aesthetics of joy

Last week I was interviewed for this great piece on the trend towards “tiny sweets” by New York Times writer Julia Moskin. In the article I try to demystify why it is we’re attracted to mini-canolis or Baked by Melissa cupcakes (above) and talk about the “Alice in Wonderland effect,” where big changes in the scale of objects around us, either tiny or huge, make us reconsider our scale in relation to the world in a joyful way.

For more, check out past posts on tiny sweets, giant sweets, and the joy of miniaturization.

NYT: “Small Wonders”
Image: Tony Cenicola/New York Times

Amidst numerous disappointments for me in the redesign of the New York Times Magazine, there is one thing the new editors got very, very right, this being the presentation of Mark Bittman’s wonderful Eat column. If you’ve been exposed to Bittman through his Minimalist column, or his myriad cookbooks, you know that he stands for beautifully real food, simply prepared. He is a voice for restoring the place of cooking among the palette of basic skills possessed by all adults, and his adroitness at balancing elegance with ease in his recipes makes his body of work an important entry point for those “too busy to cook.” His philosophy of approximate measures, devotion to high quality ingredients, and embrace of the seasonal and sustainable have inspired me on more than one occasion, and so it’s a joy to see his recipes matched by visuals convey their exuberance.

Bittman’s organizing principle is theme and variation. The theme is of the moment: heirloom tomatoes, asparagus, pasta primavera, lobster. It is a carpe diem call, an urging to revel in an evanescent largess of some kind. It is rooted in abundance, a perennial theme of Aesthetics of Joy, and this is what we see brought to the forefront in the visuals. The theme unfolds in variations, typically four movements, that burst with color and possibility. It has become a weekend ritual for me to eagerly anticipate the column, tearing through the magazine to find this page, and add it to the collection on my fridge door. (It’s worth noting that it is nearly as lovely in the online version – in some ways more so, with more emphasis on the food.)

I find these arrays irresistible, and I can’t overstate what a victory I believe this is for real food. In the modern age of mass production, comestible abundance has been claimed by Big Food, by double cheeseburgers and all-you-can-eat buffets, by the Big Gulp and the Venti latte. Aesthetics of abundance are especially prominent in confectionary. It’s the “taste the rainbow” of Skittles, which overflow their boundaries in the ads, an industrial bumper crop. It’s the giddy experience Willy Wonka, vivid M&Ms, everlasting gobstobbers, and Mr. Softee with hundreds and thousands. The association between sugar and joy and abundance is primal – it derives from harvests, and our genetic predisposition to take advantage of excess while we have access to it. Waste not, want not.

But the ecstatic sugar-high has overshadowed the natural abundance available from real food, the kind that comes from a farm, not a factory. It excites me to see an aesthetic treatment that imbues real food with this feeling of plenty. After all, we eat with our eyes as much as our mouths, and for all our best intentions, there is an unconscious craving for muchness.

If there is thing I hope people take away from this blog, it’s that things are easier to change than people. And changing things often leads to changes in people. It may seem trivial, but I see the Eat column as an example of design used to outsmart our cravings, to realign our desires with the needs of our bodies in a contemporary context. I hope this is just the beginning of Aesthetics of Joy in the food revolution.

Now go make yourself some corn and blueberry crisp and savor these last days of summer!

Images: Heirloom tomatoes Yunhee Kim for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Deborah Williams. Layout from Margaret & Joy’s gorgeous food blog. Asparagus Yunhee Kim for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Deborah Williams. Fruit desserts Yunhee Kim for The New York Times. Food stylist: Megan Schlow. Prop stylist: Deborah Williams.

Oh, how I loved Gourmet. By far my favorite of the foodie mags, it’s always been a voice for the joy of food. Gourmet celebrated not just food’s flavor and aroma, but food as a visual art, food as a universal language, food as a carrier of cultural meaning and dialogue, food as biography of a food-lover’s life. It facilitated this passion for the short on time or skills to some degree, but never compromised the indulgent joy of a day arranged around cooking and eating by bludgeoning it with excessive pragmatism (ahem, Bon Appetit). I would have subscribed at three times the price to have kept it alive.

Aesthetics of joy are alive and well on this penultimate cover, so much so I’d already planned a post around it before this sad news arrived. Bright, vibrant color; the spherical apple; the shiny surface; the sticky sweetness you can practically taste just by looking at it — this is the joy of autumn made visible, and a clear illustration of what food culture is losing in Gourmet.

The NYT had a cute piece on bento boxes in this week’s Dining section. Kyaraben, the making of cute lunch boxes for children, rises to the level of art form in Japan. I found these on the Flickr photostream of a mom who makes these weekly for her kids. I think the hungry caterpillar one is irresistible, and the pandas had me at hello. A great example of aesthetics of joy applied to food. I’d be willing to bet that the food in those boxes tastes better than it would if it were just thrown in there too.

NYT: Bento Boxes Win Lunch Fans

Yesterday I posted on miniature sweets and the perspective shift that comes from out-scaled items. On the opposite extreme, giant sweets seem to captivate artists and designers the world over. And because their enormity makes them impossible to overlook, the giant objects seem to have an even stronger Alice-in-Wonderland effect.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Dropped Cone makes me feel like a Lilliputian living in a land where if I’m lucky, I might catch a dripping from a giant toddler’s melting ice cream. Martha Friedman’s Waffle (currently on view here in Brooklyn) and street artist Celso’s Apples have the similar effect of making me reconsider my own scale and the scale of all the common objects around me.

Of course, scale shifts can go both ways. Oversized objects can have the effect of making us feel ill at ease with our place in the universe and out of control of the events that shape our lives. Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s Knife Slicing Through Wall sculpture highlights this darker side of scale shifting. But sweets are inherently joyful — the sugar, the color, the aroma of baking, the ritual of eating — so giant treats create a much more pleasurable transformation of perspective: magical, childlike, and fun.

Brooklyn designer and studiomate of mine Azusa Hirota brings this whimsical quality to functional objects, allowing interaction with these giant sweets, instead of just viewing. Her chair, a giant cupcake, puts the user in between the cake and icing, so that you’re literally surrounded by the experience. Everyone I’ve seen sitting in it seems to have a big smile on their face. Her giant doughnut, designed in collaboration with Tawny Hixson, transforms a common inner tube into an object of delight. I remember my days spent tubing down the Nam Song river in Vang Vieng, Laos, and it strikes me that it would have been such a wonderful thing to see fellow travelers drifting gently downstream on giant Krispy Kremes!

See more of Azusa’s work here. Thank you Maggie, for the waffle tip that inspired the idea for this whole post!

Did I miss any wonderful giant sweets out there? Let me know.

I’m glad Stéphanie Kilgast mentions that these delicious-looking treats are 1:12 scale on her Flickr page, because otherwise I would be calling to ask how she could FedEx over some of those macaroons from Paris. Unfortunately you can’t eat these tiny cakes, but you can buy them on her Etsy page, or gaze admiringly at the many others on her photostream.

I’ve written about miniaturization before on the site, and why we seem to love tiny things. It’s a phenomenon I trace back to childhood and the downscaling of all the elements of real life into toys. As adults, tiny things give us an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of perspective shift. They make us aware of our scale, and allow us to see things in a new way. (They’re also just pretty darn cute.)

Thanks to Lisa at My Artful Life for the tip!

My best friend is in town from London this weekend, and we have a whole day to ourselves and a whole city to explore. I’m pretty sure ice cream will be on the agenda.

I’ve known Annie longer than I’ve known ice cream, even. We’ve been best friends since we met in nursery school, at the age of two. Once we got driver’s licenses we would regularly bounce between Ben & Jerry’s and Friendly’s, thanking our metabolisms all the way. At Friendly’s we had standard orders: a peanut butter cup sundae for me, a mint chip sundae with butterscotch sauce and gummy bears for Anne. (Which I still think is gross.) Last time she came to town we had a wild goose chase across Manhattan looking for a mythical Friendly’s (save yourself some time, Manhattanites — there isn’t one). It’s one thing we can count on in our ever-changing lives; we will both always be up for a cone, anytime, anywhere.

So this NYT review of the city’s gourmet ice cream carts is perfectly timed. I think 87 flavors is a bit excessive even for us, so it’s nice to be able to cut to the chase. I’d say that Cookshop’s strawberry would go perfectly with a visit to the High Line…

Happy long weekend — enjoy the last taste of summer!

NYT: 87 Scoops Later, A Sweet Meltdown

Roger Cohen has a wonderful op-ed piece in today’s New York Times about the recently published study showing that rhesus monkeys fed a restricted calorie diet (30% below normal intake) live longer than those who eat what they please. He views the study as an opportunity to pose the question, “What’s life for?” Is it for enjoying, with life-shortening indulgences like chocolate and cheese peppered throughout? Or is it for something else, in which case the longer the better, whatever the cost?

Cohen points to this photograph of monkeys Canto and Owen to suggest his answer:

Which brings me to low-cal Canto and high-cal Owen: Canto looks drawn, weary, ashen and miserable in his thinness, mouth slightly agape, features pinched, eyes blank, his expression screaming, “Please, no, not another plateful of seeds!”

Well-fed Owen, by contrast, is a happy camper with a wry smile, every inch the laid-back simian, plump, eyes twinkling, full mouth relaxed, skin glowing, exuding wisdom as if he’s just read Kierkegaard and concluded that “Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.”

Is this a living example of aesthetics of joy? It occurs to me that enjoyment has its own aesthetic, that its not just the things enjoyed but the results of enjoyment that are aesthetic. Owen communicates joy (as much as a caged primate can, at least) in his roundness, his expression, his glossy wellbeing — the products of accumulated moments of joy in his life. Canto evinces an aesthetic of deprivation, and like parched land, hunger strikers, and disappointed children, deprivation evokes a primal aversion, decidedly not joyful. So is there something to this idea of fat and happy?

NYT: “The Meaning of Life”

How’s this for a joyful pizza delivery experience? Place an order with Pink Flamingo Pizza near the Canal St. Martin in Paris, and they give you a pink helium balloon. You take the balloon with you to your chosen picnic spot by the canal and their bike delivery uses it as a floating beacon to find you.

It’s a simple, joyful way to create a magical experience for customers, a gesture that costs very little but pays dividends in the way it makes people feel about your service and your business. Aesthetically, it’s a hell of a lot nicer than those vibrating hockey pucks, both for the user and the surrounding environment. A bobbing balloon gives everyone a little lift.

It costs no more to make something joyful than to make something dull, but it can mean the difference between a ho-hum neighborhood joint and an international destination.

Via Frugal Traveler. Thank you flickr user Antonia Hayes for the image.

Jell-O is an absurd food, and there is often something joyful about things that are a little bit absurd (to wit: flamingos, hula hooping, and those wonderful Wayne Thiebaud cake paintings). Everything about Jell-O is somewhat ridiculous — the name, for starters; the color, because no real food is ever that neon; the dancing wiggliness of it, its preposterous, inelegant, delightfully unpredictable movements.

So it should be no surprise that people are drawn to doing absurd things with it. The Gowanus Studio Space‘s Jell-O mold competition, held last weekend, challenged designers to work with the medium in a novel and engaging way. As a designer I was most impressed by the guy who roto-molded Jell-O spheres, which I think hold lots of joyful potential to be filled in surprising ways. But I was also taken with this Jell-O caviar, shown above, which apparently had a fishy taste to it (gross!). You can see these and more in this excellent video.