Yum Yum: a serving of cultural imperialism

In the years before widespread international travel and global migration, World's Fairs and other exhibitions were a place where one could sample the cuisine of far-flung places. From 1885 to 1887 Knightsbridge, London was home to a "Japanese Village". Among its visitors was W.S. Gilbert, who visited its shops and tearooms while writing the libretto for the Mikado. The drawing above of the character Yum Yum is Gilbert's own. These are some of the denizens of Knightsbridge village:




Now, even small and medium-sized North American and European cities are home to restaurants that serve food that until recently would have seemed unimaginably exotic.

But cultural exchange through food is an unequal phenomenon, one that reflects the global migrations of people, money and ideas. While the global sushi boom may pose a threat to ocean ecology, it is unlikely to be labelled as cultural imperialism. American fast- and convience-foods on the other hand are widely perceived as symbols (and agents) of world domination.

Chinese multidisciplinary artist Zhang Hongtu's Kekou Kele Bottle captures this concern beautifully:

A brave new world of food and drink

In one way or another, food has always been an important part of the World's Fair. Visitors to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1903-04 in St. Louis were among the first to enjoy ice cream cones, hot dogs, candy floss, iced tea and puffed rice (although in the case of the latter, "enjoy" may not be quite the correct term). Some believe the hamburger as we know it was also unleashed at that fair, by a Texan named Fletcher Davis.

There's a nice essay on the British Film Institute's site on the fair as it relates to Vincente Minnelli's 1944 film Meet Me In St. Louis.

A second essay on the BFI site reveals that not everyone was welcome at this "celebration of the human family". It would seem that karma fuels the widespread misconception that esteemed African-American agricultural scientist George Washington Carver invented peanut butter – another food introduced at the 1903-04 Fair.

By the time of the 1964 World's Fair in New York, the snack food industry - in particular the soft drink industry - was firmly ensconced among the world's giants of commerce. Witness the achitectural marvel that was the Coca-Cola pavillion:



Other pop pavillions included Pepsi Cola and Seven-Up. One might have been forgiven for mistaking the soda makers for oddly-named countries.

Big Arc, big harvest

The most elegant harvest tribute I've ever seen (unfortunately not firsthand) is the 1990 Grande Moisson on the Champs Elysées. Thousands of pallets of live mature wheat were brought into central Paris, laid out on the street between the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe, then harvested by hand by hundreds of "peasants".

House of plenty

Cosimo Cavallaro's cheese house (see previous post) may seem bizarre and outré, but consider its relationship to a particular form of American vernacular architecture: the corn palace. After all, the Cheese House was part of Powell, Wyoming's cheese festival and was executed in association with the town's chamber of commerce.

The Mitchell, South Dakota Corn Palace (for which new corn murals are commissioned every year) is the only extant example of this type of building, but it was not the first. Late 19th century North America was obsessed with agricultural fairs and expositions. Exhibitors were eager to provide proof of the miraculous bounty produced by their regions, so they erected monuments not only to their harvests, but from them.



In addition to Perth, Ontario's Mammoth Cheese, the agricultural exhibit at World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893, in Chicago, featured a breathtaking and diverse collection of walk-through cornucopias. Among them were a Moorish-style tribute to corn and sugar-beets from Nebraska, a sort of wheat-sheaf baldaquin from Minnesota, and Pennsylvania's cozy fireside scene, pictured above. One of Canada's contributions was this ethereal display of Ontario fruit under glass:



Compared to these elaborate installations, the CNE's Food Building seems like fairground conceptualism :

The uses of cheese

Art has been made to embellish and promote cheese, and art (of a sort) has been made as a tribute to cheese. (For more on the story behind the mammoth cheese of Perth, Ontario, click here).

But has art ever been made out of cheese?

In a word: yes.

Argentinian Pop Art sculptor Marta Minujin has covered a Venus figure with little processed cheese cubes.



Montreal-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro has applied melted cheese to some unlikely objects, including boots, a suit jacket, Twiggy, and an entire house and its contents in Powell, Wyoming.



He has since moved on to ham, but that's not really germaine to our current discussion.

For her 1992 installation "The Cocktail Party", multimedia artist Sandy Skoglund covered a room, furniture and people with cheezies.



Not strictly cheese, perhaps. Not really food either.

Art in the name of cheese

Sharp eyes may have recognized Brooke Shields in the Breck ad pictured in the previous post. She was one in a series of American beauties who launched their careers shilling for the shampoo brand. In the US, the Breck ads were iconic and, though the shampoo is no longer, the saccharine artwork that sold it lives on at the Smithsonian.

On the other hand, no American celebrity or celebrity-to-be has ever, to my knowledge, endorsed cheese. At least not at home. Even Minnie Mouse had to cross the Atlantic to put her seal of approval on a product that she couldn't be better suited to sell. And I suspect she did the work without the knowledge of her US employer.

If you've read Clotaire Rapaille's case study on cheese marketing [see the end of the previous post], you wont doubt that the French love of cheese exceeds even the North American love of flowing, silky, hygenic hair. And for as long as the French have been putting soft-ripened cheeses into little wooden boxes, they've been tenderly adorning them with beautiful works of art.

Charles de Gaulle famously wondered whether a country that boasted 246 cheeses could be goverened. I wonder what he would have thought of France's roughly 25,000 cheese label collectors. Le Tyrosémiophile is a monument to this wonderful form of ephemera. The site is in French, but simply click on "par thèmes" to view the amazing collection by theme or "par départements" to view them by origin. Don't miss the "artistiques" category, where you will find, among others, this Surrealism-inspired Camembert label:



Oh, and the cheeses are pretty nice too. Visit France Fromages and never look back.