|
Description:
|
|
There are countless books that look back at human history through a food lens but Jenny Linford's Repast: The Story of Food is unusual. It centers on objects from the famed British Museum . These objects span multiple continents and date from pre-history to the modern day. This look at how we as a species have depicted our relationship to food over eons is striking, both for the similarities we can find and the differences.
Evan Kleiman: Was there a particular object when you started to actually work on the project that just jump started everything for you?
Jenny Linford: Thank you for your intro. You're right, because the British Museum has got the most enormous collection. It holds over 8 million objects, 2 million of those online. So I went and walked around the museum. And it's interesting, because when you walk around the British Museum, there are lots of things that aren't to do with food. Things that are to do with war or beauty or other aspects of life. But yet, there's this incredible strand, and that's what I wanted to put in the book, this richness, in a way, of our human food history. Because that was the whole exciting thing. We weren't looking at one culture, we were trying to do this really big picture stuff, you know, like a very, yeah, sweeping overview.
The work of the British artist Samuel Palmer is characterized by images of an idealized pastoral life. Painted while he was living in the village of Shoreham, Kent, this nighttime scene of a farmer walking through a field of harvested grain is invested with a poetic mystery. Photo courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum.
Could you pick out what the oldest object is that you chose for the book?
So one of the oldest objects in the book we have dates back to the late Ice Age. So that was about 14,000 years ago, and that's this amazing object. It's like a spear thrower, and it comes from France. It's just this very powerful shape inspired by a mammoth, when humans were hunting mammoths, and that's what's amazing. We were hunting these huge animals, because that's what we need to do to live on in the Ice Age. So there you go.
It's just incredible that something that old survives to tell the story of the people who used it. I remember when I first started going to museums as a young person, the first art I probably responded to were paintings that had an agricultural theme, images of harvest and gathering. What are one or two pieces of art that you highlight with this theme, and what kind of story did they tell us?
I can see why you would respond to that. They are very, very beautiful. The wonderful thing about food is that, we all eat, so we can all relate to the idea of food. And I think what's interesting, we live in an age where perhaps we're distanced from the realities of growing and harvesting food, and yet, of course, it's been so important in human history. So among the objects that I choose, there's a painter called Samuel Palmer, a British painter, very romantic. He was inspired by William Blake. He was working later than Blake. These sort of 19th century painters. And the British Museum has got this incredible collection of prints and drawings and paintings. And there's an image by Samuel Palmer, “Cornfield by Midnight with the Evening Sun.” Corn in those days, just meaning grain actually, not specifically maize, like we would think of it now. So probably a wheat field, actually. But it's incredibly romantic. You know, it's very rich colors. It glows. The corn in the field is sort of red and orange, and then there's this sort of misty, purpley-blue sky, and this moon shining down on it, and it feels very mystical, which Palmer did paint. In his paintings, he painted this sort of idealized pastoral English landscape, in a particular way, with a lot of emotion. So when you look at that, you can feel that sort of emotional power, actually, of the harvest.
Rigid open baskets from the rainforest region of Queensland, Australia, are traditionally made by men. This one was used to collect Moreton Bay chestnuts. Photo courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum.
But the objects aren't limited to two dimensional paintings or drawings. Tell us about the baskets in the collection that pertain to gathering.
Yeah, that's a really wonderful thing you've picked up on, because we use that phrase "hunting and gathering." So the book, just for context, starts with hunting, gathering, fishing as this very fundamental way that humans lived. You know, for most of human history, that's how we lived. And then agriculture comes along about 12,000 years ago. So gathering is really fundamental. The British Museum had so many that I wanted to put in. I mean, there was a very beautiful birch bark, one made by indigenous people in North America, woven together, beautifully woven together. Then around the world in a totally different part of it, we also have an Australian weaving basket from Queensland, Australia. The different baskets were made with different uses, very, very specific, to pick different things, weaving from different materials, using local materials that grew to create different textures, but also with a real aesthetic appeal to them. It was absolutely stunning. And again, you know, the skill it takes to make baskets in the way that they were doing, is quite remarkable.
Birch bark is an important resource for the Indigenous Peoples of North America, who prize the natural material for its versatility and water-resistant properties. Strips of bark, carefully cut from birch trees, are shaped into containers and held together with pieces of split root, as in the case of this berry basket. Photo courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum.
One of the things that was really interesting to me is just the breadth of it from all over the world. As you explored the collection, did you come to notice different emphases by certain groups of people or geographic areas, either of craft or the way certain foods were memorialized?
Oh, that's a big question.I think what struck me overall was just this sort of shared humanity of eating. In a way that was my starting point for this book. I mean, the phrase which opens the book is, "Food is universal yet particular," which was something I kept saying to the curators, because I had a big consultation process with the curators. And, you know, it's when I was saying that we all have to eat, and we've eaten through human history. So we share these ways. Or, you know, how did we obtain our food? And yet, it's nice to say different. But I think I kept, I kept being struck, in a way, by the shared. Towards the end of the book, we have got sections on eating in and eating out and, like, picnics. So in a way, what was fun for me was I would be, I'd come up with an idea and think, "Oh, I'd like to talk about picnics. I'd like to have a spread on picnics. Have we, as much as they've got objects on picnics? Put it in." And then you've just been struck by how in different cultures, particularly different times, you know, from sort of Mogul India to 19th century England, there are these images of people picnicking. And then, of course, you have Japan as well, under the cherry blossoms, and people eating out in the fresh air, this idea of the delight of eating food in, you know, in the countryside, and it being an activity people enjoy. That was really lovely for me.
A depiction of picnicking under cherry blossoms. Utagawa Hiroshige, An Excursion to Gotenyama, 1840s–50s. Japan. Colour woodblock print on paper. Photo courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum.
For me, what really struck me overall, is this the difference of our lives now. We spent so much time surviving. We spent so much time hunting, gathering, transforming food and making all of the objects that we needed to do that all by hand. It's really striking how much, I don't want to say, how much we've lost, but how much more distanced we are now from the production of it all.
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. For most people, food was precious. You know, it was really, really precious, which is why, you know, kings and aristocrats ate huge amounts of very precious food, because to show their social status, you know, that they could have the most luxurious ingredients cooked in the most complex ways, spices imported from the other side of the world, you know, and a huge expense. Because, because food was, you know, everyone else would just be limited to eating what they you know, what they could find, what they might be able to grow on a tiny plot of land, what they could hunt for. And so food [was] so important. And you are absolutely right, and that's such a wonderful recognition of this book that you know, we have this whole rich history of all these objects. One of the strands in the book is human ingenuity. You know that we are this remarkable, adaptable, clever species. And wherever we were in the world, we found ways of hunting and gathering that suited the environment we found ourselves in, but they say it was just a huge amount of work, and it was really important, and food was not wasted. As a species, we used to treat food with much more respect, and we really need to learn that again, I think.
This Japanese handscroll is an example of a gassaku, a collaborative work of art often created in a social setting, such as a party. Twelve artists took turns to paint fish and other seafood, displaying an impressive knowledge of different species. The increasingly loose style of the painting suggests that the artists were drinking sake while working on the scroll. Photo courtesy of The Trustees of the British Museum.
There are a couple of pieces that show off just beautifully skillful depictions of shellfish. Can you describe one or two of them, please? And is it possible to tell from the objects how they may have been prepared?
You are right, the shellfish were just amazing depictions of shellfish. There was this incredible scroll, which, again, was Japanese, of fish. It was created by people having sort of an evening of drinking and poetry and passing the time having a party. And then the artists, of which I think there were 12, they all painted seafood, each in turn, and they sign it, so you can see their different signatures. And what is really amazing about it is how you know they weren't painting from life, they were painting from memory. And yet it's so accurate. You can see the species. You can see, "Oh, that's a sea bass. That's a really specific type of prawn." Which so I think again, you get the sense of this how well understood and known fish and seafood were to these cultures that, you know, ate it and loved it and enjoyed it, which, of course, you know, nowadays we would think of, we do think of Japan as a culture that celebrates the food of the sea, including seaweed and shellfish and, you know, and has great respect, you know, this is a culture where the different flavors of the different fish are allowed to shine through the fact that they're served raw, you know, and and that's appreciated. So I think you have a sense of the importance of these ingredients in those cultures at that time.
As Jenny Linford wrote "Repast: The Story of Food," she worked from the premise that food is universal yet particular. Photo courtesy of Thames & Hudson. |
.png)
More
Religion & Spirituality
Education
Arts and Design
Health
Fashion & Beauty
Government & Organizations
Kids & family
Music
News & Politics
Science & Medicine
Society & Culture
Sports & Recreation
TV & Film
Technology
Philosophy
Storytelling
Horror and Paranomal
True Crime
Leisure
Travel
Fiction
Crypto
Marketing
History
Comedy
Arts
Games & Hobbies
Business
Motivation
