people actually ate. Others complained that Season 2 had featured too much ‘humanity’ and not enough food, a criticism which was taken on board. Season 3, made without Chen Xiaoqing’s involvement, felt more like a glossy advert cycling through dishes than something with a story to tell. 

The show had a bigger problem, though, which was there from its inception, and was possibly inevitable: something with so much beauty and gravity will inevitably reshape the fabric of the universe in which it shines. 

In 2019, I travelled around Sichuan with a film crew for a project that ultimately came to nothing. I remember driving along a single mountain road that had three restaurants, all with banners claiming that A Bite of China had been filmed there. When Yunnan Nuodeng ham was featured in the very first episode of the show, its sales volume increased seventeenfold in just five days. In many small towns around the country, there are restaurants or family homes that are now tourist destinations, forever changed by the fact that they appeared for a few brief moments in the banquet of A Bite of China. 

By trying to celebrate the hidden talents of a disappearing China, the show created new appetites. The entire cottage industry of rural douyin (Chinese TikTokers) has seen millions of young Chinese people give up cities in search of the kind of life A Bite of China so poignantly captured. Where the show had been novel in spotlighting the ancient and peripheral food ways of China, rural douyin empowered creators in those places to make their own content; in a way, A Bite of China cratered because of these douyin. Gone was the omniscient narration of Li Lihong (a fair baritone approximation of the gravitas of David Attenborough); now millions of creators could speak with their own voice. 

The biggest, like Li Ziqi, became boons for local products and tourism. Li grew up in rural Mianyang, raised by her grandparents. She left aged 14, moving to a city where she worked first as a waitress, then a nightclub DJ. But she returned to the countryside in 2012, the same year A Bite of China took off, to look after her ailing grandmother. There she started an online shop and, in 2016, began vlogging. By 2021, Li was granted a Guinness World Record for the most-subscribed Chinese language YouTube channel; she now has 17.4 million subscribers. (This is notable not least because YouTube is banned in China, where her Douyin – China’s version of TikTok – has over 50 million subscribers and 200 million likes.) Li’s branded products are also legion, with her luosi fen noodles so popular that online distributor Tmall had to construct its own factory to produce them. 

But Li is just one of China’s many cottagecore stars. There’s Uncle Rural Gourmet, who makes elaborate, multi-day dishes like steamed cow’s head baked in clay. Then there’s Chen Dan, whose online handle xiangchou 乡愁 translates to something between ‘nostalgia’ and ‘homesickness’ – a neat summary of the thread that binds all of these accounts. Chen has over 180 million likes across nearly 200 videos on Douyin, and describes her work as ‘using a small lens to capture rural life in the countryside.’ The popularity of these videos is intimately related to the desperation that many urban dwellers feel at the intensity of their lives. China has urbanised, but it has also grown unsustainably expensive and unequal. Another hard truth. 

If A Bite of China was pushed aside by the creators of rural douyin, that’s not to suggest that these accounts are artisanal windows into the bucolic countryside. The biggest accounts, like Li Ziqi’s, have huge production teams, massive sponsorship deals and murky partnerships with local governments desperate to drive tourism and sell local handicrafts. Li’s attempt to promote the beauty of her rural life in Mianyang, Sichuan saw her embroiled in a lawsuit with her management company, Hangzhou Weinian, who were located in the eastern coastal boomtown of Hangzhou. The irony, of course, was what this spat revealed: ultimately, even the biggest champions of China’s rural traditions were themselves driving money into the cities. 

Since the pandemic I have been living back in London. Sometimes I find myself watching rural douyin or rewatching old episodes of A Bite of China, suddenly nostalgic for a life that I lived adjacent to for a time. Food has a unique ability to connect people; I don’t imagine myself in rural Mianyang, nor do I have plans to quit London for a foothill in Yunnan, but I can imagine eating that food. I can feel myself sitting on the floor of a thatched cottage, a steaming bowl of noodles before me. Yet beyond the visceral pleasures of that image, it’s worth remembering what the show meant for millions of people when they first saw it. A Bite of China  travelled to the furthest corners of the country and brought its bleeding edge into dialogue with its urban core. It reminded involuted city dwellers of where they came from – beyond those concrete confines, a diversity that stretches thousands of years into the past. 

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Where to watch A Bite of China:

Season 1 – original mandarin, with mandarin subtitles

Seasons 1 and 2 – with unofficial but reasonable subtitles 

Season 1 – with hilariously bad dubbing (I don’t know who decided that Tibetans would have Australian accents in English). You also lose the amazing sound of the original narrator Li Lihong’s voice, which sounds like a warm hug.

Credits

Barclay Bram is a writer based in London. You can find more of his work at http://www.barclaybram.com/

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Sharanya Deepak and Rebecca May Johnson, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles, which you can read on the Vittles back catalogue.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

Subscribe now

The Story of Japanese Food Told Through Four Arts

1. Pottery: How Japanese Food Became Everyone’s, by Jonathan Nunn

When I used to work in tea, one of our favourite things to do when there were no customers in the shop was to watch YouTube videos, mostly of old food adverts from the early 90s, like the Tango advert that led to a real-life spike in slap-based assaults, or the Gino Ginelli advert which was ahead of its time in its rejection of Italian food orthdoxy (sample lyrics: ‘Take home a Gino Ginelli ice-creama piazza Italia’). I can’t remember how many videos deep we were when we came across an account that scoured online videos of people conducting Korean tea ceremony, and denouncing them as inauthentic. Whenever anyone did something that the narrator disapproved of – using an electric kettle, pouring the tea in the wrong order – the Queen song ‘Liar’ would play, while the word ‘FAKE’ flashed up on screen. 

Debates over the correct preparation of tea – like debates over the correct preparation of any other food – are so often a proxy war for something else. In this case, the account was run by a right-wing Japanese nationalist who saw the ceremonies as a Korean encroachment on what he considered to be a purely Japanese art. These review videos were playing into a long history of distrust from Japan to both Koreas, one that has been exacerbated in recent years, with Shinzo Abe (Japan’s prime minister from 2012 to 2020) repeatedly making revisionist statements about Japan’s colonial role on the peninsular, and appearing to minimise war crimes. Yet the Japanese right-wing distrust of Korea is not just historic; there is an increasing paranoia about North Korea’s geopolitical aims, as well as a kind of jealousy at the popularity of the Hallyu – the cultural wave of Korean influence, from TV dramas to K-pop, that has done for South Korea today what Nintendo and Studio Ghibli did for Japan in the 90s. 

Yet even as these videos impotently raged against the Korean ‘appropriation’ of the tea ceremony, they ignored that there was once another Korean wave, back in the Koryŏ era (918–1392 CE) during which both tea and ceramics, as well as Japan and Korea, were completely entwined in a shared history of exchange and colonisation. Tea, before it became the most consumed beverage in the world, was once an obscure Chinese medicine, and it was only during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) that consumption of Chinese tea became elevated into something close to an art. Tea expert Timothy d’Offay writes that in this time ‘the cultivation, processing and preparation of green tea became a skilled practise and art with its own set of protocols.’ Before this, tea would have been steamed and compressed into a cake, or drunk as an infusion with adulterations like salt, cloves or fruit peel. 

During the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), green tea in China evolved again, starting to be ground into a very fine powder and whisked into milky-white froth. This pale proto-matcha was one of several factors that influenced the more limpid style of ceramics which emerged from the Song period. Chief among them was the development of celadon, a glossy, pale green-blue glaze conjured through iron oxide, which had the added attraction that it could show off the colour of the white frothy tea. Over in Korea, meanwhile, where loose-leaf tea and its attendant ceramic tradition had spread through the movement of Buddhist monks, the Koryŏ intelligentsia codified more elaborate ways of drinking tea, utilising ever more beautiful celadon bowls with decorative patterns to drink their tea. The ceremony of drinking tea in Korea became multi-sensory, with aroma, taste, colour and texture all in harmony; a celebration of nature and craft, as well as religious and philosophical ideas. The most sought-after potters were the Jungkooks of their day.

As the Koryŏ era faded, neo-Confucianism supplanted Buddhism as the dominant way of thinking. Buddhist temples (and, by extension, Korean tea drinking) went into decline. But the Korean influence on tea culture and ceramics left a lineage in another, unexpected, way. In the late sixteenth century, when Japan invaded Korea, many of the most skilled Korean potters were forcibly removed to go work in Japan, where ‘Korai chawan’ (Korean tea bowls) had become highly prized. It was through these potters that many styles of pottery now considered to be Japanese – for example, mishima and karatsu – were first produced. It has even been suggested that Tanaka Chōjirō, the founder of the Raku line of potters (perhaps the most prestigious pottery lineage in the world) and a close collaborator of Sen no Rikyū, who codified the Japanese tea ceremony, may have been the son of one of these potters. At the same time, that Chinese frothy white tea – through refined shading techniques and processing – started to resemble the emerald-green matcha we know today, and can now be found in lattes and dessert bars across the world. This tea is not just the cornerstone of Japanese tea ceremony, but the entire kaiseki meal that precedes it, which itself has gone on to influence the aesthetics of every Michelin-starred restaurant in the UK, France, Scandinavia and the US – from the lighter techniques of cooking it advocates, to the plating and the use of glazed and unglazed ceramics to present food. The next time you eat something too austere to enjoy, from a plate that cost more than your monthly rent, you know who to thank.

Japan’s tea ceremony, like its cuisine, is not pure, even if Japanese culture is so often essentialised – both by foreign Nipponophiles who insist that everything about Japan is special and unique as they talk in hushed tones about their favourite shokunin, as well as right-wing Japanese historians who see Japan as an isolated and exceptional island surrounded by inferior cultures (where have you heard this before?). Many cuisines of countries that have been colonised are euphemistically described as ‘confluences’ – French and Vietnamese, Portuguese and Goan – while the cuisines of the coloniser are considered to be pure. Yet so much of what we believe to be uniquely Japanese has its origins somewhere else, whether it’s the tea ceremony which was refined in Korea, ramen that came from China, or even its recent rural nostalgia for traditional foods which, as Rachel Laudan points out in her excellent book Cuisine and Empire, was part of a backlash against foreign imports like pizza and fast-food burgers. 

Today’s newsletter is a compilation of stories about Japanese food told through its art, but it is also a compilation of stories that emphasise the influence of the outside, whether it’s Jelena Sofronijevic on Hokusai’s documentation of Chinese food production techniques, Hugo Brown on American food in post-war Japanese novels, or Kambole Campbell on Ainu food in the manga Golden Kamuy, and Japan’s indigenous population who are treated as peripheral. Each shows that the urge to see any cuisine as pure and untouched is not just strange, but a kind of myth-making – this is true of Japan as it is of the UK, Greece or Italy, and anywhere that food becomes sucked into culture wars. As Alberto Grandi pointed out in a recent Financial Times piece, ‘tradition is nothing but an innovation that was once successful’. I’d add that what we consider to be native to a food culture is nothing but the foreign that has become familiar. The story of Japanese food is maybe the greatest global food story of our time: a cuisine that was once foreign everywhere and is now as familiar as a meal deal. Like Italian food before it, it now belongs to everyone. I’m not saying we need to go as far as doing a Japanese Gino Ginelli, but I look forward to more abominations becoming new traditions. 

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Today’s intro is expanded from an essay originally commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum. To learn more about the Hallyu you can visit the V&A’s new exhibition in London here.

2. Manga: Ainu food and remembrance in Golden Kamuy, by Kambole Campbell

There’s no shortage of work dedicated to the pleasure of food in Japanese visual media. Bowls of ramen are evangelised in the comedy western-eastern romance Tampopo, while peripheral meals in Studio Ghibli anime are lingered over on fan sites as if they were main characters (Isao Takahata’s film Only Yesterday does, in fact, centre a cherished memory of family around a pineapple). But it’s a manga, Golden Kamuy by Satoru Noda, that contains some of the most striking depictions of food of all. Just look! Squirrel mincemeat soup cooked with windflower; orca fried into tempura; fresh animal brains eaten with salt. 

This is not, however, Japanese food as it is typically known. Instead, it is a small part of the cuisine specific to the Ainu, a people indigenous to the area surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk (which includes the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and the Russian-controlled Sakhalin and Kuril islands). By 1907, when Golden Kamuy is set, the annexation of Hokkaido by the Japanese state, and forced integration of the Ainu, were well underway. Over the preceding century, the Ainu population had plummeted as they were systematically disenfranchised through various methods: their land was stolen; hunting and fishing bans were put into place; forced marriages to non-Ainus were imposed; and they were made to take on Japanese names. The effects of these policies are still felt today, with a vast number of Japanese citizens unaware of their Ainu heritage due to lost ancestral knowledge, or having to hide their identities. Over the course of Golden Kamuy, depictions of food unlock a more expansive history and viewpoint of Japanese cuisine that is usually shown in nationalist narratives, highlighting the customs and culture which have been suppressed by imperialism and assimilation. 

Golden Kamuy begins with the meeting of Saichi ‘Immortal’ Sugimoto – an impoverished and heavily battle-scarred veteran of the Battle of 203 Hill in the Russo-Japanese War – and Asirpa, an Ainu girl and accomplished hunter. After a bear attack forces them to team up, Asirpa and Sugimoto establish themselves as equal partners, then close friends. The plot follows their intertwined journeys across the land – a search for a hidden fortune of gold stolen from the Ainu that they both have their own reasons for needing. If you think this makes it sound like a Western, then you’re right: fans of the series colloquially refer to it as a ‘yaminabe Western’ (hotpot Western), in homage to Sergio Leone’s ‘spaghetti Westerns’ (which, in turn, are a homage to Akira Kurosawa).

In the first volumes of Golden Kamuy, which were published in 2014 and drawn in black-and-white sequential panels, Noda renders Ainu food as inviting, warm and lush; while the characters’ faces are drawn with efficient and sometimes cartoonish elastic line-work, what they eat is drawn with meticulous and realistic detail. Noda uses the production of each dish as a way of foregrounding Ainu history and zoography: stews, soups and dishes of game and fish are tracked back to their source in Ainu hunting and fishing culture. Animals are caught using rawomap (wooden branch traps sunken in water to catch river fish throughout winter) and eagles by hook hunting – practices that row against the capitalist annihilation of various species via commercial hunting. The series goes on to unpack indigenous cuisine across the surrounding areas, like the Uilta (or Orok) and Nivkh people of Sakhalin (Japan’s Karafuto prefecture at the time), as well as the Ainu who also lived there. Noda dismantles monolithic ideas not just about Japanese food, but even within the Ainu (salmon fishing is key for the Karafuto Ainu, while Nivkh meals include ‘most’, a mix of fish skin, berries and fat, frozen in the outside cold).

Food is shown as a pathway to memory, both personal and historical. Sugimoto remembers the time before the ruinous war through the taste of persimmons, for instance, and through her hunting and cooking practices, which she teaches Sugimoto; Asirpa remembers her father, who taught her what she knows. The detail of these things was so important to Noda that he went as far as to eat fresh deer brain with an Ainu hunter so he knew how it tasted (like bland gummy sweets, apparently). Food is also the primary signifier of culture between Sugimoto and Asirpa. The first of the dishes that Asirpa shares, chitatap, becomes a frequent callback. The dish’s preparation involves each person chopping the meat into mince while repeating the word ‘chitatap’ (meaning ‘we mince it’), which becomes a hugely exciting social ritual to Sugimoto and his other travel companion Shiraishi. Asirpa also adapts her cooking so that, in her words, ‘an elegant sisam like you [Sugimoto]’ can eat it, cooking her chitatap into a stew rather than eating the minced meat raw as is custom. In another instance, Sugimoto adds miso to fish, beginning a long-running joke about Asirpa’s disgust at its appearance, and then reluctant enjoyment of its flavour. 

Ainu cuisine is often talked about in the West (as well as in Japan) in terms of what it gave the Japanese: for example, kombu and the resultant umami flavour have their basis in Ainu cooking, according to Remi Ie, Director of Slow Food International Japan, and Hiroaki Kon, an Ainu chef and owner of the Kerapirka restaurant in Sapporo. But there are moments in Golden Kamuy – even if it’s just sharing miso and frying whale into tempura – which represent a kind of wish fulfilment of what could have been: a genuine exchange between cultures, rather than the erasure of one by the other. 

Golden Kamuy was so popular within Japan that it helped catalyse a new ‘Ainu boom’ – similar to what happened with manga in the 1950s and 60s, when there was widespread resurgence in Ainu cultural practices and language, as well as organisation. It inspired famous mangaka to focus on Ainu protagonists, like Osamu Tezuka in his work Brave Dan, or Yoshiharu Tsuge with his epic Iomante no Otome. Books that have long been out-of-print, such as Harukor by Ishizaka Kei (which was made to heavy resistance in the 1980s) have since been reissued. 

But there are downsides to this new boom, a subject broached in the 2020 film Ainu Mosir, in which the Ainu and their lands are used as a tourist attraction. Noda is conscious of this tension: ‘I’m a wajin [the majority ethnic group in Japan], so I’m always striving to remain neutral within that space’, he once said. Noda sought to represent the essence of how the Ainu lived, rather than only how they were made to suffer and assimilate. In an interview with his editor Ookuma Hakkou and his Ainu-language consultant Nakagawa Hiroshi, Noda talks about when he met the Ainu – they ‘only once told me what to do: “Please do not write about miserable Ainu, [instead] write about strong Ainu for us.” That was all.’ 

The presence of Ainu cooking in Golden Kamuy is part of this resistance to the erasure of indigenous cultures, a procedure of recollection. A note in the fourth volume of the book says that the Ainu favour oral storytelling over written folktales or history. If we continue to speak of this knowledge, their history continues.

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3. Literature: The Bar Food of the Economic Golden Period by Hugo Brown

For Japan, as for many countries, the years following the Second World War were filled with great change. For those of us whose perception of the war is framed through the European theatre, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t until 1952, seven years after the end of the European conflict, that the American occupation of Japan ended. During the war, Japan had already endured the destruction caused by atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; economic hardship following the invasion of South East Asia (due to industrial redirection to the war effort); and mass starvation caused by US trade embargoes paired with domestic economic and agricultural practices. After the war, the Japanese army was demobilised, Emperor Hirohito lost all power as the country moved from Imperialism to democracy, and Shinto, the national faith, was separated from the state.

Despite this period being a time of cultural upheaval, the decades following the war – from the late 1950s until 1992 – were those deemed the economic ‘golden period’. During this time, through American occupation and a more open foreign policy, Japan also accelerated its import of a certain kind of Western influence, one that had begun in 1868 with the beginning of the Meji period. After the war, American aid meant that wheat, bread, flour, corn and milk were more prevalent, with a shift in ingredients also leading to new dishes – curries, spaghetti, fried cutlets – and the popularisation of ramen. This gave further rise to yoshoku – Western-style Japanese food which uses Western ingredients in a way that is familiar to Japanese palates, like, for example, Omurice, chicken karaage, chicken fried rice, chicken cheese katsu and curry ramen – which was again rooted in the Meji period. An uptick in purchasing power, and an increase in urban population, meant that many more people in Japan started to eat out. Yoshoku’s emphasis on easy-to-prepare set meals and combos using inexpensive ingredients made it popular in a casual dining-out culture based on a multiplicity of dishes.

It is, in other words, the perfect solo bar food. 

It’s possible to argue that this movement in Japanese dining culture allowed for a certain style of literature to emerge in the twentieth century (particularly in the 60s, 70s and 80s) – one which dealt with the themes of love and loss, isolation and union, dissatisfaction, and detachment, often using the medium of food. Writer Kenzaburo Ōe touched on this in 1964 with his novel A Personal Matter, where his isolated narrator Bird drinks to excess and is horrified by food, and the tradition survived all the way up to writers like Hiromi Kawakami, whose novel Strange Weather in Tokyo (2001) is catalysed by a meeting in a bar. It was the explosion of bar culture, changing gender roles and new ingredients and cuisine that were at the heart of this literary trend. 

In novels, writers used yoshoku as a contemporary cultural catalyst to propel their isolated Japanese narrators into the world. We see this in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, for instance, and in Banana Yoshimoto’s 1988 book Kitchen, which is contemporaneously set. In Kitchen, there is a scene where narrator Mikage realises she is in love, and she uses a yoshoku dish – the katsu don – to declare this, taking it to her lover Yuichi. ‘That’s how I came to find myself standing alone in the street, close to midnight, belly pleasantly full, a hot takeout container of katsudon in my hands, completely bewildered as to how to proceed’, Yoshimoto’s narrator muses.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the gaze of writers and their often-young narrators moved away from the home towards bars and restaurants. In books like A Personal Matter, Kitchen and Yoshimoto’s Moonlight Shadows, plus Murakami’s 1Q84 and Hear the Wind Sing, characters inhabit food establishments in the city as if they were their homes, drinking excessively in bars whose bartenders often occupying an almost parental space. Bird from A Personal Matter is perhaps the most morally compromised example of this. ‘Bird had hoped at least to achieve a little humour in his vomiting style, but his actual performance was anything but funny’, Oe writes about his narrator, who has once again publicly drunk himself to destruction while avoiding the birth of his disabled child. Murakami, who owned a bar himself, uses these spaces to depict the changing culture of Japan. Things like The Beach Boys, Hawaii Five-0, Cutty Sark whisky, cooking spaghetti and the Beatles appear frequently in his books. His first novel Hear the Wind Sing is set largely in a bar which serves only French fries: ‘The chill of the air conditioning met me when I backed my way as usual through the heavy door of J’s bar, the stale aroma of cigarettes, whiskey, French fries, unwashed armpits and bad plumbing all neatly layered like a Baumkuchen.’

The novels of the economic golden period also depict female protagonists who drive plots in ways previously uncommon and therefore unconventional. Yuko Tsushima’s 1978 novel Territory of Light presents a flawed protagonist: a separated single mother who struggles with depression, drinks too much and is neglectful when looking after her daughter. In Kitchen it is Mikage who seeks out Yuichi, and this tradition continues in Hiromi Kawakami’s Strange Weather in Tokyo, where it is protagonist Tsukiko who approaches and pursues Sensei, her former teacher and love interest. Both Mikage and Tsukiko use food as a means to declare their agency and reverse traditional gender roles. 

The bars in these novels, and the food they serve, are now everywhere in contemporary Japanese culture. In the TV series Midnight Diner, for example, we see plenty of yoshoku. The characters, who range from boxers to Yakuza bosses, singers, strippers, pachinko parlour workers and shop workers, order these now-canonical dishes, which often have sentimental value. Today, there is the sense that this kind of food has always been a part of Japanese culture, because we think of the country as one that has a massive cultural reach but a largely inward gaze. Yet curries, katsu and ramen demonstrate the impact of the war on Japan – the change it caused and the manner in which Japan responded – all while creating a new food culture.  

The weight of narrative given to food in these books might not be noteworthy to Western readers, but framed in the context of the starvation and hardship endured during the Second World War, and the radical cultural shift in the years that followed, this makes sense. For Japanese writers, whose work is so widely exported, this seems to be a way to say: Look at us; this is how things have changed for us, while also giving their characters space to move, change, reflect, fail. That all their dishes are unremarkable heightens this notion: through their presence, we get a sense of what Japanese people during this period were actually eating, a type of realism which might contravene Western interpretations of everyday Japanese cuisine, but one which is nevertheless true to life.

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4. Printmaking: Edo food production in Hokusai, by Jelena Sofronijevic

Much of what we now consider to be contemporary Japanese food culture can be traced back to the Edo period (1603–1867) – the time of the Tokugawa shogunate, a military regime typified by samurai daimyo (Japanese feudal lords). The period remains stereotyped as ‘traditional Japan’, with washoku – the cuisine that was developed at this time – recognised as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2014. But despite what this singular name and award might suggest, Japanese cuisine has never been fixed – instead, it has remained constantly in flux and, much like art in Japan, it absorbs influences from across Asia and the rest of the world. No wonder, then, that it is the popular visual art of the Edo period that best traces the flows and tides of Japanese food culture.

During the Edo period, as the Japanese economy boomed, cities burst with newcomers that had new social appetites, and artists documented the burgeoning life they saw by the ocean, in the fields, and on the streets. Katsushika Hokusai was one of these artists, and is perhaps the most famous printmaker of Edo Japan. Born in 1760, towards the end of the Edo period, and best known for his monumental series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai was an obsessive documenter of everything he saw, from passers by to  fishing boats traversing the treacherous waves in the Sea of Japan.

Towards the end of his life, Hokusai’s ambition was to compile a vast printed encyclopaedia known as The Great Picture Book of Everything. For unknown reasons, the book was never published. But in 2019, 103 drawings, which would have been destroyed in the woodblock printing process if the book had been published, were unearthed, and a couple of years later displayed at the British Museum. Taken together, these illustrations provide an alternative history of the producers and consumers in Japanese food chains, and how it was individuals who were the agents in shaping cultural values and tastes through cuisine. 

In one such picture, Three men brew rice wine on the orders of Yi Di, Hokusai shows three ordinary workmen following the instructions of Yi Di, one of China’s earliest rice wine brewers, in order to produce a batch for the legendary King Yu the Great of the Xia dynasty. In his characteristic fashion, Hokusai inverts the focus from the grand recipient to the producers on the ground. The result is a comic scene, where the three workers use their weight (and a rock) to crush a sack of rice grains, the juice pouring out into a gutter at the bottom to be brewed. Clinging onto the pole for dear life, they’ve even wrapped their ankles together. As Tim Clark, co-curator of the British Museum exhibition, says, ‘Hokusai manages to make it look as if it is happening right in front of you’. 

Rice is central to Hokusai’s work – and like tea, this also came to Japan from elsewhere. It travelled from the regions that are today included in China, through modernising migrants who brought with them religion, plus the means and knowledge to cultivate the rice. In his work, Hokusai reveals how the production of rice wine started – not as a small porcelain cup of clear, slightly simmering Japanese sake, but the original mijiu, which was first produced from glutinous rice in ancient China around 1000 ʙᴄ before spreading across Asia, mutating into cheongju in Korea and sake in Japan.

Hokusai’s illustration hints at how ‘traditional’ Japanese methods and instruments were really foreign inheritances. But more than this, as British Museum curator Alfred Haft suggests, Japan was actively positioning itself as the preserver of ‘authentic’ Ming Chinese culture, rather than being passively influenced by or appropriating it. These prints are testament to the two-way flows of food and culture between both states.

Edo Japan is often mischaracterised as a time of severe restrictions, with farmers locked to their lands, a strict feudal class system and sakoku (an external travel ban); successive political regimes wishing to legitimise themselves as modern have often pointed to this. But Hokusai adds nuance, acknowledging the role of other cultures and traditions as part of Japanese modernity. 

Take the series ‘Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road’, which charts the rise of domestic travel in Japan. We see Japanese tourists greedily savouring soba in Iwata, Shizuoka – a city now internationally renowned for its fresh white-flour noodles. In Shinagawa…, Hokusai shows three women hand-picking and stretching nori seaweed (laver) over slats, sun-drying the fronds to intensify their flavour. Travel circulated different modes of nori production. The traditional method of harvesting from wooden stakes at sea – the process that precedes that of ‘Fifty Three Stations...’ – persisted until the 1920s (when faster-growing bamboo replaced the wooden stakes to help keep up with demand). This Asakusa nori – likely named after the Asakusa (now Sumida) river from which it was harvested – quickly became an Edo speciality. It fetched a high price in the city, forcing other regions to rebrand their own nori with the Asakusa name in order to compete. As well as demonstrating China’s influence on Japan, Hokusai highlighted Japan’s own domestic foods; this series is a visual testament to rural, artisanal production, preserving, idealising, and advertising practices in the villages en route.

The drawings from this period also complicate the idea of ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’, and the changes which were happening in the late Edo period. In the more politically subversive prints of , even the ‘immovable’ Buddhist deity Fudō Myōō is swept by the popular waves of Westernisation – a period when the consumption of meat, particularly beef, was promoted by the new Meiji government as a sign of prosperity. In the print Enlightenment of Acala, Myōō reads the government’s propaganda paper, News Magazine, redirecting his holy flames to warm his sake and beef stew instead. This blend of past and present finds its mirror today in the wagashi bloggers who tout mochi as Japan’s oldest processed food, and renewed interest in ‘traditions’ like tea ceremonies as both mindfulness practice and high art culture.

Exhibitions in Japan such as Hokusai and the Gourmets of Great Edo, Oishii Ukiyo-e: The Roots of Japanese Cuisine and the poultry market history captured at’ The Hokusai Bird Park which I saw at the Sumida Hokusai Museum this month, have done important work in showcasing the origins of Japanese cuisine. Yet outside of Japan, barring the fascination with food in Studio Ghibli films, the connections between Japanese food and visual culture remain underexplored. One exception here is Clare Pollard, curator of Japanese art at the Ashmolean Museum, who use Utagawa Hiroshige’s ‘Famous Restaurants of Edo’ series (1839–1842) to reveal how restaurants became a vital part of the urban infrastructure and sites of interclass interaction in the period. 

Hokusai’s farmers; fishermen; cauldrons stoked by fire; Hiroshige’s restaurants; Kyosai’s fiery feast: all are vital clues which demonstrate how food was produced and eaten in Edo Japan. If these artists’ ambition was truly to depict everything possible, then the recurrence of restaurants, recipes, and real people across their work reinforces the centrality of food production for Japanese culture and history, speaking to the many heritages of – and continued influences on – Japan, highlighting how flux has always been central, and how its oft-othered culture is perhaps not so rigid or unique after all.

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Credits

Kambole Campbell is an Anglo-Zambian freelance writer and film/TV/culture critic based in London, with written and audiovisual work appearing in Empire Magazine, Sight & Sound, Little White Lies, i-D, BBC Culture, The Independent, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Thrillist, and Polygon and more.

Hugo Brown is a writer and editor based in London.

Jelena Sofronijevic (@jelsofron) is an audio producer and freelance journalist, who makes content at the intersections of cultural and political history. They are the producer of EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art, and historicity, a new series of audio walking tours, exploring how cities got to be the way they are.

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Sharanya Deepak and Rebecca May Johnson, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles, which you can read on the Vittles back catalogue.

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My favourite meal is not a dish, but a setting. It is late evening, after a fresh spell of rain, in a corner of my neighbourhood bazaar where a cigarette shop, juice stall, the best chat vendor in the world, and a bread-omelette cart congregate. Girls rattle glass bangles at the seller, threatening him to lower prices; boys tickle one another and argue over plates of momos. “Chutney pass kar, chutiye!” they shout at each other, brimming with affection. “Pass the chutney, asshole!”. As I wait for my masala cheese omelette to get made, I am grinned at, heckled, or flirted with – which in Delhi, is just a mix of both.   

Everything I eat in this moment is spectacular, of course, because of how much fun everyone else is having. “My people” I think, becoming stupid and hysterical with fulfilment as more boys arrive on scooters engineered to sound like large motorcycles, the scent of their strawberry flavoured cigarettes causing the man who made my omelette to sneak me a look. All this happens in some seven and a half minutes, because that is how time works in most Indian cities. Only the rich have the constant luxury of any conventionally defined pause, of watching the world pass by with a meal. For others, stillness is an act of will, sought through participation, which is often through eating and buying food with others, and diving into the thick mesh of life. 

What bickering Delhi boys and bazaar-banter are to me, the pudiya — conical newspaper packages filled with spices, sweets and rice — is to Farah Yameen, the author of today’s newsletter. Farah tells of the splintered intimacies that make up buying and selling food in South Asia, where one transaction can be made of multiple economies, emotions, textures and moods. It is in the moment in which the pudiya is rolled, spruced up, and filled with wonderful things that Farah mediates pleasure, and pause. But the story of the pudiya, Farah writes, is more than a nostalgic one of “simpler days” and “sustainable packaging”. It is one of how millions of Indians, those ignored and neglected by the global corporate food economy, negotiate agency when they buy and carry food home. Even though artistry often needs to be codified and recognised by the elite, this doesn’t matter to makers of the pudiya — in which art itself becomes automatic, accessible, utilitarian, beautiful, and routine. SD

Routine Masterpieces: the informal art of Indian food vending, by Farah Yameen

It is the 1990s in Ranchi, India, and an understated thriller unfolds at Hari’s four-by-three-feet bhel-puri cart. He piles the chutney-drenched muri (puffed rice) into a tightly wrapped cone, which he’s made using glossy 80 GSM paper from a 1999 edition of Cosmopolitan – the same one my sister and I once nicked and stored under our mattress. Where the paper hasn’t been licked by puffed rice and chutney, the heel of a Jimmy Choo is visible. Its price is available ‘upon request’. I dig the carefully torn seven of diamonds card Hari hands me and scoop the bhel from that edge; my education in luxury footwear begins here.

In Ranchi, a city in India’s eastern Jharkhand state where I grew up, we lived on a diet of small-town drama and big-city aspirations which was brought to us on paper packaging. This is where we first learned of the 20,000 rupee shoes and slender legs that we were convinced all big-city girls possessed. One day, we would tell ourselves, we would live the stories that arrive on serendipitous paper scraps.

If the paper package was conical, we called it a pudiya; if it had been glued together to make an envelope for larger purchases, it was a pudda. Like Hari’s Cosmopolitan cone, there were stories draped across pudiyas and puddas wherever we went. A man had returned from the dead on the folds of a pudiya containing twenty-five grams of cumin. Who Was Shah Rukh Khan Seen with Near the Hotel? asked a headline on a pudda of flour, happily oblivious to the age-appropriate content-censoring that defined the rest of our lives. 

I’d like to say I was fascinated by the art of the pudiya as a child. That I marvelled at the speed with which the sheet was tightly cocooned around the garam masala. Or that I’d watch with undivided attention while the chaat vendor laid two sheets across one another, making a square package that would hold my batata puri until I ripped it open at home. These lies would prop up my ability to see art in the ubiquitous; give me something to add to my bio, even: Farah Yameen is a curator of found stories captured in wrapping ephemera. 

Tempting as that is, to claim it would be woefully untrue. I was far more interested in the neat triangles of silver-foiled Laughing Cow cheese, the Quality Street chocolates in tins that became my grandmother’s sewing kit. Neat and symmetrical, without the uneven edges of the pudiya, these slickly packaged presents from ‘foreign’ were the packaging I wanted in my life. 

Yet it is the pudiya that stays in my mind, and its impact on me goes beyond a nostalgia for ‘sustainable packaging’ and ‘simpler days’. The art of the pudiya not just about the drama you can find on its packaging; rather, it is an unossified skill of labour born of the need to carry food home. It tells the story of how an informal artistic language without traceable provenance developed, allowing millions of Indian families to negotiate how they choose to purchase their food every day.

Every year, in the run-up to the anniversary of the Prophet’s birth, my cousins and I would cook batches of flour into glue; this substance would hold together our puddas, which we made from old newsprint, and which we would use to hand out sweets. (My aunt awarded the winning pudda the princely sum of ten rupees.) But proud as we were of our creations, they had none of the easy sturdiness that would safely hold the finest of flour on its journey back from the kirana store. Even as the pudiyas and puddas from the store were deftly designed, back then, they were simply camouflaged into ordinariness, the paper disappearing in an instant when the package arrived home.

I spoke about this with social scientist Sarover Zaidi, who called the phenomenon the ‘soft intimacy of paper’. ‘Plastic and foil never produce this vanishing act’, she said. ‘A scrap of newspaper wraps the food, doubles up as tissue, and ends up forgotten in your pockets, until it emerges in freshly washed clothes days later.’ The mortality of the paper pudiya is its essence. Plastic and foil, on the other hand, so jarring and alien, refuse to disappear, ending up in bags that bulk up behind kitchen doors.

Most importantly, however, the pudiya allowed subjective purchasing; the largesse of ‘buy as you need’. In the subcontinent, where incomes are often small and volatile, selling without standard, pre-ordained measurement is integral, deriving from the communal understanding that purchasing capacities are often smaller than the standardised volumes of pre-packaged food. Large boxes of processed food are scaffolded by concerns about adulteration and hygiene, sold with the explicit instruction that their contents are ‘not to be sold loose’. At the small town and village grocer, however, the boxes come undone, as do the dictates of Western capitalist uniformity. Though they may be ordained, they are rarely obeyed. 

And so, women in floral polyester sarees walk home with fistfuls of dal, which have been weighed on scales using smooth stones. The stones’ values are known only to the grocer, they are measurements of a community economy that works on trust and faith. This is what I remember from Kamal Bhaiyya, the grocer from the corner kirana shop in my neighbourhood who I have known since I could barely call my order over his counter. His shop-front was warm and bright with sunlight streaming in, its recesses pitch-black. Kamal Bhaiyya sold everything imaginable – rice, dal, spices, indigo, salt, sugar; even pickles and kerosene. Above his head hung lurid coloured sachets of shampoo, liquid detergents and chewing tobacco. The counter against which we tiptoed to get a look at him was an array of glass jars containing candies in vivid pinks, greens and oranges, plus the occasional cream roll for children like myself. 

The neighbourhood I grew up in was poor, with only a handful of middle-class homes (ours was one of them). For those who worked on daily or weekly wages – as domestic workers, electricians and plumbers – food had to be purchased on a smaller scale, and sometimes on credit. For these situations, Kamal Bhaiyya had a thick ledger, adapted from school notebooks, that kept track of everyone’s tabs. Even though, growing up, Kamal Bhaiyya’s shop was my favourite place to escape to, at the time I did not really notice his dexterous crafting of pudiyas. But I remember it now: the way his practiced fingers crafted the cones, each one like the last, as he scurried around. Kamal Bhaiyya had no qualms about tearing open a bag of detergent to sell a few scoopfuls of washing powder to a customer, or opening a packet of kalonji or nigella seeds to sell a handful that would be used sparingly on a puri for special occasions. 

By the 2000s, other kirana shops, only a kilometre away from Kamal Bhaiyya’s, were selling sealed bags of neatly weighed flours, rice and spices. This was post-economic liberalisation – when wealth and aspiration had begun to trickle into Indian cities and minds. Houses in our neighbourhood could not expand horizontally, so they shot skywards. Some teenagers (to whom I was a sad outsider) had mobile phones, and we began to know about the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. We hastened to pick up fake accents, added ‘ing’s to our Hindi verbs and ‘s’s to our plurals to sound like we spoke English. We purchased ill-fitting, low-riding jeans à la Spears, worn under our kurtas that we shortened as far as we dared. 

At home, we hankered for Kellogg’s cornflakes as a breakfast treat and discovered soybean nuggets, called by their brand name ‘Nutrela’. (They tasted like washing-up sponges, but who could dispute food in a box?). We couldn’t wait to be in a spick, new urbane life, unencumbered by the embarrassing poverty of reuse that defined our everyday.  

Kamal Bhaiyya’s shop caught up, too. It filled with new boxes of chicory-heavy coffee, branded teas, sugary drink mixes, an assortment of children’s health drinks, half a dozen brands of refined oil, rice, and new spice mixes. Along with them came plastic bags, which arrived in pink, yellow and blue, displacing magazines and newspapers and other paper as primary packaging. In the evening, these bags flew over terraces tied to kite lines; in the morning, they speckled the trash, blocking our drains.      

When it first arrived, the plastic bag did not replace the pudiya. Instead, it offered another layer of packaging, meaning you could carry several pudiyas and puddas at once. But in the years that followed, the pudiya gradually faded. In post-liberalised India, which aspired to the exactness that mimicked manufactured Western lifestyles, the emphasis on standardised packaging increased, the price of paper rose, and plastic was cheaper than before. By the end of the 2000s, we saw fewer and fewer sheets of newsprint nailed to Kamal Bhaiyya’s walls. 

Something similar happened in 1960s and 70s Japan; here, although the mass-produced new packaging often nodded to old forms, it reduced the idiosyncrasies, aesthetics and actions of wrapping food to the transactionality of visual merchandising and safe compliant supply. In his two volumes, How to Wrap Five Eggs and How to Wrap Five More Eggs, artist Hideyuki Oka, who documented the wrapping traditions of Japan, grieves the loss of wrapping practices, which he believes signify care – not just for the food, but for the person receiving the food. He writes:

Just what are these packages on whose passing we lament? They are difficult to define in words. Actually, the best way to understand them is to see and experience them. Such packages were not the products of contemplation, nor yet of theory. They assumed their shapes over years and years of unselfconscious use and experimentation, which is to say that this packaging is one form of Japan’s cultural heritage.      

In his work, Oka also articulates the ineffability of our everyday relationship with this art that emerges from an undefined practice. He notes that losing something so utterly ephemeral can mean that it barely registers.  

Outside Indian cities, the wrapping material changes from paper to leaves, bamboo and straw – taking different forms, holding different objects, but producing the same unselfconscious artistry. Architect Shakeel Hossain remembered a woman with a basket of pani phal, or water chestnuts, sitting on the edge of the street in a city in Eastern India. The chestnuts were piled in a mountain on a woven bamboo tray, purple-black in colour after being cooked to help ease the skin’s grip. The woman had shaved a narrow strip along the centre of each chestnut, revealing their smooth, pearly interiors, and arranged them in circles on top of one another. Shakeel was struck by the effort she put into something that would disappear before the day was over. ‘She has peeled each one simply for the visual effect. It rivals Sottsass’s Memphis pattern!’ he said.  

This idea, of everyday art present in unobtrusive street corners, is critical to vending in the subcontinent. It is what sociologist Amita Baviskar calls, quoting a vendor: ‘location and look’. The vendors she describes use everything – bright colours, photoshopped celebrity images, artistic geometric arrangements of their goods, and catchy phrases – to get attention. Sarover noted this too, stating that ‘the vegetable vendor who borrows flowers… from the flower vendor [to decorate,] to make a heart over his cart, is creating art.’ On the street, one must amp up performance to be seen amongst the bustle. When I think of the woman with the water chestnuts, I think about how, in a few weeks, the season for the fruit will have passed, and she will move to piling mountains of hara chana or green gram on her woven bamboo trays. She will line these with a smooth red cloth to set off the grams’s bright green, until the seasons demand a new display. 

I notice these performances and branding strategies only retrospectively. I remember only now how the vegetable vendors in my neighbourhood in Delhi organised their vegetables in cascades of contrasting colours, propping pineapples behind apples and oranges. I think of how the chaat vendor in Karol Bagh, who vended in steel carts, displayed yellow, green, pink and red fruit – both sliced and whole – offsetting the blinding metal in hot sun. In the market complex in Ranchi, the chana seller had only a small box hung around his neck from which he sold his dish, but his tuneful baritone advertising the snack he sold was so distinct you could not think of the market without him.  

As India has progressed into increasingly standardised packaging, many things have faded, as they are wont to, and there has been a gradual silencing of whole lineages of wrapping traditions in their many forms. Kamal Bhaiyya’s shop has moved to a steel-shuttered, glass-fitted space. The cream rolls have acquired plastic boxes and now sell in sets of three. There are packaged, branded loaves of bread, rusks, cakes and soft drinks, which sit beside 5- and 10-kilo bags of Ashirvad Atta and Dawat basmati rice. Despite this, Kamal Bhaiyya hasn’t stopped selling loose. ‘One must walk with everyone. Some of my customers cannot afford big bags of food,’ he remarked to me sagely when I visited him this year. And so, he continues to purchase a small stack of pre-cut sheets to make pudiya for those who request it, rolling them in that traditional way.  

Although the pudiya is gradually withdrawing from Kamal Bhaiyya’s shop, its bigger cousin, the pudda, has inspired several alternative businesses and contemporary lifestyle brands to come up with recycled paper bags. But their intentional design and elevated arguments of sustainability remove them from the unobtrusiveness of the pudiya. They become another statement for ‘conscious, sustainable living’ without the quiet economy of care and continuity that the pudiya begets. Pudiyas have not disappeared, as today’s boutique revivalists suggest – they have just become more muted. But with this mutation, the intimacies of dawdling over the counter, deliberating an unnecessary purchase; the shared moment, of holding a large wrap together as another person secures it with twine, are lost. 

Most of all, to Kamal Bhaiyya, to countless shop owners, and to me, the pudiya offered pause. It provided a sliver of time in which each package was rolled, allowing conversations to flow across the counter. Time slowed down for a moment, welcoming the calm of deliberate repetition. Among many things, the pudiya is a chronicler of how time works in the subcontinent – warping into stillness when the paper cone is being rolled and filled with food, and bursting into sudden speed when it is taken into the madness of the bazaar.

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Credits

Farah Yameen is a public historian who writes about our lives organized around food. If you meet her she'll talk to you about food to cover-up social awkwardness. A year later she'll write about it. That is how this article came to be. You can find more of her work at https://farahyameen.com/

Samia Singh is an illustrator and graphic designer based in Chandigarh. You can find more of her work on her website or on Instagram

Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles.

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Today’s newsletter by Ruby Tandoh is the third in ‘The Story of Post-War Food Told Through Art’, a series of essays looking at how food changed in England after the Second World War, told through different artistic mediums — literature, painting, design — all offering alternate answers to why English food changed.

You can read the first newsletter on literature and the culinary imagination of Barbara Pym, H.E. Bates, Muriel Spark, Sam Sifton and Evelyn Waugh here.

The second newsletter on painting and the English food traditions and spaces depicted by Beryl Cook can be found here. JN

How the Sainsbury's Design Studio Packaged a Nation’s Dreams, by Ruby Tandoh

When Leonard Beaumont joined Sainsbury’s as a design consultant in 1950, what came first was the problem of the egg. Until this point, if you wanted to buy an egg, a Sainsbury’s worker would hand-pick it from a wicker basket behind the counter and place it in a small paper bag or, if you were lucky, a rudimentary carton. Since at least the reign of Queen Victoria, Britain (perhaps leaning into the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ taunt) had taken grocery shopping very seriously and, as is the case with almost all of our most serious national projects, this meant an earnest commitment to ceremony. Being a housewife was a full-time project and shopping was a daily, carefully choreographed, often arduous routine: from one shop counter to another, from the care of one sales assistant to the next, the fabric of a morning was a patchwork of little queues.

We do not, as a nation, respond to subtlety, and it would take the Second World War to precipitate a move away from counter service and towards a less theatrically deferential way of selling food. In 1949, the Ministry of Food – the wartime arm of government responsible for rationing and British restaurants – granted 80 self-service licences, incentivising existing shops to convert to a new ‘self-service’ shopping model that would free up labour in a workforce depleted by war. With the exception of deli, fish and butchery products, most food would be laid out in shelves on the shop floor where they could be touched, held and chosen by the customer. Sales counters all but disappeared, freeing up space for the easy drift of passengers through the store. Tills were moved to the very edge of the shop, delaying the imposition of the real world for as long as possible. Compared to the fragmented, mediated experience of counter service, this was an immersive and tactile way of shopping. Pick things up, put them down, look, look, look. Shopping became, as Rachel Bowlby puts it, ‘an endless “perhaps”’. Sainsbury’s converted its first branch in Croydon in 1950, and by the end of the decade one in ten of its stores were self-service. Perhaps supermarkets were bound to happen at some point, but it was the war – or more accurately, the negative spaces opened up by the war – that set the stage for the supermarket’s ascent. For an increasingly suburban British public, the supermarket turned into a repository for small dreams. 

Leonard Beaumont’s problem was working out how to package these dreams. The egg box was an existing technology, but it was missing something – a carton from the 1930s simply read ‘J. Sainsbury’ and ‘Freshness Guaranteed’. Beaumont knew that it would no longer be enough to simply pack the eggs: now that the product was liberated from the care of the salesperson, they needed to be packaged. As Shelf Appeal journal explained in 1936, ‘packaging is really packing plus something else.’ It now had a double function: to safeguard but also to promote. With the shopping experience no longer mediated by a sales assistant, products had to sell themselves.

The egg box design overseen by Beaumont was a four-egg carton made from interlocking slips of card. Down one of its yolk yellow sides ‘4 EGGS’  was written, while ‘J. SAINSBURY STAMFORD STREET LONDON SE1’ was overlaid on top in vermillion Albertus typeface – a font that would become a brand signature for much of Beaumont’s tenure. Behind the labelling, two off-white ovoid shapes – no outlines, just egg-shaped negative space – were a starkly geometric touch, owing as much to the work of Bauhaus painter László Moholy-Nagy as to the 80 years of Sainsbury’s design that had come before.

The following year, Beaumont worked on the 1951 Festival of Britain – perhaps the most potent expression of Britain’s post-war ambition. The festival was a ‘moment of modernity’, with Britain’s culture reoriented to look towards the future; this seemed to mean hygiene, progress, science, and a new way of living brought to, and bought by, the masses. It’s impossible to disentangle this change of sensibility from the domestic migrations of those post-war years: self-service Sainsbury’s branches were built on London County Council estates in Debden and Grange Hill, serving Eastenders who’d relocated from the bombed inner city, as well as in the new towns of Harlow, Stevenage, Crawley and Hemel Hempstead. (When a new Sainsbury’s opened in East Grinstead, it was not sold as the best or the biggest or the most bountifully stocked but ‘the most modern’ supermarket in the country.)

Lord Alan Sainsbury (known to everyone as ‘Mr Alan’), who would become Beaumont’s employer, wanted to similarly rupture the sentimentality of Victorian packaging and the necessary drabness of wartime. One of his influences was the design work of Frank Pick, the man responsible for the modernist aesthetic of the London Underground. He worked with Beaumont to translate the national mood – a feeling, whether or not it was justified, of British common sense, practicality, robustness, quality and taste – into a visual register that would reflect the average consumer’s reality while conveying their dreams. ‘Simplify,’ he would stress. ‘Simplify.’

 Over the next 14 years, Beaumont’s designs were rolled out across Sainsbury’s stock. Typefaces were standardised and designs streamlined; punchy labelling replaced lengthy assurances of quality or provenance. By 1960, there were 1,000 Sainsbury’s own-label products, all unified with a common visual language. As Mr Alan put it, ‘our design will have failed if our customers have to read the name over our entrance to know the shop they are entering.’ Every bottle, box and own-label tin had to be a physical expression of the idea and identity of Sainsbury’s.

Wherever a creative process is a group effort – when it stretches between people and across a number of years – one iteration of that team will always emerge as the line-up. For Sugababes (the Trigger’s broom of British girl groups), it was Mutya, Keisha and Heidi, from 2001 to 2006. Arsenal’s ‘Invincibles’ season of 2003–2004 would come to define the club for almost twenty years. Leonard Beaumont may have set the tone for the design of Sainsbury’s own-label products, but the company’s heyday started in 1962, with the arrival of Peter Dixon and the birth of the Sainsbury’s design studio.

The hits came fast. Two fat horizontal stripes – the lower one in bright red, the upper in cerulean – wrap around the white belly of a cola can designed in 1966. Sat lightly on top of the blue stripe is the word ‘cola’ in red, lower-case Helvetica, its letters huddled so closely together that they touch, turning the word into a coherent form in its own right. Set at an angle, the ‘Sainsbury’s’ descends towards the ‘cola’ like a straw. A 1971 packet has ‘trifle sponge cakes’ in ultra-bold white Helvetica against a backdrop of contrasting, but tonally similar, bands of red-orange and magenta. The wide, uneven plains of colour interplay without blending, a kind of own-label Rothko.

One particularly iconic design is Bill Wilson’s 1970 cornflakes box. Beneath the ‘corn flakes’ – which is huge, in slim, angular lettering – are thirty-five golden circles, arranged into a neat grid pattern. The abstraction of this particular design is almost total: it is similar to Agnes Martin’s 1959 work Buds. In many of these designs, flat, block colours dominate, a shock against a background of white: a set of 1967 jam labels look like Pantone colour swatches. This visual simplicity aimed to convey a kind of modern functionality that had been lacking until that point.

Dixon’s mission as head of the design studio was to create packaging that was ‘flexible and progressive,’ and he ensured there was room for a diversity of styles. (By 1985, Dixon’s team included seven designers and three administrative staff.) Unlike Beaumont’s favoured Albertus, the typefaces used in the design studio’s creations range from modernist Helvetica to blocky, utilitarian Venus and the baroque serif stylings of 1970s frozen burger patty and Scotch egg packages. Some designs featured blown-up, almost abstracted photography. Others, like a wheat flakes cereal packet, drew on a vernacular style, illustrated wheat sheaves calling to mind the English pastoral myth.

A 1965 design for a two-pound Christmas pudding is reminiscent of the work of the Russian constructivists: in squat sans serif and fully capitalised lettering, the words ‘SAINSBURY’S’ and ‘CHRISTMAS PUDDING’ bellow out from the centre of the circular design. The colour scheme is pared back, nearly monochromatic, with white and almost-black rectangular-ish forms orbiting against a field of red. There’s a whisper of the emerging sixties psychedelia in this vortex, but really it has more in common with constructivist El Lissitzky’s geometric designs, suffused with expressive, unstable dynamism. 

The results of the design team’s efforts were often startlingly different, but what animated each one was a desire for the packaging to reflect the quality of the product it contained. As Design magazine put it in 1967, this was ‘designer’s design’, very different to the packaging of rival chain Tesco, which they witheringly described as ‘an approach that suggests that the average housewife has relatively unsophisticated requirements’. The Sainsbury’s aesthetic was harmonised company-wide, with the studio even creating in-house educational materials and training manuals that would never realistically reach the public. It was a unified theory of Sainsbury’s, constructed through attentive, sometimes exuberant design. This synthesis of art and pragmatism chimes with El Lissitzky’s vision of ‘das zielbewußte Schaffen’ – creation that is also purposive, or art that serves a goal. ‘In the end it doesn’t matter much if the consumers appreciate what we are doing,’ Dixon shared in one interview, ‘so long as they keep buying what we are doing.’

After Peter Dixon retired in 1989, the studio was slowly wound down and nearly all design work contracted out to agencies, but if you’ve spent any significant amount of time online, you have probably encountered its work, perhaps retweeted onto your feed or shared in nostalgia-complex Facebook groups. This afterglow is at least in part thanks to the Sainsbury Archive at the Museum of London Docklands: a temple for 150 years of commercial design, where archivist Allison Foster presides over a collection of packaging that ranges from empty packets of crisps from the mid-1970s (angular striations of electric blue and yellow; a clear plastic window) to designs for cat food. She often summons these objects from the archival depths, taking to Twitter to share that cola can or cardboard packaging for five ounces of Brussels sprouts.

Seeing these designs today, it’s hard to avoid a sense of loss. There’s an argument to be made that they are as expressive of post-war Britain as Guimard’s curlicued Métro stations were of Belle Époque Paris, although, unlike the stylings of art nouveau, these packages register as strikingly modern, even today. Many of them are beautiful, and those that aren’t beautiful are ugly, which at least means they are interesting. The alleged drabness of the food of the 1970s and 80s doesn’t tally with the arresting design work being done at the time, just as the dullness of design today doesn’t reflect the diversity of cuisines and ways of cooking that we now have access to in the UK. With the move to agency-led design work has come a blurring of identities between different stores and over time: I’m not sure that it’s true any more that you could, as Mr Alan dreamed, know that you’re in a Sainsbury’s without having to read the sign over the door.

Still, nostalgia – even, or especially, for a time that is not our own – has a way of pulling history out of shape. When I romanticise these designs from the 1960s and 70s, I remind myself of Twitter accounts that share a photo of Rococo sculptor Giuseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ alongside Duchamp’s urinal and lament the decline of Western art. Wandering the aisles of a Sainsbury’s now, you don’t feel like you are navigating the architecture of war or embracing modernity, but languishing in a place outside of time in perfect, frictionless ease. (Ease, it bears saying, is not the same as simplicity.) But maybe this new aesthetic, which is more cluttered and less engaging, designed to promise but never to provoke, is true to the kind of shopping we do today. If we were to revive those designs from the 1960s and 70s, no matter how modern they appear, we would be lying about who we are. In the 1950s, Leonard Beaumont was lying too, in a sense (Britain would not really be ready for the supermarket for a few more years), but it was at least a generative lie – pretending that the British supermarket was something that it wasn’t yet, but could be, if all went according to plan.

Sainsbury’s packaging in the post-war years was striking because it had to be: because the supermarket was still establishing its place in British domestic life; because self-service was new; because hygiene needed to be seen to be improving. These designs ‘[brought] order from the chaos,’ as Beaumont put it, packaging not just their physical contents but also the idea of the supermarket more generally. Today, for better or worse, supermarkets are a given – purgatorial, vast, unassailable – and packaging has nothing left to sell but the food.

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Ruby Tandoh is a writer on food and culture whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Vice, Taste, Eater, Vittles and more.

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

As a child, I always wondered about the pictures that hung in my grandma’s house. They were all by the same artist, who had a distinctive style, painting slightly rounded people in everyday scenarios: down the pub; running errands in town; tucking into fish and chips. They were endearing and humorous and, in my child’s mind, they didn’t fit. They didn’t fit the mould of the art I was shown at school, which seemed stuffy and earnest. The faces featured in these paintings, which were always smiling or laughing, didn’t fit my conception of ‘good art’, which had been informed by the despairing faces from Renaissance masterpieces. When I asked my grandma why she liked them, she said it was because they showed happy people: ‘Nice to have around the house.’ 

As I got older, I flattered myself with a critical eye and, for a time, dismissed the paintings – I probably saw them as knick-knacks in an old lady’s house. But now, as I write this, one of the paintings hangs a metre away from me. In recent years, with what might be a kinder way of seeing, I have grown to agree with my grandma: they are nice to have around the house. 

The creator of these paintings was Beryl Cook, who, throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, was one of the most visible artists in Britain. Her work could be found reproduced on postcards, on tea towels, and in framed prints like those owned by my grandma; thanks to these reproductions, it felt as though anyone could own a Cook painting. And her work was accessible not just in terms of availability, but also content. Observing the daily goings-on of life in Plymouth, the city where she lived, Cook typically painted working-class subjects in places that would feel familiar: the pub, the market, the picnic in the park. Crucially, she often depicted those subjects enjoying classic English meals – fish and chips, fry-ups, pasties – celebrating vernacular English cuisine at a time when it was being maligned.

The popularity of Beryl Cook is remarkable, given her beginnings as a hobbyist painter in the late 60s, when she found time for her passion while running a guest house in Plymouth. By this point Cook already had a long association with food: during the early part of her married life in the 1950s, she worked as a cook in a hotel, preparing simple meals she herself enjoyed such as shepherd’s pie, cauliflower cheese and baked potatoes. This weaving of personal and professional experiences – as her son John, who can be seen serving full English breakfasts in one of her paintings, told me over email – may have served as Cook’s first inspiration to paint people eating and drinking. And by personally inhabiting these spaces and observing what was taking place around her, Cook succeeded in producing paintings that had honesty as well as levity. 

But Cook’s work did not garner universal acclaim. It has been sneered at by sections of the art establishment, who have at times viewed her as an untrained outsider and regarded the people who like her work as tasteless philistines. The critic Brian Sewell, haughty as ever, once remarked of Cook: ‘She has developed a very successful formula which a lot of fools are prepared to buy, but which is anti-art in my view. It doesn’t have the intellectual honesty of an inn sign for the Pig and Whistle. It has a kind of vulgar streak which has nothing to do with art.’ Similarly, the Tate doesn’t possess a single Cook, despite her popularity, and despite the public campaign in support of her work’s admission to their collection, which they rejected. 

There is a kind of deliberate misunderstanding of Cook’s work and an incomprehension that folks could in fact appreciate it so fondly, which reflects a wider reaction to popular culture and tradition in the latter part of the twentieth century by arbiters of taste. When it came to post-war food in England, those arbiters were hastening the turn away from traditional British fare after the drudgery of rationing had ended, leaning instead towards arriving European flavours. Publications such as The Good Food Guide – which compiled restaurant reviews written by (often rather affluent) members of the public – became influential bastions of perceived good taste within food discourse which at times smacked of snobbery. This dichotomy widened when the first solely restaurant-based  Michelin Guide appeared in the UK in 1974, elevating the nouvelle cuisine above anything that British fare could conceive of. The new and the sophisticated – particularly from the continent – was making the traditional and the unpretentious appear slightly uncultured. 

‘Beryl did not enjoy spending hours in a fancy restaurant waiting for the next course to be served,’ John told me. ‘She mostly preferred plain and simple food.’ This is reflected in the kind of food that you can see being enjoyed by her subjects, with fish and chips (a firm favourite, featured in at least half a dozen paintings) and the full English breakfast appearing consistently. This sentiment also extends to the types of spaces she wanted to celebrate. Restaurants hardly feature in her works, despite their growing availability while she was painting (albeit mainly to the middle classes); on the rare occasions that she painted them – like, for example, Langan’s Brasserie in Dining Out – she would depict their dishes as humble foods she enjoyed, such as cabbage and potatoes. 

More often she leant on working-class food settings for inspiration. Take, for instance, Elvira’s Cafe, one of Cook’s most famous works. In the painting, a dishy marine from the Plymouth barracks sidles into a cafe where slices of cake, cups of tea and sausage sandwiches are being served to grateful customers. The proprietor’s eye is caught by the sight of the marine, distracting them from their work. It’s the kind of interaction you might expect to witness, if you sat for long enough, in your own local cafe, and betrays a hallmark of Cook’s work: cheekiness. In this moment, Cook captures what writer and Beryl-admirer Isaac Rangaswami calls the ‘homeliness… at the heart of every good caff’. The warm colours, which according to Cook, made painting food so appealing, comforted the viewer, making them feel at home with a sight that felt familiar. This offers us a clue to Cook’s popularity: perhaps people hung her paintings in their homes because they saw their own lives reflected there? 

But it wasn’t just the joyousness that my grandma appreciated in Cook’s paintings; it was also her scenes of people around Plymouth, where Cook would later find much of the source material and inspiration for her paintings. Having grown up in Plymouth in the 1940s, these scenes reminded my grandma of where she was from – and now, they offer me a clue to understanding her relationship to that place, too.

My grandma’s connection to Plymouth was also marked by enjoyment of Cornish pasties, which she grew up with and continued to make long after moving away. Plymouth is, after all, a pasty city, despite being located in Devon rather than Cornwall. It isn’t Padstow, or St Ives, or the West Cornwall Pasty Company kiosk at Waterloo station, where pasties are nothing more than a baked novelty. In Plymouth, pasty joints are present on almost every street, and if you walk around you’ll see shoppers, tourists and workers alike cross the threshold of many a bakery to grab their lunch. Working-class tradition has helped the pasty thrive there in spite of its many challenges, from the castigation of English food to the insurgent European cuisine – and, of course, George Osborne’s ‘pasty tax’. 

Naturally, Beryl understood the pasty’s place in local food culture. In Picnic at Mount Edgcumbe, we see several generations of a jubilant, bathing-costume-clad family relaxing on the lawns of a Cornish mansion which overlooks Plymouth. There is mucking around with a beach ball in the background and the unpacking of a picnic in the foreground. The picnic contains oranges, crisps, sandwiches – and the beguiling yet ultimately functional local favourite, the Cornish pasty. 

So a deliberate choice, yes, to paint the pasty – the dependable, unfussy staple whose grateful consumption in everyday Plymouth life Cook both observed and celebrated – in its natural environment. This is something that John remembers fondly (‘my mother was much taken with how people enjoy themselves in their leisure time, and eating plays a large part in this,’ he tells me), but not a choice made with any grand agenda in mind. As the academic Bernadette Casey writes, ‘it would be unwise to attribute to Beryl Cook any rebellious, let alone politically radical, intention, but her pictures nevertheless show us, and speak for, groups within society that may be in the majority, but are not culturally dominant.’ 

In the years since Cook recorded English food, other voices have emerged to claim it, and there remains an endearing, almost meme-worthy quality to our national cuisine. I’m particularly drawn to an unlikely successor to Cook: ex-Apprentice candidate Tom Skinner, whose 6 a.m. shepherd’s pies at Dino’s Cafe in New Spitalfields Market spark, in some strange way, a similar joy to that of Cook’s paintings, with both taking pleasure in food and the observation of people eating it. Finding his niche on social media, Skinner is from a crop that includes Rate My Takeaway and the Fry Up Police – all of whom can perhaps trace a lineage back to Cook, sharing as they do her knack for dry humour and showcasing ordinary food being thoroughly enjoyed. 

Though there was a quiet period in the years after her death in 2008, Cook’s paintings have never been more sought-after than they are now. Her paintings are lionised in Plymouth, and a cottage industry of their reproductions thrives. More surprisingly, Cook’s work has just been exhibited in America for the first time (in New York, no less), and John has just sold the painting he features in, Breakfast at Elvira’s, for £82,500 – a record fee for a Cook painting. 

Could there be a reason for this renaissance? Cook’s work certainly evokes nostalgia, which strikes a chord with many, and I think it can be seen as a time capsule: for working-class culture; for certain culinary staples; for Plymouth itself – which is perhaps how my grandma already viewed it. But for food and for art, Cook’s work is an enduring reminder that the familiar and the simple can bring just as much enjoyment as the exotic, the complex and the celebrated.

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Frank Kibble is a writer and fundraiser from South London. He writes about culture and identity and works with locally-led community projects across the country.

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

There is an opinion which has become something close to an orthodoxy in recent times, that the food of England was grey and dour, boiled and bland until, like the transformation of the gothic castle at the end of Beauty and the Beast, sunbeams shone through the shutters and England’s cuisine was transformed by the pen of Elizabeth David. ‘To this day, it is routinely assumed that David and David alone saved the British from their own dreadful post-war food,’ writes Diane Perkiss, in her new history English Food, before going onto dispute this in very strong terms. Of course, there is actually some truth to the idea: the post-war food of England was a culinary nadir in the history of this country, and undoubtedly David shifted cultural capital from haute-French cuisine to the food of the Mediterranean peasantry — simple food, good ingredients, no malarkey — that has gone onto influence everything from the offal cooking at St. John to every time you see a tomato cut up on a plate with salt and olive oil for £10 (note: this price will be incorrect by the time this article is published).

That strand of history is told so well by Lewis Bassett on the Full English podcast (and do listen to new episodes to keep up with why food inflation is happening) but we must remember that like the 1960s Swinging London revolution, which was mostly confined to a few thousand upper-middle class kids who lived in Chelsea, the Elizabeth David revolution didn’t happen for everyone in the country, and certainly not at the same time. There are other strands of history, ones as Vida Adamczewski writes in today’s newsletter, ‘diverge along lines of class, race, religion, and migration.’ We can all agree that something happened to English food after the war, but it happened for different people, at different speeds and for different reasons.

Over the next few weeks, Vittles will be running a series of essays looking at how food changed after the Second World War, told through different artistic mediums — literature, painting, design — all offering alternate answers to why English food changed. It will also challenge the idea, prevalent among many food writers after the war, that there was something inherently bad about English food culturally rather than it being a victim of economic circumstances. Today’s newsletter is our two parter opener. Please do stick around for a well timed list at the end by Deirdre Tynan. JN

Good Food Again: Culinary Imagination in Post-war English Novels, by Vida Adamczewski

The government’s response to depleted food stocks during the Second World War was a system of strict rationing, predominantly affecting the working and middle classes living in cities. While the landowning and wealthy classes had access to alternative off-ration food sources, such as game meat and abundant home-grown vegetables, food subsidies and controlled prices meant most people lived off their allotted rations, supplemented with other foodstuffs, many of which had become inaccessibly expensive or needed to be grown at home. Despite this, rationing was still embraced in the war years themselves, but in the period after war ended, people became frustrated and hungry for something more. 

Ambrose Heath was a prolific food writer who embraced the challenge of rationing, publishing 29 cookbooks between 1939 and 1945. His book Good Food Again was published in 1950, five years after the manuscript’s completion. When Heath wrote his introduction to the book, rationing in Britain was ongoing, even though the war had ended five years prior (meat would only come off ration in 1954). Yet the book is crammed with affordable, seasonal dishes that would be at home in many recipe books today: a delicious sage-scented turnip soup with cheese; eggs baked in peppery potato nests; a ‘Sailor’s omelette’ with anchovies and cayenne; a beetroot and mint salad. Writing to disheartened middle-class cooks, Heath sought to revive English kitchens with his recipes.

In the introduction to Good Food Again, Heath tells a hopeful story for English bellies. He writes that:

[During the war] feeding, as is right in times of such emergency, took the place of eating and the pleasures of the kitchen had to be abandoned for the pains of the shopping-queue. 

He goes on:

By the time the war had done with us […] many had forgotten what they knew about good eating, many more had grown up without an idea about it, and yet never have there been so many intelligent people possessed by an absolute craving for the good things of the table.

Heath’s introduction amounts to a declaration of faith in the ability of English cooks: crucially, he positions bad cooking as a product of the war’s deprivations, rather than our inevitable fate. He is confident that there is an appetite for good food in England – all that is needed is a little culinary imagination. And it is in the novels of the post-war era that this imagination and appetite can be found. 

The novels of Barbara Pym, H. E. Bates, Muriel Spark and Sam Selvon are full of food. English food. In an article for the TLS, Laura Freeman calls these books ‘Hungry Novels’, characterised by the attention their authors pay to the food characters eat. Freeman notes the wistfulness of these novels; within that wistfulness, I see the remembrance of good food, the savouring of it, and the desire for it again. These stories understand what it means to eat well. 

Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952) brims with culinary curiosity and discernment. Even very plain meals are described precisely, with attention paid to the interaction of flavours and textures. Pym wasn’t an especially talented or adventurous cook herself (her diaries document her daily shopping lists and menus) and, similarly, her characters often eat simply. But Pym’s novels, by applying analytic acuity to cookery, and taking note of their characters’ tastes and palates, dignify the daily fare of post-war middle-class English kitchens. It is this typicality that calls Laura Shapiro to note: ‘to read [Pym’s] novels… is to discover a revisionist history of mid-century British cooking’ (What She Ate, 2018).  

In Excellent Women, Mildred makes a salad for Rocky, the dashing man from the flat downstairs: 

I washed a lettuce and dressed it with a little of my hoarded olive oil and some salt. I also had a camembert cheese, a fresh loaf and a bowl of greengages for dessert. It seemed an idyllic sort of meal that ought to have been eaten in the open air, with a bottle of wine and what is known as ‘good’ conversation.  

Excellent Women was published three years before Elizabeth David chastised English cooks for ‘drowning [salads] in vinegar and chemical dressings’ in her book Summer Cooking (1955). But Mildred’s supper is subtle. By basking in each of her simple and savoured ingredients, Mildred transcends austerity and conjures a bucolic and sophisticated scene for herself and her guest. Unlocking this sensuality with a sparse larder is the essence of culinary imagination. 

In Pym’s first novel Some Tame Gazelle (1950), Harriet and Belinda eat thoughtfully, too. Through them (or rather, through Pym), typical beige English fare is reframed, its blandness transposed to delicacy. Take this passage, in which Belinda muses on the ‘established ritual’ of serving ‘boiled chicken smothered in white sauce’ to the new young curate:   

The coldness, the whiteness, the muffling with sauce, perhaps even the sharpness added by the slices of lemon, there was something appropriate here, even if Belinda could not see exactly what it was.

This is the first meal in the novel and, as it is eaten, the dynamics between the spinster sisters are made clear. Harriet, ever excitable and ‘especially given to cherishing young clergy’, gives the curate ‘all the best white meat’. Belinda, the ruminative and disapproving older sister, flinches as her sister demonstrates for the curate how to gnaw a chicken bone, the ‘white sauce… beginning to smear itself on her face’ as she does so.

Food is such a central aspect of Pym’s writing that Honor Wyatt and Barbara’s sister, Hilary Pym, compiled a cookery book entitled À La Pym (1988), consisting of recipes for the meals served or mentioned in her novels; the book even includes some of Barbara’s own recipes. One of these, for ‘Maschler pudding’ – a weakly flavoured milk jelly – is pointedly named after Pym’s editor, Thomas Maschler, who had turned down one of her novels. For John Bayley, this pudding is a rare moment of culinary ‘sharpness’ in Pym’s personal diaries, though her novels consistently use food to undercut and send up English middle-class manners.  

When bad cooks appear in the post-war novels, particularly those of Bates and Pym, they do not represent a moral failing, nor a national or cultural trait, but instead reveal an abstemious or puritanical character. In Some Tame Gazelle, Pym writes dubiously of a dinner at the archdeacon’s home which features ‘stringy cabbage’; in Excellent Women, Mildred, going for dinner at the vicarage, observes that 

Julian and Winifred, as is often the way with good, unworldly people, hardly noticed what they ate or drank, so that a meal with them was a doubtful pleasure. Mrs Jubb, who might have been quite a good cook with any encouragement, must have lost heart long ago. 

Pym found food revealing of character, but didn’t judge her protagonists for eating badly. Although it is true that Pym’s characters sometimes eat half a tin of baked beans, undressed tomatoes or unseasoned cod, these lonely meals are not necessarily signs of poor cooking. The meals are described wryly, and often follow some heartbreak or disappointment. In Excellent Women, Mildred muses that while she likes food, she finds it ‘a bother cooking just for [herself]’, hinting at her larger loneliness, and thinks dejectedly of the ‘half-used tin of baked beans; no doubt [she will] be seeing that again tomorrow.’ I notice that the food I eat alone starkly reflects my self-worth, too: heartbroken at university, I retreated to my room to nibble dry Weetabix and drink weak tea brewed with water from the hot tap. Even good cooks make meals that are soggy, bland and unsatisfying when they feel it is apt. It seems to me that, if your mood plays out in your meals, it is not a sign of bad taste, but of an intimate and personal relationship with eating. We might give more credit to Pym’s excellent women. 

Post-war literature also produced one of England’s most famous cooks: Ma Larkin. As readers of Bates’ The Darling Buds of May (1958) – or viewers of the two popular TV series based on his books – will know, Ma’s table is laden with mountainous portions of unpretentious English dishes such as fish and chips, kippers, roast beef and sticky buns. Plates (and glasses) are refreshed at every hour of the day and night, so no one ever wants for nothing. Preparing a Sunday roast, Ma asks her sprawling family: ‘What sort of vegetables do you fancy? Asparagus? I got green peas and new potatoes but shout if you want anything different.’ Her children cheerfully request brown braised onions, Yorkshire pudding, baked potatoes. ‘Fair enough,’ Ma says, ‘as long as we know.’ When the family is not eating, their time is spent revelling in the countryside, making love and charming tax inspectors. Everything is just ‘perfick’.

Ma Larkin’s kitchen is a fantasy. Even post-rationing, her lashings of Jersey cream and untapped access to meat, butter, sugar and eggs are a far cry from the skimpy ingredients that most people could afford. Even as landowners with a farm from which food could be sourced, no family in England would have as much grub as this. But the Larkin novels are not to be read as historical fact; Bates instead captures a fantasy of hunger being sated and cooking being easy, and in doing so shows that the English know what it takes to make food good if they have the resources. Ma’s bacchanalian feasts and their enduring popularity are enthusiastic evidence of, and fuel for, that culinary imagination that Ambrose Heath spoke of. The Larkins are the epitome of life lived in pursuit of pleasure rather than duty: an attractive proposition to a society recovering from the self-sacrifice of war. As Bates surmised, ‘the Larkins’ secret is in fact that they live as many of us would like to live if only we had the guts and nerve to flout the conventions.’

There are notable exceptions to the ‘Hungry Novel’ that deal with  hunger and appetite in different ways. In the decades following the war, many middle-class people became ashamed of their appetite, mistaking hunger for gluttony. Having endured the privations of war, it seemed right that their bodies ought to be put under physical stress – to be denied pleasure – in order to be worthy. Propaganda around rationing had played on the concept of the ‘citizen-consumer’, whose purchases reflected their politics. The campaigns invoked patriotism and self-sacrifice, presenting moral succour as an alternative to actual food. In Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), Mrs Hawkins embarks on a diet that is triggered by a sense of inadequacy, perhaps a sense that she has not suffered enough in the war. Set in 1954, much of this novel is based on Spark’s own experiences of publishing in the 50s, and the fad diets that characterised the 60s and ensuing decades. We see Mrs Hawkins gaze around her office and notice that everyone has an affliction of some kind, including war wounds. She resolves that her affliction must be her ‘Rubens quality of flesh’ and begins an ‘eat half’ diet. She takes pride in her hunger pangs, and feels superior when she ‘[sneaks] a glance at the amount everyone else [is] eating’, which seems ‘enormous’. In this attitude, Mrs Hawkins speaks to the psychology of a generation of middle-class women who felt it was impressive to be thin. 

While many of the post-war novels long for rationed foods, like cream and real butter, the British citizens who arrived from the Caribbean and elsewhere to help rebuild Britain dreamt of food that tasted like home. When Pym and Bates were writing their rural novels, Windrush novelists like Sam Selvon and George Lamming were describing their experiences of post-war London. The city is captured vividly through the food that was available to Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956). In a new and often hostile city for migrants, the culinary imaginations of his characters lead them to foods that remind them of the Caribbean:

Before Jamaicans start to invade Brit’n, it was a hell of a thing to pick up a piece of saltfish anywhere, or to get thing like pepper sauce or dasheen or even garlic. It had a continental shop in one of the back streets in Soho, and that was the only place in the whole of London that you could have pick up a piece of fish. But now, papa! Shop all about start to take in stocks of foodstuffs what West Indians like, and today is no trouble at all to get saltfish and rice. This test who had the grocery… he find out what sort of things they like to eat, and he stock up with a lot of things like blackeye peas and red beans and pepper sauce, and tinned breadfruit and ochro and smoke herring…

England, and its culinary landscape, was changing. In her article ‘The Lonely Londoners: a new way of reading and writing the city’, Susheila Nasta argues that with his use of creolised dialect and lyrical observation, Selvon ‘forged a shift in perspective which would not only change the way the city was seen, but “Englishness” itself.’  Leaving the Caribbean, arriving in London, missing home: Selvon’s Lonely Londoners are in a state of constant yearning. Food, the places they buy and eat it, becomes a kind of third place – neither here nor there, but home, where they are safe, seen and satisfied. 

It is impossible to describe a whole nation’s appetite succinctly – it always diverges along lines of class, race, religion, and migration. But contrary to the prejudice, famously espoused by Julia Child, that English people can’t, and have no desire to, cook, what I see in the post-war novels is a fascination with food, a deep yearning for accessible and economical dishes, and a culinary imagination that is still alive and kicking. Ambrose Heath was right – cooks living in Britain only needed a little ‘venturesomeness’. And they got it: from new ingredients and dishes introduced by migrant communities; from quality seasonal recipes; from garlic; and from giving simple meals a bit of thought. This is the lesson from Good Food Again to be taken into today’s kitchens: ‘bad’ food does not indicate a lack of taste or desire. Convenience food is not a sin. Eating under-nourishing food, or not enjoying the food you have access to, or in other ways not eating ‘well’ enough, is usually a symptom of hungry cooks making do in measly times, not hopeless ones. 

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Every mention of food and drink in Brideshead Revisited in chronological order, by Deirdre Tynan

In Evelyn Waugh’s preface to the 1959 edition of Brideshead Revisited – fourteen years after the novel first published – he revealed that the flow of food and beverages in the book was a serving of hedonism to contrast with his experiences of World War Two, and his sense of loss for the interwar years. 

It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful.

Waugh said the book was a ‘souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensibly deals.’ Yet, with the success of the TV series, Brideshead Revisited is also an icon of the 1980s that retains contemporary relevance by presenting a very British understanding of food, booze, and nostalgia. 

The book’s food diary begins with beans, and after a parade of plenty, it ends with sandwiches thrown in a disused fountain and a cup of tea. The complete list of food and drink from the novel reads like a poem, or a dare to reconstruct a menu. In compiling the list, which is not a ranking but rather a record of the thread that runs through the story, I’ve allowed myself to make mistakes. ‘Soya beans and Basic English’ has rhythm when read aloud, but ‘Basic English’ in Waugh’s world refers to a style of communication not, as I had initially thought, a breakfast.

Prologue

Soya beans and Basic English

Book One

Chapter 1: Claret cup and cucumber sandwiches – wine – basket of strawberries and a bottle of Chateau Peyraguey… the sweet golden wine – a very heavy meal of honey buns, anchovy toast and Fuller’s walnut cake – sherry – mulled claret – a plover’s egg – lobster Newburg – Cointreau – eggs and bacon, pickled walnuts and cheese… beer – champagne

Chapter 2:  A glass of champagne – catch a fish – liquors – iced black coffees and charcoal biscuits – the spirit they mix with the pure grape of the Douro – crumpets – aperitif – Rhine wine – Four Alexandra cocktails (sweet creamy) – sherry – an omelette and a peach and a bottle of Vichy water – glass of hock – old Burgundy – coffee and liqueurs – green Chartreuse – Mavro-daphne Trifle – soda water – scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade

Chapter 3: Whiskey – nursery snacks – rusks, glasses of milk, bananas and so forth – lobsters – a white tasteless soup, over fried fillets of sole with a pink sauce, lamb cutlets propped against a cone of mashed potato, stewed pears in jelly standing on a kind of sponge cake – a three-course dinner was middle-class – a single chop – soup and three courses… fish, meat and savoury… meat, sweet, savoury – lobsters – the herring pond – the dishes were ornamental in appearance and regularly alternated in colour between red and white. They and the wine were equally tasteless – a glass of barley water – yeast – white raspberries – gin and vermouth – champagne – a peach – port

Chapter 4: The fruit always ripe – kitchen gardens in search of alpine strawberries and warm figs – Muscat grapes – a vast store of wine… vintages fifty years old – Bath Oliver biscuits [passage on wine tasting] – wine – beer and whiskey – wine – wine – lunch at Foyot’s – coffee and bread – garlic sausage, bread and a flask of Orvieto – the smell of garlic was overwhelming – Italian sweets – to Florian’s for coffee – I was drowning in honey, stingless – scampi – melon and prosciutto – hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at Harry’s bar

Chapter 5: Drinks a coffee in the morning at the Cardena café… drinks cocoa in the evening – a bottle of champagne – some wine – a jeroboam – a plate of eggs and bacon – tea – scrambled eggs and crumpet – among the rum bottles – a grog tray – a cocktail tray – gin and vermouth – whiskey – a glass of hot whiskey [for a cold] – tea and bread and butter – half a bottle of whiskey – a glass of port when we have guests 

Book Two

Chapter 1: Supper – cocktails – no sign of the cocktail tray – curious dishes of goat and sheep’s’ eyes – champagne – whiskey – port and the decanter was at once taken from the room – whiskey – my third glass of port… that hospitable tray in the library – eggs – scrambled eggs – port – Ciro’s…Paillard’s – soup of oseille, a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a caneton à la presse, a lemon soufflé… caviar aux blinis… a bottle of 1906 Montrachet… and with the duck, a Clos de Beze of 1904 – cognac – blinis – pigeon pie – cream and hot butter… caviar – a bit of chopped onion – the soup was delicious after the rich blinis, hot, thin, bitter, frothy – sole… simple and unobtrusive… thin slices of breast – first glass of the Clos de Beze – I rejoiced in the Burgundy… [in the intervening years it offered]… the same words of hope – cognac – after the duck came a salad of watercress and chicory in a faint mist of chives – soufflé – then came the cognac… clear and pale… a very thin tulip glass of modest size… brandy… a balloon the size of his head… stuff he put soda in at home… wheeled out the vast and mouldy bottle… treacly concoction

Chapter 2: The second magnum, and the fourth cigar – bread-and-milk – lunch at the Ritz

Chapter 3: Tall glasses of lager – the staple of France, Dubonnet – scented with cloves – two beer bottles – brandy – cognac – coffee – the Ritz Grill – meringues

Book Three

Chapter 1:  Iced water – sweets – a cocktail party – the morning orange juice – a whiskey and soda, not iced – whiskey and two jugs, one of iced water, the other of boiling water – a cup of hot chocolate – the life-sized effigy of a swan, moulded in ice and filled with caviar – glassy titbits – potted shrimp – an impoverished bar – toast – little balls of crumb – pools of spilt wine – some brandy drinking in the smoking-room – salmon kedgeree and cold Bradenham ham – Muscat grapes and cantaloupe – whisky and tepid water… a nip of champagne – wine – champagne – wine – some tea or something – beef steak – cocktails – trays of glasses

Chapter 2: Luncheon – smell of gin and cigarette-ends 

Chapter 3: Lime-scented evening – brandy-butter and the Carlsbad plums – port 

Chapter 4: Hot oil and garlic and stale wine

Chapter 5: Champagne 

Epilogue

Sandwiches – tea 

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Credits

Vida Adamczewski is a writer from Peckham whose writing has appeared in Ambit Magazine, Document Journal, Fem Zine and The Byline Times. She received the UEA New Forms Award 2022 from the National Centre for Writing for her lyric play, Amphibian. 

Deirdre Tynan is a writer based in Jaén, Spain. She posts lists at:

Lists

Lists and about lists

By Deirdre Tynan

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

Subscribe now

The following newsletter is part of Vittles’s ‘Redefining the food film’ package, which looks at how food functions in different films and film genres.

You can watch the previous films in the series below:

Film 1: A Glass of Orange Juice In Palestine, by N.A. Mansour
Film 2: Spaghetti Breakfast, by Andrew Key
Film 3: Imagined Food Futures, by Chris Fite-Wassilak
Film 4: Disconnection meals in Buenos Aires, by Kevin Vaughn

Today’s film, the last film in the series, is by Joel Blackledge, on how food is often used in films to teach children the rules of adult society, and as a tool of punishment, but how unruly appetites often win out.

Film 5: Unruly Appetites

Words, narration and editing by Joel Blackledge

It’s an adult’s task to teach the rules of society to children. The role of the child is to learn or, more commonly, to rebel against those rules. A great way to tell this story is with food. Dinner tables are classrooms and mealtimes are lessons. Don’t eat too much; finish your vegetables; don’t play with your food – in fact, don’t have too much fun at all. The rules of what, when, where and how to eat underpin polite society. It’s in eating that children learn to behave like adults, or learn why they shouldn’t.

A family meal being equal does not always make it fair. But it can be difficult to keep a fair justice system from the kitchen. Spike Lee wrote Crooklyn with his siblings, based on their memories of growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In one scene, middle child Nate isn’t allowed to leave the table until he finishes his black-eyed peas – which he just can’t bring himself to do. His mother holds her ground, but the united front is undermined by his father. It’s one of many everyday negotiations in the film, and shows the difficulty of pleasing many mouths with one recipe. Fairness is dealt a further blow when the dog steals a slice of cake, and the difference comes out of Nate’s share. There’s a difference between fairness and equality – ultimately, some people just don’t like peas. 

A childish appetite can be wild and insatiable. For the adults who usually provide the food, their children’s hunger is a source of annoyance, exasperation and even fear. For a child to grow up means to control that appetite, to tame the wild beast, so they can live peaceably with others.

Spirited Away by Hayao Miyazaki is a fantasy set in the marchlands between innocence and experience. When Chihiro and her parents find an abandoned food stall stuffed with hot delicacies, it’s the adults who surrender to their appetites. This being a fairy tale, they are punished for their gluttony: a familiar cautionary tale. Eating as pure delight, without obligation or responsibility, is not the correct way to behave; coming of age means learning that there can be too much of a good thing. 

Pinocchio learns this lesson on Pleasure Island, where he ignores the wisdom of his conscience and indulges in pie and ice cream, which in the film is equated with violence, tobacco, alcohol and… pool. His transformation into a donkey is a story to tell little boys who won’t eat their vegetables – a large appetite is a sin, and one that makes you less than human.

Now alone in a strange land, Chihiro has to grow up fast, so she starts working in a magical bath house. Like many Miyazaki films, Spirited Away is an ode to compromise, responsibility and the satisfaction of a job well done. Chihiro finds meaning in her work, and in the food around her. This is not just about eating, but taking the parental role of feeding others as well. 

The ghostly demon No-Face has a bottomless appetite and will reward any food with mounds of gold. While the other workers rush to pile up the impossible banquet and cash in, Chihiro only offers No-Face a balm to soothe his hunger. She feeds to keep the bath house peaceful and just. 

But, sometimes, when food is used as a tool of discipline, it doesn’t work out as planned.

Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro is another fantasy about a ten-year-old girl coming of age. Ofelia is warned not to eat any food from the table of the terrifying Pale Man. So when she eats a grape, this is not a plot hole, but a simple and righteous decision on her part. In the supposedly responsible adult world, Spain is suffering a crippling famine under a fascist government. Maintaining the privilege of childish independence, Ofelia dares to take from someone who has more than his fair share.

Many children are taught to hate and fear their own appetites, and to discard their uninhibited pleasure in food as a sign of maturity. But the law creates its own transgression, just as limitations create excess. These stories of children exist in that tension between rules and rule-breaking.

In Matilda, schoolboy Bruce Bogtrotter faces a retributive punishment for the crime of stealing a slice of chocolate cake: he is made to consume the entire thing. The punitive logic is clear: if Bruce learns to despise cake – and, by extension, his desire for it – then he’ll curb his eating habits and stop being such a nuisance to the adults. But unlike, say, Augustus Gloop in another Roald Dahl adaptation (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory), Bruce is not bested by his gluttony. In fact, he embraces it – he cheerfully devours the whole cake and wins the day. The audience of other students, for whom this spectacle is a supposed deterrent, side with Bruce: he’s their champion, because he has delayed the onset of adulthood for another day. 

The role of food to help children grow up is totally reversed in Hook, where an adult Peter Pan recovers his childhood by imagining a hyper-real banquet. Glazed meat sits next to doorstop cheese slices and cake that seems to be made of plasticine. Eating and playing are totally entwined here, so of course the meal descends into a rapturous food fight. 

In Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite, one meal is the spark that ignites the fire of revolution. The roughhousing, cigar-chomping students of a repressive boarding school are served nothing but beans, while the housemaster quietly steals their chocolate snacks. At one lunchtime breaking point, the beans barely touch the table before they are upturned in an anarchic riot. Now riled up, the boys get organised: under the banner of a skull and crossbones, in a blizzard of pillow feathers, they rise up against the adults and march out to freedom. 

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Credits

Joel Blackledge is a writer and filmmaker based in the West Midlands. His video series Feast Your Eyes explores how films tell stories with and about food. His writing has been published and produced by Novara Media, Little White Lies, BBC Radio, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, [in]Transition and Liars' League. Find him on Instagram at @dam.fino 

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

Subscribe now

The following newsletter is part of Vittles’s ‘Redefining the food film’ package, which looks at how food functions in different films and film genres.

You can watch the previous films in the series below:

Film 1: A Glass of Orange Juice In Palestine, by N.A. Mansour
Film 2: Spaghetti Breakfast, by Andrew Key
Film 3: Imagined Food Futures, by Chris Fite-Wassilak

Today’s film is by Kevin Vaughn on a filmmaker who is well known for his depictions of food in his Hong Kong films, the director Wong Kar-wai. Less appreciated is the way food acts as an indicator of disconnect and alienation in his one film made in Buenos Aires, Happy Together.

Film 4: Disconnection meals in Buenos Aires

Words and narration by Kevin Vaughn; editing by Joel Blackledge

Buenos Aires always feels like it is a day away from collapse. California has the San Andreas Fault, Argentina has the peso and, at any moment, the earth is due to shatter underneath our feet. 

Wong Kar-wai arrived in Buenos Aires during the winter of 1996 to make Happy Together. He arrived without a script but was guided by his love for football, Diego Maradona and the words of the author Manuel Puig. While he searched for his story in the streets of the south-side’s working-class barrios, Wong must have intuited that he was gliding through a city that was folding in on itself. 

The 1990s was the decade of pizza and champagne. The neoliberal  government of Carlos Menem promised to bring a return to calm following the turbulent 1980s, a decade marked by contradictions. The brutal dictatorship led by General Jorge Videla, which disappeared an estimated 30,000 people and silenced and exiled countless others, collapsed in 1983, leaving the democratically elected President Raúl Alfonsín with overwhelming national debt and record-breaking hyperinflation. Menem promised a real return to calm: he opened up the country’s economic borders to the International Monetary Fund, transferred public works into private (and often foreign) hands, and aligned the dollar and the peso one-to-one. The 1990s promised ascension up the social hierarchy to the masses: the pairing of the humble pizza with decadent champagne. 

When he arrived, Wong found himself in a country that desperately wanted to connect to the rest of the world. In return, the world chewed Argentina up and spit it back out. He must have felt comfortable with that sense of longing, the inevitability of change. After all, many of his films are about Hong Kong rapidly transitioning underneath the pressures of capitalism, told through the love stories of characters that never meaningfully connect with one another. 

Food often sits in the middle of this disconnect, like in As Tears Go By, when Ngor (played by Maggie Cheung) makes a meal off-screen for her distant cousin, Wah (played by Andy Lau) – a gesture that breaks down his tough-guy act and makes him begin to fall in love with her. Or in the rapidly Westernising 1960s of In the Mood for Love, when Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan (Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung) trade noodles for steak and ketchup while they pretend to confront their cheating spouses. Amongst the suffocating individualism of pre-handover 1990s Hong Kong in Chungking Express, He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro) scours neon-lit convenience stores for canned pineapples that expire on 1 May – the day he’ll get over his ex-girlfriend. He eats thirty to himself.  

Happy Together, a movie about the up-and-down relationship of Hong Kongese lovers Yiu-fai and Po-wing (played by Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung) who get stranded in Buenos Aires isn’t as readily remembered for its food as Wong’s Hong Kong films. Yet food is omnipresent, even if it is rarely the focus of the frame. 

Throughout the film, Yiu-fai barely speaks – most of his lines are delivered in voice-over – instead, his character relates to the world through food, which flashes onto the screen like an extra, an actor’s subtle gesture. When he feels affectionate, he pours a bowl of hot soup with urgency, spilling broth all over the countertop; when he feels sorrowful, he lets an egg fry lamely in a pan of rice. In the film’s first act, the estranged Po-wing breaks back onto the screen at the tango bar that Yiu-fai works at in a rusty car filled with a bunch of young men. The camera follows Yiu-fai as he lingers on the cobblestoned streets and stares into the window. His eyes never stray from his old lover, who is making out with another man. ‘BAR SUR’ is painted in giant letters on the glass that separates the pair. His ex won’t let him in, and the city he is stuck in won’t, either.  

Yiu-fai flees to the corner kiosk and buys a ham and cheese on pan árabe. I know this sandwich well. It’s a sandwich of desperation: either of hunger, economy, or both. I can feel the plastic wrap cling against my hand, the slimy meat of questionable expiry that flops out from one side, the absence of condiments increasingly clear as each bite of stale flatbread crawls slowly down the throat. This is not a meal of sustenance, of pleasure; it’s a meal to fill the void. 

Argentine food is as hostile as the city that rejects Yiu-fai’s otherness: a cashier at a pizzeria mocks his accent; a stale medialuna crunches when he is left out of his co-workers’ break chatter. But his own dining table, crowded with bowls of stir-fry, steamed chicken and egg-fried rice, shows another man – a man that finds power in feeding others. ‘You’re always fucking around in here,’ a neighbour bemoans in the communal kitchen when he scoops his bowl from her grasp. When he nurses a bedridden Po-wing to health with noodle soup, he shovels his own mouth with rice; later, when Po-wing rejects food amidst a quarrel, Yiu-fai can barely lift his chopsticks. 

Food is the couple’s glaring disconnect. Yiu-fai feeds himself and others, despite no one taking the time to feed him. His only meaningful connection is with Chang, a young Taiwanese man whose loyalty is cemented over a bowl of dumplings. But Po-wing rarely eats at all. He prefers to eat from the bodies of his lovers. When the couple finally separates, Po-wing fills the pantry cabinet of the room they used to share with boxes of cigarettes. He stays behind in Buenos Aires, crawling ever-deeper into the cracks of a society hypnotised by the hedonism of a doomed romance. 

The flash sale on Argentina’s resources soon ran out of stock – the pizza turned to crumbs and the champagne went flat. Four years after the release of Happy Together, the country defaulted on payment of 93 billion dollars of external debt, plunging Argentina back into crisis. The storm after the calm. I bet Po-wing ends up hungry and emotionally bankrupt, too. 

In the final scenes of Happy Together, Yiu-fai returns to Hong Kong. On a layover in Taipei, he walks calmly through a night market and the screen erupts with bright lights, crowds of people and hawkers that invite him to have a seat. He finds Chang’s family food stand and sits to eat a plate of meatballs and soup. He’s alone and the future is hazy, but he has finally been fed. 

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Credits

Kevin Vaughn is a food writer, photographer and editor based in Buenos Aires. He edits the magazine Matambre, a compilation of interviews, art, photography and the occasional reported story about the intersectional politics of food in Buenos Aires and Argentina. You can find him on Twitter as @iamkevinvaughn.

Joel Blackledge is a writer and filmmaker based in the West Midlands. His video series Feast Your Eyes explores how films tell stories with and about food. His writing has been published and produced by Novara Media, Little White Lies, BBC Radio, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, [in]Transition and Liars' League. Find him on Instagram at @dam.fino 

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

Subscribe now

The following newsletter is part of Vittles’s ‘Redefining the food film’ package, which looks at how food functions in different films and film genres.

You can watch the previous films in the series below:

Film 1: A Glass of Orange Juice In Palestine, by N.A. Mansour
Film 2: Spaghetti Breakfast, by Andrew Key

Today’s film is by Chris Fite-Wassilak on the world building function of food in science-fiction films, and how these films deal with issues of disgust and cleanliness, purity and putrefaction, in our imagined food futures.

Film 3: Imagined Food Futures

Words and and narration by Chris Fite-Wassilak; editing by Joel Blackledge

We recommend that you watch the film above with the sound on. Subtitles can be turned on using YouTube’s caption settings. If you are unable to watch the film then we have published the text of the narration below.

Food only features marginally in George Lucas’s techno-topia THX 1138, his first-ever feature film from 1971. In an underground bunker-city, a voice on a loudspeaker evenly intones: ‘For more enjoyment and greater efficiency, consumption is being standardised,’ as if an announcement in some kind of existential supermarket. The people receiving this message are walking in queues along broad, clean hallways, all of them with cleanly shaved scalps and wearing identical white pyjama-like outfits. We are only given a glimpse of an anaemic tin tray of four small, light-grey rectangles that look a bit like old tofu flecked with darker bits, just next to the pills that form the main part of the population’s diet, and a larger brown rectangle that looks kind of like a flapjack but more like a block of MDF. 

In mainstream Western visions of the future, how people feed, nourish and treat themselves is often just a brief background detail, a quick supplementary world-building prop to the whizzing innovations and slick machines whooshing by. You can break them up into various tropes or categories: take Flash Gordon (1936), when the portly Prince Vultan of the Winged-Bird Men breaks a hunk of bread, grabbing at an oversized platter of some ornately roasted animal; here, the trope is ‘unimaginable abundance’. There’s the ‘hunter-gatherer redux’, a category that includes the occasional scrounging for scraps in the Mad Max sequels, or The Road. There’s ‘Eden denied’, like the abandoned crops of Silent Running, or its flip side ‘Eden achieved’, which encompasses the unexpected bounty found in Fury Road or Interstellar. A common trope is corporate-topia, like the market-driven drivel of Soylent Green, Brazil, or even The Road’s bunker, with a lifetime supply of Dole tinned fruit and Vitamin Water™. And then there’s the increasingly popular trope ‘You thought things would change?’, which includes Blade Runner’s casual street-side noodle bar. THX 1138, meanwhile, is a dark twist on the ‘meal-in-a-pill’ trope. 

Such categories in sci-fi inevitably start to slip, spill and overlap, but running throughout (and often overriding) these is the weight of progress: science will keep developing, and things should get more efficient – cleaner, faster, purer – for humans at least. (Non-humans in sci-fi films generally are, and eat, slimy, gooey things – just see Jabba the Hutt’s amphibious bar snacks in the Lucas-scripted Return of the Jedi.) Foods in sci-fi films often revolve around this axis of disgust and desire, which in itself is standard for most food films, but with an additional y-axis of a wider push towards an ideal state of efficient, immaculate harmony – a state that might not be achieved in the film, or available to all, but is still a central drive. These consumptions and commentaries on what and how we will eat shape a hygienic imaginary, implanting an idea of what our bright, clean future should have in store for us: eating our way to perfection. In the case of THX 1138, the food pill has none of the quasi-magic that defined early outings of the trope in sci-fi literature or TV shows like Lost in Space or The Jetsons – where pills are nourishing, delicious and filling – or even later, rarer continuations, like the pill transformed to a full roast chicken in The Fifth Element (1997). In Lucas’s future, the ideal state of eating is abundant but something determinedly joyless. 

THX 1138 perhaps feels even more familiar now than when it came out, echoing the anodyne architecture, corporate jingoism and desire for cleanliness that increasingly define contemporary urban lives. Lucas witnessed a nascent culture in parts of the US where knock-offs of modernist sleek, empty glass houses proliferated into spaces of indistinguishable, brightly lit hospital waiting rooms and corporate lobbies; dreams of better living fuelled by high-strength disinfectant and dehydrated space-ice-cream. He simply took it to the next logical step, envisioning a controlled future of rationed, highly processed foods celebrated for their drab reliability, reviled but inescapable – visions that aren’t too far off today’s Huel powders, swallowed in the name of efficiency.

In the end, the character THX 1138, having shunned his cubed food and his pills, is permitted to escape to an uncertain, decimated surface world. The underground society continues as it was before; if its denizens are remade into MDF blondies is never clarified but heavily implied. Director Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) a few years later would spell it out more explicitly, with Charlton Heston’s Detective Thorn even taking a production factory tour at the film’s climax, watching dead bodies be liquified, presumably pasteurised, and turned into the small, nutritious green wafers that an overcrowded population clamours for. 

The meal-in-a-pill trope found an unexpected update recently in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, whose narrative is driven by some humans who have evolved to eat plastic and a group of ‘terrorists’ producing vibrant purple rectangular snack bars out of industrial waste. The film closes on the protagonist’s face flooded with beatific joy as he finally tries a bite of one, as if the ultimate laxative. Part of the intended impact of these foods is that of shock, disgust: the implication that it’s a far cry from, or even the exact opposite of, what the food of the future should be. But there’s a quieter, instructional pulse that runs underneath all of these. Implicit in the way characters eat in these films is a swallowing of food hierarchies and their wider social ramifications; an instruction of how we are to submit ourselves to what is to come, rehearsing for a homogenised future and its ultimate food: consuming of the perfect, purified body.     

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Credits

Chris Fite-Wassilak is a writer, critic, and former cheesemonger. His books include Ha-Ha Crystal (2016) and The Artist in Time (2019).

Joel Blackledge is a writer and filmmaker based in the West Midlands. His video series Feast Your Eyes explores how films tell stories with and about food. His writing has been published and produced by Novara Media, Little White Lies, BBC Radio, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, [in]Transition and Liars' League. Find him on Instagram at @dam.fino 

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

Subscribe now

The following newsletter is part of Vittles’s ‘Redefining the food film’ package, which looks at how food functions in different films and film genres.

You can watch the previous films in the series below:

Film 1: A Glass of Orange Juice In Palestine, by N.A. Mansour

Today’s film is by Andrew Key, on the times when dining tables don’t bring us together…

Film 2: Spaghetti Breakfast

Words and and narration by Andrew Key; editing by Joel Blackledge

We recommend that you watch the film above with the sound on. Subtitles can be turned on using YouTube’s caption settings. If you are unable to watch the film then we have published the text of the narration below.

A dining table brings people together: a vehicle for bonhomie, conviviality, love. But not always! As much as it’s a place of togetherness and belonging, the dining table can be a conduit for tension, hostility, aggression, resentment. Eating is an intimate act, and doing it with other people is not always pleasant. Watching and hearing other people eat can be infuriating – just see Phantom Thread, in which Reynolds Woodcock grimaces with barely suppressed rage as his wife Alma emits a series of contented mouth-sounds over breakfast. 

Because of this, dining tables are extremely useful cinematic props. Shooting a scene around a table at which a meal is taking place gives the film-maker a chance to bring an ensemble together, providing an opportunity to map out and develop the lines of tension running between various characters. Here, the shared meal can be a site of ill will: an opportunity to express grievances, to criticise, to attack; it can be accompanied by awkward, stilted conversation, morose chewing under a cloud of silence, the air humming with tedium, anxiety, the chafe of obligation. 

A dining table is at the heart of A Woman Under the Influence, John Cassavetes’s 1974 film about the sometimes-intolerable pressures of family life. In a pivotal scene, construction worker Nick Longhetti (played by Peter Falk), comes home one morning. He’s been out all night on a double shift, fixing a burst water main. Because of this emergency, he’s stood up his wife Mabel (played by Gena Rowlands), who had sent their three children to her mother’s house for an evening so she and her husband could spend some time together. 

Nick and Mabel’s house is crammed. The two adults sleep on a fold-out bed in the dining room; one of the doors leading out of this room has a sign reading ‘PRIVATE’, letting us know just how little privacy they have. Nick arrives home accompanied by his work crew, who slowly realise that they’re intruding on a complicated situation. The previous night, Mabel, feeling abandoned, went out, got drunk, and brought a stranger back to the house; in the morning, she seems not to recognise that this man is not her husband. He’s gone; she’s on edge. Still, she does what’s asked of her when Nick returns: she cooks. What do you cook first thing in the morning for your husband and eight other men – his friends and colleagues – who have been working all night? An enormous pot of spaghetti with tomato sauce, served with red wine and bread.

The meal does not go well. None of the guests know what to say, or how to respond to Mabel, who is too much for them. She sits at the head of the table, the PRIVATE sign above her head, and one by one she says hello to the men, who are reticent and awkward. She starts flirting with one man, Billy, who becomes visibly uncomfortable, before Nick shouts at her and there’s an eruption of violence. The meal, already ruined, comes to an end with a phone call from Nick’s mother, neurotically concerned about her health. His crew file out uncomfortably, with looks of relief. 

During the meal, we never get a master shot of the whole table – nothing that shows a shared experience. Instead, the camerawork reiterates how fractured and isolated the characters are. It’s not always easy to know who’s speaking. People talk over each other; they speak when they’re out of shot, interrupting the flow of the scene; the camera frames the side of someone’s head too closely. Shots are interrupted by people leaning forward, or by hands reaching across the table to grab cutlery, wine glasses, bread. The camerawork and editing create an atmosphere of tension and disruption, at the same time as they recreate the chaos of a large shared meal – its mix of cheerfulness and neurotic tension.

Cassavetes took three days to get this scene right. It was rehearsed repeatedly, first without the spaghetti, and then about thirty times with it. The film’s producer was in the kitchen simmering batch after batch of sauce. (Cassavetes obtained 110 boxes of pasta from a manufacturer with a promise that he’d show the packaging in the film, and then reneged on it.) At first, the men, many of whom were not professional actors, were acting too likeable: trying to be charming, good guests, telling stories or jokes; trying to make the meal a success. Cassavetes did not want the meal to be a success: he wanted his actors to allow their real personalities to show. The scene has the uncomfortable air of improvisation but it was tightly honed and practised. 

Later in the film, there’s another devastating scene around the same table. After some erratic behaviour, Mabel is committed to an institution; she comes home, burnt out, only to find that Nick has organised a party for her, then cancelled it and sent everyone home last-minute, except the immediate family. They all sit down around the same table at which the spaghetti breakfast took place. This time Nick and Mabel sit next to each other, opposite everyone else. Someone brings food in from the kitchen but nobody eats. This meal is also a failure. 

These scenes are painful to watch because they explore the deep loneliness that comes from the inability to truly connect with your loved ones. That the dining table is in the room in which Nick and Mabel sleep and have sex makes the loneliness even sharper. Nick loves Mabel, but he doesn’t understand her; she’s too much for him, too strange. He wants her to be the kind of woman who happily cooks spaghetti for ten first thing in the morning, to be the kind of woman who can make that experience fun, spontaneous, but without getting too involved in it. 

And so, the dinner table becomes a site of failure, a place of hurt. Mabel sits facing her husband, his friends, their family, and is confronted by the inescapable fact that she’s not right for them, that they want her to be someone she isn’t. In the end, Nick and Mabel are stuck; kept together by the intensity of their love, but separated by the insurmountable distance between them: an abyss the length of a dining table.

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Credits

Andrew Key is a writer living in Sheffield. He is the author of a novel, Ross Hall (Grand Iota, 2022) and his essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Parapraxis, LA Review of Books, and The Point, among others. He writes a Substack, Roland Barfs Film Diary (rolandbarfs.substack.com).

Joel Blackledge is a writer and filmmaker based in the West Midlands. His video series Feast Your Eyes explores how films tell stories with and about food. His writing has been published and produced by Novara Media, Little White Lies, BBC Radio, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, [in]Transition and Liars' League. Find him on Instagram at @dam.fino 

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe for £5 a month, please click below.

Subscribe now

In his 2020 essay Survival Food, the film writer Mayukh Sen identified a group of scenes which have become something close to canonical in defining the boundaries of a cinematic genre known as ‘food film’. There’s the turtle soup that converts the puritans of Babette’s Feast, the timballo reveal of Big Night, the ramen of Tampopo, the bravura opening scene of Eat Drink Man Woman that follows the making of a meal from conception to finish. Each of these ‘food films’ Sen argues, places food — both its consumption and production — solely as a site of pleasure, something that provokes desire, or perhaps salivation, a sudden wish to eat that is as visceral and physical as John Carpenter making your heart rate jump.

Yet what if, Sen argues, we could expand the idea of food films to go beyond simply films where food is there to provide gratification for the audience? If we do this, we might make room for films where food is mundane, alienating, disgusting, messy, fun, or where it makes itself felt through its absence. The food scenes that really hold me rarely come under the bracket of ‘food film’: the interminable meal prep of Jeanne Dielman, the meal edging of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the simple dish of ochazuke a jaded couple reunite over in the Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice, the absurd, pungent Finnish sushi in The Other Side of Hope, even the bloody steak that Cipher holds up in The Matrix. Food may not be the main character in these films, but they do catalyse the plot, and are perhaps more honest about the different ways we all relate to eating.

Over the next week and a half, in this special series of five newsletters that Vittles has commissioned with Joel Blackledge of Feast Your Eyes, we take Sen’s essay as a jumping off point to explore the boundaries of the food film and stretch them in different directions. Some essays focus on one film in particular: Kevin Vaughn writes about Wong Kar-Wai’s anomalous Happy Together and how food becomes alternately a form of solace and alienation in an unfamiliar city, while Andrew Key close reads the pivotal meal scene in John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence. Others looks at genres of films and how food functions in them: Chris Fite-Wassilak compiles various tropes within sci-fi films and their imagined food futures, while Joel Blackledge shows how food is often used as a tool to police children’s unruly screen appetites. In today’s newsletter that kicks off the series, N.A. Mansour critiques three Palestinian films and shows how seemingly incidental food scenes record small acts of resistance that display the full texture of Palestinian life.

This series departs a little from our usual newsletters. All five essays will available to read if you want to, but Feast Your Eyes has turned each of them into five wonderful short films, voiced and narrated by the author themselves. We hope that you enjoy watching them. After all, the best form of film criticism is often film itself. JN

Film 1: A Glass of Orange Juice in Palestine.

Words and narration by N.A. Mansour; editing by Joel Blackledge

We recommend that you watch the film above with the sound on. Subtitles can be turned on using YouTube’s caption settings. If you are unable to watch the film then we have published the text of the narration below.

The best glass of juice is not just cold-pressed or squeezed from heirloom fruit. It is the juice bought by someone else, living in their fridge until it is served to you on a sweltering day of childhood summer. Perhaps it is the juice you and your brother drank after you were chased around your neighbourhood by some bullies during the height of a FIFA World Cup. But then, a girl from your neighbourhood shelters you in her home, maybe because you’re both proud Brazil supporters. She serves you the juice in an ordinary glass, from a Tetra Pak that you could buy from a dukkan with your pocket money. However, the heat, adrenaline and camaraderie of the moment gives that glass a brightness that added flavourings cannot. Your little brother whispers for more. You ignore him.

This is the mid-point of the 2019 Palestinian short film Maradona’s Legs. The film, directed and written by Firas Khoury, follows two brothers’ sticker-collecting quest during the summer of 1990, the height of the First Intifada (1987–1993). As the World Cup is played on the radio, occasionally a pirate radio breaks through, calling for Palestinians everywhere to rise up, resisting the Israeli occupation. 

I’ve thought for a long time about that glass of juice in Maradona’s Legs. I’ve had that glass of juice in visits to friends’ houses – the sweat beading down its side and cascading into driblets makes the juice seem even colder. Maradona’s Legs is technically a football film, with jerseys, live score updates, and team allegiances galore, but my brain fixates on those 30 seconds with the juice – and suddenly, it’s a food film, too. 

With every rewatch, Maradona’s Legs strikes me as distinct from other films produced by Palestinian writers and directors. It looks to a universalised notion of childhood, while weaving in detail specific to the Palestinian struggle. 

To me, Palestinian films often feel written for European and North American film festival markets, not necessarily for a Palestinian audience (particularly not those living in Palestine). The films are mostly dramas with crisp cinematography, and they either focus on resistance movements or a major disruption the occupation has instituted, while playing to a foreign audience’s sense that Palestinians are as violent, volatile, and patriarchal as the stereotypes suggest. But for Palestinians, the same films cut too close to home. They are not an escape from the reality of the occupation; a reality that, while ever-present, is not the subject of every conversation. 

I struggle when watching films like those, like Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar (2013) – notable for being largely funded by Palestinians, and its Academy Award nomination. But even so, there is a moment in Omar that reminds me of Maradona’s Legs. In this particular scene, a trio of friends – including Omar and his friend Tarek – sits at a hummus shop moments before an Israeli raid. As they tuck in, the titular Omar complains the bread isn’t fresh. Tarek responds that the bread is not as fresh as what Omar is used to, as Omar works in a bakery. But that particular bakery is across town, across the Apartheid Wall, which Omar scales regularly to see his friends and secret girlfriend Nadia (who is also Tarek’s sister). Within seconds, the armed Israeli police enter the shop looking for Omar, and the film becomes a political thriller about betrayal and the Israeli occupation.

I’m not interested in the political thriller aspects of Omar which, like Hany Abu-Assad’s previous film Paradise Now (2005), go into the question of collaboration with the Israeli state. But my brain revisits the hummus scene because of its simple message – Good hummus needs good bread – making the meal not simply one of hummus, but hummus and fresh bread. Omar knows he and his friends deserve good lives of dignity, and dignity can mean fresh bread with your hummus. When I watch that scene, I hope that there is a home for that stale bread, which is ultimately abandoned as Omar and his friends are pursued through town by the Israeli occupying forces.

In Maqloubeh, a precious short film by Nicolas Damuni, a group of friends make a meal together before their apartment is raided by the Israeli army. And there it is once again: that splash of familiarity, something I recognise from the texture of my Palestinian life, like the glass of juice: it is the lively pan-Palestinian debate on the proper way to make maqloubeh/makluba. When they’re eventually attacked and hauled out of their home by the Israeli army, a couple across the way, watching the spectacle with nonchalance from their own apartment, call out: It smells like they were making makluba. As the couple dig in, they quietly bicker over whether an eggplant or cauliflower is better in makluba. Maybe it’s the best makluba they have ever had. 

Anyway, I keep my head down during these debates. But watching Maqloubeh, I am reminded that sometimes we really don’t have debates about gastronomical authenticity to seek out gastronomical authenticity, it’s a moment of escape that we can provide to each other as we bicker about something pointless. And as I watch the couple eat before the credits roll, I remember this reality that exists for many living in Palestine: the cross-section of society that has fiery opinions about makluba overlaps neatly with the cross-section that has experienced illegal arrest and threats to their person in their own home. 

Upon us Palestinians rests the necessity of documenting the Israeli occupation. And in Palestinian film, this is often limited to the most visceral of Israeli violence towards Palestinians, like bodily harm or the destruction of homes. But, to achieve its goals of displacement and genocide, the Israeli state strips the textures of our culture out of existence, and it tries to muffle our vigour – the same vigour we funnel into our food (and our unnecessary food debates). 

I keep watching Palestinian films because of a strong communal urge to show support for my people’s nascent film industry, in the hopes that the industry will grow into something that produces films for its own people; maybe one day I will find myself watching a Palestinian rom com. But I also watch Palestinian films because herein lies a record of how we eat: the no-nonsense sharing of food and our ability to create pockets of solace for each other. And how, in ways big and small, food shows us at our best. Whether it is the iterations of makluba, the glass of juice or the desire for fresh bread – these are little winks across the filmscape to the global Palestinian community and to no one else. And for now, this is how our films resist.

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Credits

N.A. Mansour is a historian of books, art and religion who writes about food and culture.

Joel Blackledge is a writer and filmmaker based in the West Midlands. His video series Feast Your Eyes explores how films tell stories with and about food. His writing has been published and produced by Novara Media, Little White Lies, BBC Radio, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, [in]Transition and Liars' League. Find him on Instagram at @dam.fino 

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

Maqloubeh can be watched on YouTube.
Maradona’s Legs can be watched on Netflix.
Omar can be watched on Mubi

All contributors to Vittles are paid: the base rate this season is £600 for writers (or 40p per word for smaller contributions) and £300 for illustrators. This is all made possible through user donations. Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year ─ if you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running and keep contributors paid. This will also give you access to the past two years of paywalled articles.

If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free weekly, or subscribe to the Friday newsletter for £5 a month, please click below.

Subscribe now

Note: Today’s text is performed by the author, who has transformed it into a reading and sound collage with additional music. We strongly recommend that if you have the time, you listen to the essay being read via the podcast function at the start of this email.

The best ‘translator’ for food is the body: food speaks through the sensations it produces when we eat it. Writing about food brings the challenge of conveying the irreducibly complex sensations of the body into the medium of language. The body, like food, is site-specific; it is anchored to place and time and cannot be in two locations at once. Language is unattached, and disembodied: floats away from us. Unlike one dish or one body, the same word can be in many places at once. To speak of food, language must go against its ephemeral nature and try to approximate a rich specificity of place and time. Language about food does not always travel well, changing meaning en route. 

Today’s piece of nonfiction by the author and artist Tice Cin speaks of the movements of food and language from North Cyprus to mainland Turkey and to north London across the sea, or on a plane, as well as across the table. Care must be taken when food and language travel – Tice shows us that you need the right container and an understanding of how it will be read. Against the odds, cheese smuggled thousands of miles in slippers might arrive intact when a word for cheese spoken face to face does not. Her text expresses the dance of food as it moves between bodies and borders and words. RMJ

Food as a Babysitter, by Tice Cin

I am soaking Tupperware that is the perfect shape. Before it moulded a stump of cylindrical moin-moin, egg in the middle, day-sustaining and scotch-bonneted.  

No one is here.  
The bleach rivulets into the indices of the lid. 
We smuggle food. 
Pillowcases of it. 
Jars in shoes.  
Contraband gifts. 

Someone’s argued with the neighbour with the goats. My uncle’s had to resort to the other neighbour, with her goats. I once told a boy on a date that I loved his family cheese because they made it ekşili: I loved the tart, the tang. Perhaps the sourness of older goat milk that gives helim a little boost of flavour. Churned with secrets.

My sister gifted her in-laws back on the mainland proper cöy helim, taken on a stormed-up boat from Kıbrıs to Mersin. They sat at a long table in a garden eating soğuk kahvaltı. Cold breakfast. Spicy hung-up pastırma, walnut paste, green-appley almonds. She watched as her husband’s uncle sized up the cöy helim, and she felt confident that this mainlander would become a convert and see how it was special, the cheese from our village, made by the family of the boy I dated. She tells me how he smiled politely after his bite. Said it was nice. Subtle taste. Subtle? She was confused. She remembered the cheese to be tart, lemony but not ekşili. The taste had changed, become milder. Instead they were eating a neutral type of cheese, rather than the cheese that toddlers feared and village men sequestered. Is this the potent cheese you loved so much? Where is the vim? The polite smile of my sister’s husband’s uncle said a lot.      

Sidebar, I said to her, isn’t ekşili a good thing? Isn’t ekşili ‘tart and lemony’? She said no, ekşili is a diss in the Turkish language. That’s like saying someone marinated their cheese in vinegar. I had a click into place, an image of a boy on our date together: I had found the source of the changed cheese. Rewinding all the way back to me leaning forward, towards my date, and using a word to describe a bright, tart flavour. Him, choked on his tea when I’d told him about his ‘ekşili’ family cheese. I thought he was choking because he was shy and I looked pretty. I remember he replied saying how I was more of a villager than the villagers. Now I see he meant: I had the negging that aunties have, as in, ‘hmm the cheese is good but you make it too sharp, honey’. I had only meant to say that I loved the tang of his helim. But he changed it to a new recipe forevermore after that. I can’t believe I changed the helim. I’ve heard his family business has gone a bit downhill in the village. I’ve heard that expats buy their cheese more now, because it tastes less villagey. We might never get that particular tongue-flicking, sour cheese back. I feel to buck him one day on the beach and say ‘I’m sorry, it was just a language barrier thing, a misunderstanding’. I feel to ring up my sister’s husband’s uncle and explain to him how I’ve ruined the cheese and that mainlanders need to put some respect on Turkish Cypriot cheese. If you came to the village itself, you’d find some lovely stuff here. We’ve got strong flavours. We add a particular type of salt to our goat milk. We have some old-school ways that have lasted through the slow pace of life here. There are lots of neighbours who regularly top one another: just when you think you’ve found your favourite, someone else is arriving to come out on top of flavour. Some lovely lovely stuff.  

Food embargoes are such a bore. You’d be rude not to exchange Nescafé from London for homemade prizes. But there’s a flip side. In the airport back to London from North Cyprus via mainland Turkey, me and my siblings, all fifteen and younger, got pulled by security once. 

They all protested: nothing was in our suitcases, promise. 

I remember earlier that day in my auntie’s spare room, virtually untouched since the 1970s, and her winking at me as she put food in alternative stockings: lemon in a pant leg here, crumbly dairy-haven nör in a sock there. 

This was my time to straighten things out, to remind my siblings, ‘Eh, what about the helim in our slippers?’ 

What slippers and what helim? 

Suitcases. Four kids looking on. Me, pleased as anything. 

Police are brandishing a pillowcase of dried molohiya before our eyes.

Security guards are looking at me like I am a paid-and-prodded snitch.

You see, North Cyprus has been under harsh embargoes since 1983. Flights to its Ercan International Airport are banned internationally. If you’ve made the trip there, you’ve had a stopover in Turkey, or you’ve crossed the Green Line at the border to get over there. The United Kingdom, Germany, and some other European countries accepted Turkish Cypriot food products, including citrus, being directly imported for some time, until the European Court of Justice heightened the economic embargo in the 90s by stating that food certificates issued by North Cyprus were deemed unacceptable for the European Union.

When people ask me what do I eat, what’s on our family table, they often don’t imagine the lengths the food took to reach the table. Let’s forbid a jar breaking. Economic scarcity takes on new heights when you break something that is expensive and hard to replace. 

There’s a saying: if you don’t exist politically, you don’t exist at all. But we try to find ways to make it work. To archive ourselves on a plate.

An ex, breaking up with me, once spoke to me about how it must be nice to be so connected to my island, ‘yours surrounds you in North London’. It’s not quite as simple as that. Many Turkish Cypriot food businesses have failed over the last twenty years: it is easier to find and eat most foods from across the Middle East and North African regions than it is to find a Turkish Cypriot business thriving. Those others are similar and beloved but they’re not the same. On the phone to my sister, talking about the guy who brings delicacies over from North Cyprus, she tells me, ‘I don’t know where he brings it from but he just does it’. 

I spent a lot of my young years getting driven around various cash-and-carries. Babysitters with side-hustles would drop me off while they went off on phone calls. It would be a waiting game of mine to hold tins up and wonder if it might be similar to home goods in North Cyprus. Elsewhere I’m let loose and told to walk around eating by myself, and to return when I’m full. If I’m a kid, nobody will notice me. Go to the salad bar. Eat the olives out of the bowl containers. Find the hot chicken corner. 

My few memories of being with my dad involve these places too. Loon Fung in Tottenham is where he introduced me to dried fruit; he’d buy a box of sweetened mango and I’d go back to his flat, in shock at the quantity before returning home and wishing I’d taken another packet with me.

Another time in JJs wholesaler I am walking around with my dad, whose kebab shop in east London is failing (Romford is still quite… impenetrable at this point, and he eventually swaps to making Full Englishes and roast dinners). We are in the meat fridge, where the plastic shutters feel warm by contrast, and he is explaining to me how Turks didn’t originally cook kebabs with lamb in London: the real stuff is with beef so it gets steaky, like the delicious Iskender in Antepliler on Green Lanes. . I am enraged because it sounds like a lie. I’ve always known lamb to be best – it was never the cheap option in my head. If England had been different, the kebabs might have been beef all along. Is it hearsay or subterfuge in a meat locker? I go back home, to my mum, who says that in her opinion, things like köfte meatballs always taste better when you mix the mince half and half. Lamb. Beef. I nod because this is common sense. 

Best Kebab opened in Stokey in 1982. According to some potentially reliable family members of mine, they started off with beef for their döner and went on to use lamb. That same family member thinks the choice was their idea, that they practically invented the secret recipe in a conversation while ordering from them in the early 80s. But the general idea was that the lamb had more fat and therefore would stand out and taste juicier, attracting a cold-weather stomach. On my way home from my first poetry performance when I was 22, a friend of mine offered to drive me and my siblings home – we slowed down to grab Best Kebab on the way. She was complaining about the smell of the kebab, how it would sink into the leather seats of her new Mercedes. Me and my brother cradled the two bags of döner in our arms as the winter winds whipped in through every open window, finding her disdain sacrilegious. We were grateful for the lift, but more grateful to get back home and peel the paper away. 

My mum used to go to the market stall in Lefkosa in the 70s and buy ‘paupers’ essentials’ from stallholders who shouted the lyrics of Barış Manço’s ‘Domates, Biber, Patlıcan’ – ‘tomatoes, pepper, aubergine’. They’d yell it so fast that you couldn’t make out the song. It is rumoured amongst mainland Turks that you can make 700 different dishes from that combo of ingredients. My mum will tell you it’s more like 20, but I am looking to reach at least 100 somehow, with smoking drums and fine sieves. ‘Domates, Biber, Patlıcan’ is an ode to missed opportunities: it tells the story of a heart-ached poet who is on the brink of expressing his undying love for an unnamed woman. Right on the cusp, a street seller outside suddenly cries out Domates! Biber! Patlıcan!’ and it halts him in his thoughts. For there is always reality when you come back to eating, sheltering, walking on. 

In my novel Keeping the House, cooking is a means of connecting back to what you have around you. There is a line ‘our Tupperware, just the same’. To me, this calls to mind the warming surprise as Tupperwares get sent back and forth between friends' households. You never return a loaded plate empty. My pepper paste recipe has been improved by a friend of mine whose Yoruba mum gave him tips to freeze mine for better results. Smoke things before you blend to freeze them. The rest, top secret.

The adaptability of food has always been a comfort to me. One item swapped for another. Nothing is lost as we find ways towards each other with tricks and solutions. 

I am soaking Tupperware that is the perfect shape. It is a friend of mine’s birthday and there is no better way for me to show love than by filling the Tupperware with ceviz macun: green walnuts in a clove and sugar syrup. I asked my auntie to get the lady in our village to do it, the same one who’d shown me around her home and pointed out black-and-white family portraits of her husband before the war, and new ones of her grandkids in jelly shoes. She fell and broke her arm after a playful goat ran into her arms. She’ll make it again but first I need to visit, to bring her the fresh walnuts, the sugar, the cloves. In the meantime, I am going to fill the Tupperware with ceviz macun delivered by the short, hooded man who brings things over. My auntie asked the lady in Esentepe to make it for me. As a thank you, I will use a holidaying relative to send back coffee, underwear from Primark, maybe some M&S biscuits. 

No one is here.  
We smuggle and swap food. 
Pillowcases of it. 
Jars in shoes.  
Contraband gifts.

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Credits

Tice Cin is an interdisciplinary artist from North London. Her novel Keeping the Houseis set in and around the north London heroin trade. She is a recent recipient of a Society of Authors Somerset Maugham Prize, and was shortlisted for Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. A DJ and music producer, she is preparing to release an accompanying album for Keeping the House with a host of talented features including those from the creative house she is part of, Fwrdmtn, such as Kareem Parkins-Brown and Latekid. A filmmaker, she is currently writing and co-directing three short films. She has just produced, self-funded and directed her first music video.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. Previous clients include Vittles, Hachette UK, Welbeck Publishing, Good Beer Hunting and the London Science Fiction Research Community. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Rebecca May Johnson, Sharanya Deepak and Jonathan Nunn, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

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The first tattoo I got was a small illustration of a pineapple smoking a cigarette that looks a bit like an old friend. I got it after a short trip to Taiwan with my siblings (one of whom drew the tattoo), during which I adopted a pineapple from a market in Taipei and carried it around the country for the ten days we were there. I remember little of Taiwan, being overwhelmed and disoriented at the time, but the pineapple is intact in my memory. I can see it perched on my backpack when we ate on the street; nestled in my lap when I drove our rented car.

Before I got that tattoo, I had imaginary ones. When we were teenagers, my best friend and I would play a game we loved called ‘Kevin and Blake’, where we pretended to be sun-soaked, sweet-tempered white boys from California who were always having a good time. In the game, we would switch to make-believe personalities; we had fake accents and also fake tattoos – of milk cartons; wiggly snakes; a lyric from our favourite Replacements song. I like to think that we were using our pretend identities as fun white dudes to make up for the casual liberty we desired but didn’t have access to as young women who lived in Delhi’s jagged density. Like tattoos, we thought that free-footed silliness was a luxury afforded to white people and boys. We didn’t believe that it could really be ours.  

As I thought more about my stupid pineapple, I realised that, when I got it, I was perhaps claiming idiocy as a right. In my public, professional life as an Indian woman, I often reel from the pressure of being resilient, serious, gentle – performative to other people’s expectations. The ridiculous pineapple, meanwhile, cannot be fucked. It reminds me of my impulse to buy food in transit and aimlessly store it away. It tells about (to the annoyance of some and amusement of others that know me) the crumbly pieces of sponge-cake and half-smoked cigarettes that emerge belatedly from my bag. 

Tattoos are as real as they are fantasy, as impulsive as they are ridden with thought; food tattoos, then, are equally various and diverse. The fast-paced, intense worlds of the kitchen are often articulated on the bodies of those that work them, as too are meaningful caricatures, silly jokes and simple moments in which food appears as a symbol to mark the passage of time. 

Yet, even though chef’s ink is what is most talked about when we think of food tattoos, food — and, by extension, food tattoos –– belong to everybody. Unlike sharp knives and ripped-out steaks, food takes form in many ways in people’s lives, and then, similarly, on their bodies. As Steph Marsden, who came up with the idea for today’s newsletter, writes: that food and tattoos go together as much as they do is unsurprising; both food and tattoos become incorporated into the body; they both become part of you. 

We asked some people to write about their food tattoos and got in return short essays. Reading them made me feel like I was at a warm dinner table, being told stories for the first time. Many of these tattoos intersect in theme and sentiment, yet each one is different from the next. These food tattoos are full of memory, power, laughter, intimate references and inside jokes, and reading about them has also got me thinking about my next one. SD

Doon yer tea, eat yer bread, by Steph Marsden

‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are,’ Kelis once said, quoting some French guy. If you told me about your food tattoos, I wonder if I could predict who you are, what you eat… and where? Once, tattoos signified life on society’s fringes, but today tattoos can be meaningful markers of kitchen life, echoing the often brutal rite of passage of service work. Or they can simply be an indelible imprint of identity expressed through food. That they go together is unsurprising: both food and tattoos become incorporated into the body; they both become part of you.

I first thought about getting a tattoo aged 18 but was not confident that my aesthetic choices would match my future taste preferences. But today, at 42, I’ve embraced playfulness, and the concept of permanence seems less absolute. I’m much fonder of a tattoo which signifies playful expressions of taste, be it Spam, Monster Munch or a bunch of beetroot. I’m fascinated by people opting for condiment tattoos, like Sam Smith’s recent Marmite tattoo, or the 70 people  who got freebie tats of Duke’s Mayo at Yellow Bird in Richmond, Virginia. 

My friend, tattoo artist Gino Matos, has a food tattoo that really means something – an olive branch on his forearm, which pays tribute to his experience of living in a foster home called El Olivar in Madrid. But, like so many of my life choices, the idea for my own tattoo came about as a bit of a joke. When discussing my favourite tattoo trends with Gino, the silliest tattoo I could think of no longer seem so outlandish. His advice to someone who is getting tattooed for the first time is to start with something small, and not to overthink it. So, for my first bit of ink, we decided to embrace the spirit of a piece of graffiti that has popped up all over Edinburgh, which features the saying ‘Doon yer tea’ and an illustration of a crocodile saying ‘Eat your bread’. 

I love the silliness of the tags, and the mystery surrounding what they are supposed to represent. There are many discussion threads about the graffiti, on its abundance in the city and its possible meaning – while some embrace the (gabber) subculture, others lambast its existence. Recently, a photographer created a project mapping all of the examples of it that they’d found in the city. 

Gino and I used the graffiti as inspiration for my monochrome panel. I showed him a mood board of images and styles I liked; this included some other foods which have permeated my subconscious, such as a squid (which featured in my MSc Gastronomy research) and a mathematical gastropod symbol. When Gino saw the symbol, he immediately said ‘Oh, those fractals look like a croissant!’, so the ‘bread’ in my tattoo became a croissant, depicting my dedication to pastries eaten with builder’s tea.

The final design of the tattoo differs significantly in style from the graffiti it’s based on, but that’s the beauty of interpretation that body art can achieve. I feel Gino has produced a fun design which expresses my character, while also creating a nod to my identity – what I like to eat; my tea-drinking ‘Northern’ upbringing; and the city in which I now live and roam. Did getting a tattoo change me? No. Is getting a tattoo as painful as writing? Hell no. But I have been transformed by the process.

A Sebald herring and a cabbage, by Thom Eagle 

I got my first tattoo to mark the publication of my first book First, Catch when I was 32. The book is an account of the construction of a single meal, told in digressive detail, and includes a section on herring. My writing on herrings was inspired by WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn  – a novel which narrates a walking tour of Suffolk, where I lived at the time. Sebald depicts the decline of the once-huge regional herring fishery, and the hard and dangerous way of life that came with it. The pattern of the herring’s silver scales – a five-pointed cross, which was thought by Thomas Browne to be evidence of the wisdom of God due to its ubiquity throughout art and nature – is a motif that runs through the book. 

The herring has come to mean something to me which goes beyond its culinary applications, something that I can’t quite put my finger on. So, I got a tattoo of one. My friend Owen Meredith was just starting out as a tattoo artist at the time and, although I didn’t bother to elaborate on the (arguably pretentious) reasons for my choice of subject, it came out as I wanted. 

After that, for no real reason except that a single tattoo felt lonely, I got a cabbage – a plump and pointed and (in real life) purple Kalibos, which at the time was my favourite cabbage. (If you asked me my favourite cabbage now, I’d more likely say a January King, but Kalibos is still a pretty cabbage. Mostly I tell people the tattoo is of a Hispi to save the explanation, but it knows and so do I.) Owen did this one as well; I came straight from work to get it and I remember him being slightly annoyed that, having prepped them all morning, I still smelled a little bit like herring.

Fork and Sophia Loren spaghetti, by Jen Calleja

I have always enjoyed food, and in big portions too, which probably stems from my childhood; my dad was always plonking huge, domed mounds of spaghetti Bolognese down in front of me, or curry and rice that was spilling over the edges of the plate, which I would clear with no problems. I never really thought about my body shape or food when I was younger (apart from when an older woman told my 18-year-old self that there was ‘nothing normal’ about me being a size 12). Then, a couple of years ago, I started fixating on what my body looked like and what I was eating. I largely blame social media, but I also recognise that this obsession started around the time I learned that I have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which can put you at greater risk of developing diabetes and heart disease and make your weight fluctuate more. I began having bouts of guilt about eating certain things, so much so that I would stare at the sugar and carb and protein content on items in the supermarket until I was on the verge of having a panic attack. 

Then, at a low point in my relationship with food, help came in the form of one of the most alluring women I’ve ever come across: Sophia Loren. I saw a picture of her on Instagram where she was in her underwear, with her hands piling her hair up on top of her head, and accompanying the image were her famous words: ‘Everything you see I owe to spaghetti’. It made me feel good. Her body in the picture and my body in real life had similar proportions, and she looked confident and sexy, something I hadn’t been feeling for a long time. Our bodies were both made from delicious spaghetti. 

Around the same time as seeing the picture of Loren, I started following Splendido Magazin, a German-Italian food magazine which is co-run by German authors Mercedes Lauenstein and Juri Gottschall. The publication shares a lot of pasta recipes, and its celebration of ravioli and gnocchi and rigatoni made me so joyful that I got a tattoo (by Martha Smith, who has done all but one of the tattoos on my left arm) of Splendido’s fork-and-spaghetti icon. It celebrates eating: of pasta, but also food in general. They were flattered, and sent me a piece of their merch: a pink cap that has the words ‘meglio cosí’ embroidered on the front in blue stitching, meaning ‘it’s better like this’, or ‘it’s better this way’.

The most donut, by Bethany Rutter

The year was 2013. I was relatively early on in my tattoo-getting life, but more importantly, I was relatively early on in understanding myself as a fat woman in the world. I had a popular plus-size fashion blog, and I felt part of an affirming, joyous community of fat women, both online and offline. I was figuring out how I really felt about my body, rather than how I was constantly told that I should feel about it. 

But it wasn’t all good. I had a boyfriend who was hot, but he did not treat me well. The validation I got from our relationship meant that I would never have been the one to end it, and I often wondered if he would treat me better if I wasn’t fat. I knew that I would be treating myself better by not putting up with our relationship if I wasn’t fat. In short, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times – which meant I had to find every way I could to fight for the good. 

I’d had my first tattoo done the previous year, and, in the planning process, quickly realised that I wasn’t that interested in making sure my tattoos were ‘deep and meaningful’. I just wanted them to be fun, skilfully done and representative of my tastes, my life, my choices. I knew I needed something overt, almost obnoxious, that said everything I needed to say about my relationship with my body, my fatness. When you’re a fat woman, there is a constant sense of being too much: your body is too much for other people, for mainstream fashion, for aeroplane seats, for decent healthcare. Your desires are too much, your appetite is too much, your demands are too much. So when I was planning my ‘fattoo’ (as I like to call it), I knew the food that I chose had to be a food that was not just too much, but in every way the most. 

Very quickly I landed on a donut. But not just any donut. It had to be the most donut. If you close your eyes and try to imagine this concept, it probably looks like the tattoo Rose Whittaker came up with: a bright pink ring donut covered in multicoloured sprinkles, the icing dripping down the sides, with the words LIVE FAT DIE YUM framing it. It needed to be a symbol of excess, of decadence: a visual shorthand for something stigmatised and ‘forbidden’, an indulgence so flagrant people were almost scared of it. It needed to be so bold that it encapsulated my mission statement: you, Bethany Rutter, will probably be fat forever, and that is OK. The permanence of a tattoo was part of its appeal, because what I was seeking from it was a way to bind myself to my body, the fat body I had then and still have now. My tattoo is about food, but it’s also about myself. I’ve had it for nine years now and I haven’t regretted it for a second. 

Blue-and-white rice bowl, by Nina Mingya Powles

One of the first things I bought when I moved to London in 2018 was a blue-and-white rice bowl, purchased from the basement of a corner shop in Chinatown for a few pounds. It’s such a commonplace object, but it felt like a bold purchase at the time: it was a first step towards creating my own kitchen. To me, this bowl represents warmth and familiarity; the feeling of being held when you come home. My mum, like many Asian families, has an old set of these ‘rice grain’ bowls, along with matching soup spoons and sauce dishes. The bowls have little indentations in their walls that look like grains of rice. Traditionally, the pattern was made by cutting tiny holes cut into the sides of the unfired clay bowl; the holes were then filled with glaze and the sides of the bowl thinned down, rendering the pattern of markings almost translucent. 

My fifth tattoo is of this bowl filled with noodles, tattooed by Georgina Leung. I tend to get tattoos to mark big moments in my life: a moth on my arm not long after I moved to Shanghai, a magnolia flower when my first book of poetry was published, a ginkgo leaf when I moved to London. In 2021, one of my responses to the city reopening was to get a new tattoo. I knew I wanted to approach an East Asian tattoo artist, and I’d been following Georgina’s work on social media for a while; her style is colourful, intricate and joyful, often connected to food and nostalgia.  

Wherever I am, I am always making bowls of noodles – for myself and for others. My tattoo is a reminder to myself of the small and beautiful things I am capable of creating. Its placement on the back of my upper arm means that sometimes it takes me by surprise when I turn and glimpse it in the mirror: the noodles that resemble udon, topped with two sheets of nori and a halved, boiled egg: soft but with a little chewy solidity; half runny, half fudgy, so that some of the yolk pours over the noodles and dissolves into the broth, while the rest stays intact and can be picked up with chopsticks. From far away, the yellow ink of the egg yolk and the blue bowl are bright against my skin. 

Salted duck egg, by Angela Hui 

Back in May 2020, when us rule-abiding goons were sitting two metres apart in parks while the government had wine and pizza parties, the thing I craved most was another tattoo. Not just the tattoo itself, but the thrill of waiting, the adrenaline high of hearing the tattoo machine buzzing. Or maybe I just wanted to feel alive again.

At the time, I had eight tattoos. I got my first taste of ink as soon as I was legal at 18, an infinity sign behind my right ear (during my regretful basic bitch era) and a micro-sized star on my right ankle to represent my family’s Chinese takeaway Lucky Star. I figured if I got something family-related my parents couldn’t give me a bollocking (spoiler: they gave me one anyway). Since then, my urge for tattoos has become more uncontrollable, and I gain several extra year on year, including a lavender plant by Emily Malice near my left boob, decided upon on a whim (no meaning, wanted to fuck around and find out – turns out it really hurts) and a bamboo steamer basket filled with har gao by Morgan Myers on the back of my right arm, tattooed on New Year’s Day, to remind me of all the chaotically good dim sum times with family. 

I was mindlessly scrolling Instagram for inspiration, one click away from buying my own stick-and-poke kit to maim myself with a badly drawn Sufjan Stevens lyric, when I came across tattoo artist Georgina Leung. I instantly fell in love with her drawings of cleavers, choi and cha chaan teng Hong Kong diners, and immediately slid into her DMs. After chatting for months, bonding over our families being from Hong Kong and owning Chinese takeaways in rural places, I patiently waited for lockdown restrictions to be lifted, then headed straight to her house to get two new tattoos: one, a traditional Chinese calendar with the number thirteen (my birthday), and the other a food tattoo – salted duck eggs on my right arm (I’m a salty bitch who loves eggs). 

It means so much to me to have Georgie’s work on my body. She has the ability to capture the beauty in domestic life as a love language – a mother cutting Asian pears, a carton of Vitasoy, a pink rice cooker – all of which played an integral role in my upbringing and makes my heart ache for childhood summers spent in Hong Kong. Georgie helped me to reconnect with my Chinese heritage in a small way, and to feel more at home with myself. I grew up not knowing any other kids like me; now, I couldn’t believe that someone who looked like me was tattooing me. We spent hours talking – about our childhood; the stigma of tattoos in Chinese culture (they are associated with criminals and gangs, and one of the most unfilial things to do); as well as our worries and frustrations about increased racial hate caused by the pandemic, all while she gently poked away at my arms. 

Later, I asked Georgie to illustrate the recipes in my book – from jiggly Cantonese steamed eggs to a gloopy bowl of congee. Ideally, I want to get all the recipes tattooed on me (sorry mum), but for now I have the anticipation of waiting again, this time to get a pair of chopsticks picking up cheung fun to commemorate the book. I’m counting down the days until our next booking.

Listening in on the lives of others, by Georgina Leung

Tattoos were not discussed in the Leung household, except to disapprove of them. When I was 17, I took my sister’s ID to Dublin and got a small cherry blossom flower on my hip, leading to tears, smashed plates and a threat to disown me. My dream of becoming a tattoo artist fell by the wayside.

At the start of the pandemic, when I was furloughed from an industry that had given me nothing in return apart from crippling anxiety and a damaged identity, I took up painting again. It seemed like a chance to recuperate and pick up the pieces of my self-worth. Although painting large canvases feels satisfying and appears impressive, it also felt daunting to try to create a masterpiece, so the idea of ‘flash’ designs became a less committal way of drawing; each piece could be small and quick, graphic narratives in their own right. My Instagram account became the anonymous outlet where I began posting drawings inspired by memories: Cantonese street food, cultural motifs, porcelain I would see dotted around extended family’s homes. 

I soon began hand-poking tattoos on myself, a traditional and archaic method that just involves a sharp point and some ink, where lines are born out of a series of dots which are slowly pierced into the skin. Giving them to myself slowly became a form of therapy. The act of allocating time to myself, to go at my own pace and to gift myself something I’d created – it all made perfect sense. I was astounded by the influx of viewers online who felt an affinity with the motifs I was tattooing (even just scribbles of white rabbit candies and mahjong tiles) and messaged to say they had never been interested in tattoos because there was a lack of art they felt any emotional connection to – until now. 

During this time, I met a writer called Angela Hui, who contacted me after I had posted flash designs I created of a Chinese calendar, salted duck eggs, salted fish, steaming rice cookers and Lunar New Year decorations. We immediately struck up a conversation, where we spoke of our love of our mums’ cooking, life as a second-generation takeaway kid, and how we felt an urgency to be more vocal about our cultural upbringing. She soon wound up in my flat, getting stabbed by needles herself. 

Fast forward to 2023, and I now run a small tattoo shop with two other artists. I often get asked the what my favourite subject to tattoo is, and I find myself answering ‘food’. It is in food that we find the most connections, where we can appreciate how the migration of people and food has become so fluid. I get to help people recall their most beloved home-cooked meals, a simple childhood snack they were only allowed on special occasions, or emphasise the steam coming from a bowl of noodles. It doesn’t matter to me if my tattoos are small and novel or large and significant; to me and my customers they represent migration, diversity and, most importantly, self-acceptance. The greatest gift is that with every single tattoo I give, I get to listen in on the lives of others. 

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Credits

Steph Marsden is a designer, retailer and researcher based in Edinburgh. She will be documenting her forthcoming food projects on her blog at Amuse.

Thom Eagle is a writer, chef and educator, formerly of Darsham Nurseries in Suffolk and London’s Littleduck but currently cooking and teaching in Margate, Kent. He has presented at the Oxford Symposium, writes the psychogastronomy newsletter, and contributes to At The Table, Pit and Market Life magazines, The Wine Zine and Vittles. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Summer’s Lease and First, Catch, which was shortlisted for the André Simon Food Book of the Year and won Debut Food Book at the Fortnum and Mason Awards.

Jen Calleja lives in Hastings, where she writes books, translates German-language books, and publishes Maltese books. Vehicle: a verse novel (Prototype) and Dust Sucker (Makina Books) are both out imminently. @niewview www.jencalleja.com

Bethany Rutter is an author from south-east London whose work focuses on women and girls and their bodies. Her latest novel, Welcome to Your Life, is for adults, while No Big Deal and Melt My Heart are for young people.

Nina Mingya Powles is a zinemaker, writer and librarian from Aotearoa New Zealand. Magnolia 木蘭, her debut poetry collection, was published in 2020 and shortlisted in the Forward Prizes. She is also the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons (2020), and a collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water (2021). She writes an occasional e-newsletter called Comfort Food. 

Angela Hui is a food writer, journalist and editor based in London, and the author of Takeaway: Stories from a childhood behind the counter. You can find more of her work at angelahui.co.uk and documenting Chinese takeaways in the UK on Instagram.

Georgina Leung is a London-based tattoo artist, who co-runs the tattoo shop Yuzu Space in Hackney Downs. You can find more of her work on Instagram.

Tattoo artists featured: Gino Matos, Owen Meredith, Martha Smith, Rose Whittaker, Emily Malice, Morgan Myers and Georgina Leung.

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.

It’s hard to overstate how sophisticated the PizzaExpress in Petersfield, the Hampshire town where I spent most of my adolescence, seemed. Back then, in the early 2000s, Petersfield maintained a cultural parochialism that was determinedly and unironically backwards. If you wanted to eat out there, you had the choice of an ultra-trad curry house, a wine bar, a few crusty pubs and an all-purpose Chinese restaurant. Every one of these options seemed to cleave to a trinity of aesthetic values: dark little dining rooms, chintzy furniture and thick carpets flaked with a dandruff of crumbs. 

PizzaExpress projected a different vision entirely. It was clean, bright and – by our then-standards – stylish, featuring black-and-white tiled floors, an open kitchen, marble-topped tables and imitation modernist chairs alongside spot lighting and a single rose for every table (real or fake, subject to availability), with cool jazz playing unobtrusively over the stereo. There was even an optimistic little terrazza outside, though any aspirations to a glamorous al fresco dinner were nullified by the fact it backed directly onto the Waitrose car park. 

Regardless, a restaurant like PizzaExpress meant a lot to Petersfield. Where the town’s social hub might once have been a pub near the marketplace, it was now here – a vaguely chic setting to which parents could bring their children, and one that attracted none of the stigma attached to a chain establishment like McDonalds. For me, a layman – not much of a pizza fan but obsessively interested in appearances – it represented something to aspire to: a platonic ideal of what a restaurant should look like. 

None of this was by accident. From its conception, PizzaExpress was a radical step for British restaurant culture; the food might not have been completely new, but the design of its outlets – from the furnishings and lighting to the art on the walls – had a profound impact on the way Britain’s restaurants looked and, by extension, who they catered to.

When Peter Boizot discovered pizza on a school-arranged trip to Florence in 1948, he instantly fell in love. ‘I thought it was the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten,’ he recalled in a 2016 interview. After national service, plus a quixotic series of short-lived careers and semi-itinerant stints in Europe, he found himself back in Britain, at a loose end, when a thought occurred to him: ‘I’d had a lot of pizzas in Rome but couldn’t find one in England. So I decided to open my own place.’ In 1965, seventeen years after eating his first pizza, he opened PizzaExpress on Soho’s Wardour Street. 

Although Boizot couldn’t find a pizzeria in London, pizza in the UK was not, in fact, the novelty that established narrative would have us believe. Boizot’s restaurant wasn’t even the first place to serve pizza on the Soho site: the name ‘PizzaExpress’ belonged to a previous attempt to create a fine dining-style pizzeria, established by the Italian film producer Mario Zampi. The business failed and, seizing his opportunity, Boizot leapt in, buying it for either £10 or £100, depending on which source you believe. 

White walls; fluorescent lighting; an open kitchen where rectangular pizzas were to be sliced into tranches, then served and eaten upright at the counter from paper plates: the design of the reborn PizzaExpress in Soho would have been familiar to anyone who ate in a Hackney or Williamsburg restaurant circa 2008. Everything was a simulacrum of Italy: the pizza oven had to be imported, setting Boizot back £600 – at least six times the amount he had paid for the premises themselves – and, in a first for the UK, it sold imported Peroni lager. 

However, while the truck-stop dining system Boizot had envisaged might have worked in Naples, it didn’t translate to London. Customers crowded round the counter and lingered; a single slice consumed in one go didn’t sate Soho’s lunchtime appetite. On the advice of a friend, Boizot offered his customers the chance to ’eat with a knife and fork, and perhaps offer a round [pizza]’. He also, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, introduced seats, plates, metal cutlery and even a meat topping on one pizza (he was a life-long vegetarian). And it worked. 

Two years later, Boizot was emboldened to open a second branch, this time on the premises of a former dairy on Bloomsbury’s Coptic Street. The basic idea from the Wardour Street branch would be replicated, but the decor was to be altogether more ambitious. The person Boizot commissioned for the job was Enzo Apicella, a self-taught Neapolitan graphic designer with a genius for bold gestures. Apicella’s work, as the design critic Stephen Bayley noted in his obituary, was informed not by any established Italian tradition, but rather an interest in contemporary styles, filtered through his own eccentric world view. He had made his mark on the London restaurant scene by redesigning the Trattoria Terrazza, an upmarket celebrity haunt in Soho. He did away with its formal airs, ripping out its thick carpets, shipping in contemporary furniture and giving the space a sheen of modernist cool. Trattoria Terrazza went on to become an unofficial dining room for London’s pop-cultural aristocracy: Michael Caine, Mick Jagger, Terence Stamp and David Bailey were all customers. 

Boizot’s venture, however, presented a very different set of challenges, to be addressed on a significantly smaller budget. Apicella argued the case that the site should not resemble any pre-existing vision of an Anglo-Italian restaurant, the associations of which brought to mind visions of chianti bottles in wicker baskets and tourist posters of the Dolomites. Instead, it should be an entirely more modern proposal, one lit with spot lamps previously only really used in upmarket retail – Apicella had first encountered them in a boutique selling magazines – with acoustic discs attached to the ceiling to create a buzzy echo. A less rudimentary open counter was installed, visible from every table in the space so as to provide some inadvertent theatre for diners. The floor was paved with the black and white tiles that would become part of the chain’s signature livery. 

Jonathan Meades, then a student at RADA, recalls that the restaurant’s break with aesthetic convention was notable. ‘At Coptic Street, there was an air in Apicella’s design of improvisation, probably to an extent from having a tight budget and making the best of what was [on] the premises already,’ he told me in September. Meades hazards that the chain’s art nouveau-inflected logo – a roundel filled with floral motifs and the restaurant name printed in a deeply decorative typeface – may well have owed something to the premises’ unusual facade. It was, after all, another Apicella design.

In the design of PizzaExpress, a fundamental divide between low and high culture had been breached. When Eduardo Paolozzi, himself a second-generation Leith Italian, designed a series of murals for a further, Apicella-designed branch on the Fulham Road in 1968 (allegedly on the condition he received a lifetime guarantee of free margheritas), it also became a venue for proper, institutionally-recognised pop art. At the same time, Terence Conran was trying to bring European modernism to the British high street, but his ventures – starting with the opening of The Soup Kitchen in Chelsea in 1954 – retained an air of exclusivity. PizzaExpress, however, was a truly egalitarian vision of luxury – one that, in its way, transcended the confines of social class. 

In the decades that followed, PizzaExpress expanded its reach through inner London, its wealthier suburbs and deep into the south-east of England. But at the beginning of the 1990s, the chain was still a long way from high street ubiquity. Though its reach took in some 60 branches, most of them were concentrated around the capital; only one, in Glasgow, was in Scotland. Thanks to the rise of food TV, and restaurants like the River Cafe in Hammersmith and Alastair Little’s eponymous restaurant in Soho, Italian food was now hot property. PizzaExpress’s new CEO, David Page, saw the time was ripe for expansion. 

Page was an unusual figure in the restaurant world. He had begun his career in hospitality working at PizzaExpress as a pot-washer in a Wimbledon branch and risen to become the holder of several of the chain’s west London franchises. In 1990, he had pounced on a buyout and been appointed the business’s chief executive. 

One day, on a visit to Edinburgh to explore the viability of opening a branch, Page stopped in for lunch at one of the city’s few vegetarian cafes. He was impressed by the decor, leading him to ask for the designer’s details. ‘I was really quite surprised to be contacted,’ architect Malcolm Fraser, the man who received the call, told me in an interview last summer. ‘[Page] asked me if I’d like to design some restaurants for him… I didn’t think pizzerias were all that interesting, but PizzaExpress seemed a bit different.’ 

Page’s brief to Fraser gave him the kind of budget only a high-level corporate job could guarantee, but also an unusual degree of creative freedom. Up to this point, conventional wisdom had it that the words ‘sophisticated’ and ‘affordable’ did not mix, presupposing that potential diners would be confused by the merest sop to the avant-garde. Page’s brief, however, put faith in mid-market customers’ aesthetic discernment; as Fraser puts it, ‘moneymaking, populist architecture – contemporary, modern style for normal people at affordable prices.’ For a socially conscious architect intent on democratising ‘high’ culture – Fraser’s CV included both community projects and a stint at Little Sparta, the home-cum-micronation of the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay – the appeal was obvious. 

Fraser had licence to play around, doing unusual things with polishes and plasters, unexpected counter-fronts and curves. His work for the brand took the experimental spirit of Apicella’s designs but dispensed with their exclamatory pop art trappings. Like much of the best architecture of the 1990s, there was little about Fraser’s PizzaExpresses that marked them out as products of their era; simple materials and sensitivity to place took precedence over other concerns. One of the few caveats was that the colour green was to be verboten, which had nothing to do with retail pseudo-science; for whatever reason, Page just hated it. Fraser’s memories of working for Page during this time are pretty wistful. ‘It was really quite interesting in the 1990s. I’ll sound pompous if I say something like “it was swish dining for the masses”, but I was very happy to be part of something that democratised that kind of culture… they were serving affordable food in modern buildings where the people running the show cared about contemporary aesthetics.’ 

Malcolm Fraser Architects would go on to design more than ten restaurants for PizzaExpress over the next decade, one of which – the fabulously odd branch on Deanhaugh Street in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge, crowned by a near-absurd Scots Baronial clocktower overlooking the Water of Leith – won several awards. While Edinburgh was no Petersfield – it had a fine tradition of Scots-Italian food in its own right – Fraser had created a dependable neighbourhood restaurant in a part of town that was sorely lacking in such things, all the while staying true to his brief. ‘There was something David said about the restaurants, and I think I quote from memory,’ he remembers. ‘He said: “If I catch you repeating yourself unnecessarily… I will fire you.”’

By the turn of the millennium, PizzaExpress had more than 250 branches in the UK, as well as a growing number overseas. Developments in the preceding decade had changed the average British consumer's relationship to restaurant culture and, by extension, their understanding of what constituted ‘good taste’. Over the course of this period, mid-market chains had well and truly conquered the British high street. ‘Before the 1990s, chain restaurants didn’t really exist in the same way,’ says Karen Jones, who co-founded rival group Café Rouge in 1989. Yet ‘there was a zeitgeist, and people were interested in eating out.’ Jones put this to the test in 1993, venturing beyond the well-to-do corners of the south-east to open a branch of Café Rouge in Birmingham. ‘We were only the second [sit-down, chain restaurant] to open there… and it was an immense success.’ 

Café Rouge’s ersatz gallicisms may have made a degree of sense, according to market demand, but the staggering number of Italian chains that opened between 1990 and 2010… less so. In the space of two decades, we saw our cities colonised by Prezzo, Bella Italia, Strada, Zizzi, Carluccio’s, Rossopomodoro, Jamie’s Italian and, alas, the same chef-proprietor’s ill-fated venture into ‘British flatbreads’. All were serving up much the same thing, in much the same sort of setting, for much the same price. Similarly, all borrowed liberally from PizzaExpress’s aesthetic template, often to the extent that various competing chains could be all but indistinguishable. 

Yet still, PizzaExpress stood out. ‘Only Hannibal Lector would conceivably have a favourite Café Rouge or All Bar One,’ AA Gill wrote in a 1999 Sunday Times article, ‘but everyone has a favourite PizzaExpress.’ There was a sense that the restaurants represented a kind of neutral, go-to meeting place for anything that could have been considered ‘polite society’ – they combined an unfussy modernist chic with what the industry likes to call a ‘family-friendly’ atmosphere. PizzaExpress had become – in writer Keith Miller’s words – ‘the good chain’: a chain restaurant for people who didn’t like chain restaurants.

In October 2019, PizzaExpress revealed that it owed more than £1 billion to various creditors and was at risk of folding, prompting many a calzone-themed Twitter joke. By now, the chain counted 470 UK branches, but David Page had long since departed, and the business was majority-owned by a Chinese venture capital firm whose investment, with hindsight, looks rather optimistic. Having become ubiquitous to the point of inescapability, the UK’s ‘casual dining’ restaurants have since suffered heavy losses, with some – most notably Jamie Oliver’s mini-empire of chains – collapsing entirely. 

If PizzaExpress’s plate-glass storefronts, monochrome interior deco and enthusiastic appropriation of art nouveau typefaces had seemed quietly disruptive in the Petersfield of 2002, its polished, quasi-moderne aesthetic is now looking just as tired as the design of my local branch’s competitors back then. Although the financial crash of 2008 played its role in changing customer behaviour, perhaps what’s even more important is that our perception of what constitutes ‘good taste’ has moved on. PizzaExpress and its ilk could be said to have embodied it for something approaching two decades but, as with so many tenets of the post-Cold War consensus, the ground had shifted. 

Newcomers deployed equally pronounced signifiers to mark their difference from the previous generation of chains. Opened in 2009, Russell Norman’s Polpo meticulously recreated the airs of Venetian cicchetti bars. Leon went all-out on the whimsy front, borrowing fonts from pre-war product adverts and making extensive use of found photos and old tourist posters. At MEATliquor, PizzaExpress’s ethos of bright lighting and monochrome colour schemes, which rendered the merest slick of dirt visible from anywhere in the restaurant, was reversed to create dining rooms lit as dimly as possible; Kind of Blue-era Miles Davis and bottles of chianti found themselves sidelined in favour of ear-shredding metal and ‘lageritas’. Indeed, ‘good taste’ is at least cosmetically starting to look a lot like what we used to call ‘bad taste’: restaurant designers are once again embracing kitsch, only this time knowingly. 

This successive wave of ‘casual dining’ chains may have swerved the direct aesthetic legacy of PizzaExpress, but their own visual branding communicates much the same message: that anyone can pass through their doors to enjoy decent food and service without being judged. Perhaps the chain that embodies this most of all is PizzaExpress’s upstart competitor, Franco Manca, which sells much the same product but has adopted a studiedly casual look apparently derived from a demand for ‘rustic authenticity’ – precisely the sort of thing that Apicella’s early restaurants consciously swerved. Wood has replaced marble as the surface of choice for tables; in place of art nouveau typefaces come menus in a font that looks like it’s been scrawled on with a sharpie. Yet while the chain may differ in aesthetic terms, it shares remarkably similar DNA; indeed, Franco Manca has become the host to the spirit of its predecessor’s as-yet-undead body. 

Peter Boizot and Enzo Apicella died within weeks of each other in 2018. By the time of his death, Apicella had designed dozens of restaurants for PizzaExpress around the UK, before finally parting ways with the chain in the early 2000s. Among his final commissions were a series of colourful murals in the Chiswick, Wimbledon and Guildford branches of Franco Manca. In February 2022, Malcolm Fraser’s most celebrated contribution to the PizzaExpress empire – the Deanhaugh Street branch – announced its permanent closure. Yet Fraser, too, has been commissioned by Franco Manca, and recently transformed the defunct Deanhaugh Street PizzaExpress into a branch of its rival. The current CEO of Franco Manca, coincidentally, is one David Page. 

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Credits

Digby Warde-Aldam writes the art section for The Week and much else besides. He is (very slowly) working towards producing a book-length text on the design of British chain restaurants.

Sinjin Li is the moniker of Sing Yun Lee, an illustrator and graphic designer based in Essex. Sing uses the character of Sinjin Li to explore ideas found in science fiction, fantasy and folklore. They like to incorporate elements of this thinking in their commissioned work, creating illustrations and designs for subject matter including cultural heritage and belief, food and poetry among many other themes. Previous clients include Vittles, Hachette UK, Welbeck Publishing, Good Beer Hunting and the London Science Fiction Research Community. They can be found at www.sinjinli.com and on Instagram at @sinjin_li

Vittles is edited by Jonathan Nunn, Rebecca May Johnson, and Sharanya Deepak, and proofed and subedited by Sophie Whitehead.