Functional Food

In the spirit of science, there really is no such thing as a “failed experiment.” Any test that yields valid data is a valid test.
- Adam Savage

Since I’ve spent this past month even more preoccupied with food than normal, I keep coming back to this concept of the failed experiment. When you’re working with yarn, there’s really no such thing as a failed experiment. If your lace experiment doesn’t work, you rip back. If you think the colors in your Fair Isle sweater would be better suited to Jem, you rip back.

I’m knitting a sweater in this colorway why?

Even though ripping back intarsia leaves you with significantly shorter lengths of yarn, you can frequently reconstruct the skein without losing too much yardage with a few well-placed knots. This is why steeking is one of the most nerve-wracking things a knitter can do. Sewing a few seams into your knitting and taking scissors to it, thus destroying the continuity of yarn, is a very big, nauseating step.

Cooking is different. I don’t want to pretend that I never experiment in the kitchen. Nearly any time I attempt to remove the gluten from a recipe and beat it into reasonable submission, I’m experimenting. Usually, though, I try something once and suffer through the results. I make general notes as to what I attempted to do, add a few more about what I think might work better next time and hope that the receipt I scrawled everything down on doesn’t go missing when I make my next attempt. The one thing I rarely do is throw the item away.

Perhaps it was my early childhood Spam days where the only jelly we got to eat was grape because it was the cheapest on the shelves (did you know there is an entire site devoted to Spam haiku), or maybe it was the eight financially obligatory months of rice and beans between 2001 and 2002. Regardless, there’s something in me that just doesn’t want to waste food. I think it’s because I still expect food to be functional. At the end of the day, my experiment still has to be my dinner.

I can’t help but wonder if the functionality aspect hurts the respect that people have for food as a means of artistic expression, though. I was having a conversation about copyright in a bar, and D. almost laughed me off a barstool when I mentioned that recipes had moderate copyright protection. Like clothing and many other crafts, it tends to push the limits of people’s copyright tolerance and acceptance, to subject functional items to copyright. In “Copyright and Functionality: Thoughts on Copyrighting Food: Aesthetics and Function” Robert Baron writes:

It is interesting how this dichotomy of “functional” vs. “aesthetic” is used in law to apply copyright, especially since the history of art in this century has gone to great efforts to show that these distinctions are not quite real. The Dada movement of the early decades of this century went to great pains to reveal in functional objects their aesthetic alter egos. Toilet bowls, clothing irons, teacups, stools and bicycles among other items were transformed by Dada artists into unusable items of artistic import by intentionally subverting their conventional functions. Thus a toilet bowl is up-ended and renamed “Fountain;” a clothing iron (dubbed “Gift”) is ruined by tacks welded to its flat end, teacups are fur-lined, bicycle wheels spun upside-down on a barstool pedestal and so on. The results of these experiments led to the conclusion that mundane functional elements had aesthetic import and that only by conscious acts could these characteristics be separated. Thus Claes Oldenberg, working in a neo-Dada spirit, builds a “soft” toilet, or the Museum of Modern Art enshrines objects of commercial manufacture in display cases so better to enhance the appreciation of the aesthetics of function. And here, expectedly, the very process of display subconsciously sabotages the object’s functionality.

This is the context in which the question of “food” as art must be understood. Since any object, from a “functional” chair to a cork-screw can become a work of art, to be appreciated independently of its function, then a cake, if so claimed, can be a work of art or function as an edible desert. It can be both, of course, but not at the same time . . . .

The question then becomes why does the functionality have to be removed in order for aesthetic consideration to be paid? Baron eventually concludes that most aspects of a recipe are the equivalent of a design element and that by protecting design elements, “society will become paralyzed under the force of too many competing interests.”

The founder of eGullet, Steven Shaw, in “New Era of the Recipe Burglar” states:

The assumption is that a list of ingredients is like a formula, as opposed to literature or art or craft. But I think serious recipes really are a form of literary craftsmanship. You can copyright the world’s worst photograph, but you can’t copyright a recipe, or its expression as food? That’s absurd!

In a comment on megnut.com responding to “Keep recipes free,” one poster writes “One telephone directory company sued another, saying that their arrangement of facts (ie, names arranged alphabetically by town) was copyrighted and no one else could publish a phone directory in their area without violating copyright. . . . The Superme Court basically said you can’t copyright facts and threw the case out.” As far as this poster is concerned, an ingredient list is no more than facts. This, however, attaches to ingredients a certain inevitability. It is almost as if he states that “marinara” is a fixed entity that can be no more than tomatoes, onions, garlic, wine, oregano, marjoram and basil (don’t try this at home, folks, I don’t make marinara) in ways that this is not:

White Center by Mark Rothko

If the techniques and components are edible it is assemblage, but if it goes on the wall it is art? Of course, if you handed everyone a canvas and the same six colors of paint, the artistic possibilities are infinite. Theoretically, the same could be said if you handed everyone the ingredients for marinara, but the reality is if you handed people tomatoes, herbs, onions, garlic and wine most would make marinara, not sorbet. So, because people have an innate understanding of what one ought to be doing with food items, does that make it less artful and does it become even less so when there are precise instructions to tell someone how to handle them? Further, because those instructions are as common as weather forecasts (broil, caramelize, bake until golden brown), then does it follow that the recipes are not art?

Is this art?

On Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen writes: “Food relies so much on execution, or at the national chain level on marketing, that the mere circulation of a recipe does not much diminish the competitive advantage of the creative chef.” He believes that the genius resides in the execution and that people who buy cookbooks by celebrated restaurant chefs will still travel to the restaurant if they want to experience that chef’s food. As far as he is concerned, a recipe is not an mp3, which he believes is a reasonable substitution for a CD. What does this say, though, to the legion of people who are not restaurant chefs but are merely cookbook authors. Their cookbooks as whole entities are unambiguously protected. The recipes contained within are not.

When it comes down to it, I’m not sure that I really want to see recipes better protected. While I fully respect all creative people’s ability to control how their creations are shared, I think that something is lost when the open source model disappears (but I kind of feel that way about most artistic expression, including many that people feel should be completely protected by copyright). I wonder where vegan cooking would be now, if people had felt less free to noodle with other people’s recipes. Some of Bryanna Clark Grogan’s best uncheese recipes were inspired (with credit) by Jo Stepaniak’s uncheese recipes. Clearly, vegans are inspired by omni recipes all the time. Of course, when individuals come up with methods that are clearly unique, I can fully understand why they would want to protect it with everything they’ve got. But I can’t say I’m any more sure of why the method has to be patentable before it’s protected.