Installation view: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. Photo: Jason Wyche, Artwork © 2014 Kara Walker, full photo credits here

A massive, brilliantly white, sugar-coated sphinx commanded visitors’ attention at the Kara Walker exhibition at the Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn, New York last spring: At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby
an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. Referring to her artwork as a subtlety in the tradition of medieval and early modern confectionary sculptures, Walker highlights its character as a culinary political allegory: similar to the elaborate animal figurines and grandiose sugar buildings gracing the aristocratic tables of…

» Read More

Food research is a kind of extreme sport. For one thing, it seems to have more than its share of converts whose enthusiasm for what they do borders on the evangelical. But most of all, food research is risky. Its intellectual terrain is seismically volatile and deep hidden chasms await the careless at every step. Peaks of euphoric discovery seem always to be followed by bottomless uncertainty and confusion. Perhaps I exaggerate, but I can think of no other area of enquiry that produces and destroys so many orthodoxies, or where common sense ideas turn to chimera with such regularity. George Johnson, the American science writer, recently recounted the curious example of food research and cancer. Johnson recalls that by…

» Read More