Food and Art

The places where food and art intersect are complex and strange. This has been true ever since humans started incorporating decorative elements into their meals. From the Renaissance proto-dessert course known as the Void, to the hyperrealistic cake decorating trend seen today, many questions emerge. When is food art (always, never, or sometimes)? Where do concerns about edibility and aesthetics clash and where do they align?

The above photo is from a 2023 research trip to the Is It Cake? exhibition at Madame Tussauds wax museum. Can you tell which Arnold is cake, and which is wax?

Selected Papers

Sugar and Wax: Hyperreality, Cake, and Food as Art

Presented at the Global Food Studies Conference, University of South Carolina, March 2024

‘Is It Cake?’ And Why It Matters: Internet Memes, Hyperrealism, and the History of Cake Decorating

Presented at the Northeast Popular Culture Association Conference, October 2022

The Everything Is Cake Meme in Historical Context

Presented at the Popular Culture Association National Conference, June 2021

“No One Will Ever Know”: Historically Locating Fake Wedding Cake

Presented at the Northeast Popular & American Culture Association Conference, 2016

From Fruitcake To Foam: Commodity Fetishism, ‘Tradition’, and the Evolution of the Wedding Cake

Masters Thesis, Boston University, 2015

The Year of Fearless Baking Blog, 2016

This blog chronicled my attempt to learn as much as I could about baking by stretching beyond my comfort zone in my own kitchen. When I started out in January 2016, I had no way of knowing how short-lived this experiment truly would be. That June my doctor advised me to stop eating gluten for a little while. To my dismay, I haven’t gone back since.

In the intervening years, I have also quit drinking and come to realize I am non-binary. Taken together, these developments make me want to annotate the posts here, like M.F.K. Fisher did in the 1951 edition of How to Cook a Wolf, as my perspective of a lot of things has changed. However, I’m not going to do that. This blog is completely unrelated to the 2017 book The Fearless Baker by Erin McDowell (although such a book would have been welcome at the time).

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