Taste, perhaps the most difficult sense to render in an exhibition, not only as is it a very unique and personal experience to each and every one of us, but an exhibit involving eating or tasting could prove to be a logistical and bacterial nightmare.
I had a couple of ideas. 1) Taste being presented as a past event – for example to exhibit a series of photographs of me dining around the city, a glorious yet gluttonous approach to research, or on the other hand 2) I could present taste as an immediate interactive activity aimed at reconnoitering memories or creating new ones through series of edible (or lick worthy) papers.
Then of course I have the added concept of the Gold Rush. Should I sprinkle edible gold flakes onto food? That one sounds expensive. Or conduct an anthropological study into the ‘Gold Rush’ of cuisine - from all four corners of the world.
I have to be honest I was at a dead end. So I did what I normally would do, head out and immerse myself in culture, it is during these times of cultural relaxation that my mind seems most able to think clearly. The meditative silence of an art gallery and museum tunes my brain towards its optimum frequency.
I headed down The Melbourne Museum, a stunning piece of architecture opposite to the Royal Exhibition Building.
A delightful aspect of this cutting edge design is the indoor-outdoor exhibition of nature, housing everything, from the tiniest of ants, to a plantation of trees which tower fearlessly above the horizontal vista of the building.
Within the nature exhibition there is an area dedicated to the native plants of Australia, plants that were a vital part of the ecosystem for the indigenous population – the aboriginals.
I discovered a plant called ‘Mookitch’ – more commonly referred to as the Large Kangaroo Apple. Upon further investigation I found that the fruit produced by this plant were highly valued for taste and medicinal benefits among the indigenous population. However, they could only be eaten when very ripe. If eaten outside of this period these fruits were highly toxic causing internal bleeding. At their ripest these fruits were a taste sensation, sickly-sweet but with a bitter after-taste, in their pre-ripened state they were acrimoniously nauseating.
This potentially life threatening pursuit of taste for the aborigines, got me thinking how important the sense of taste actually is. An aborigine would know by tasting the plant if it was ripe and safe to eat, if not, then an immediate spit out and rinse would ensure the content did not pass through the digestive system, thus saving them from severe contamination. Humans understand nature through their senses, a natural progression of evolution, those with the better taste buds would survive or live longer.
Then something dawned on my consciousness, my taste buds will probably never be used as intended, for survival, or as a harmonious transaction between man and nature. All the food I eat, I know is safe, ripe, in date, tested, farmed and controlled. The food I eat belongs to a profit driven market of commodities and goods. I am tasting what I can afford, what is manufactured for me, and what the market wants me to eat and even if I grow apples in my garden, the tree plant I’m sure would have been purchased at a garden centre at a premium price, and trying to grow apples from seeds, especially mass produced crop seeds are near impossible and takes decades to grow into a mature apple tree.
My experience of taste is not orchestrated by nature, but by a socio-economic system, a system that both enables and prevents me from tasting food. What we taste, living in the developed world, is, in the most part influenced by fertilisers, mechanical farming, delivery schedules, commodity prices, taxation rules, corporations and businesses, whom seem to, from experience of growing up in the UK, invest heavily in adding great qualities of sugar and salt to the food that we eat.
To eat you need money, therefore to taste you need money. I have become addicted to taste, therefore indirectly, I have also become addicted to money. I crave the salts, the sugars, the carbohydrates. As I write this text I am feasting on a bag of ‘Pascals Pineapple Lumps’ made with 4% real fruit juice, sugar, water, a concoction of E numbers and modified flavours – which is far removed from the ripened berries of the ‘Mookitch’ bush.
So assuming two things a) that our taste is now in many cases prompted by the amount of money we have, and b) that the foundations of money as a modern economic system used to relate to the amount of Gold you had in reserves. Then there is an argument to suggest that our taste buds, and exploration of them today, has been indirectly influenced by mankind’s pursuit of gold and money. Value has shifted from the harmonious taste of nature, to a taste for money.
This text based artwork presents a graphical poem of word associations that relate to taste, capital, gold and greed. Each later is edible short-crust biscuits, some are sweet and some are salty, which seem to be the two main taste buds being satisfied by the market today. All the biscuits are sprayed with edible gold to ensure the audience do not know which taste bud, sweet or salty, they will satisfy.
The audience are invited to come and eat a letter if they so wish. They may not be tasting gold in a literal sense, but indirectly they are eating the same old capital that has been recycled, reused and reinvested for centuries, capital generated from Gold Rush discoveries centuries earlier as the ingredients themselves being just another products of a market. In some cases indigenous plants which used to be so plentiful are now quite rare, and seem only available for taste as a side order in a 5 star restaurant shadowed by the high rise buildings of Melbourne’s sky scrapers. I can see why some aborigines are often disgruntled with western ways of living.
http://www.brisrain.webcentral.com.au/01_cms/details_pop.asp?ID=708
http://museumvictoria.com.au/melbournemuseum/
