David Barrie

A (moral) dog's breakfast

Last year, Gastronomica, the journal of food and culture, ran a special edition on the politics of food.

The magazine carried a review of the latest book by Nina Planck, the Queen of farmers' markets and quoted her 'real food' alternative to a key ingredient of life:

The best substitute for breast milk is made from grass-fed, raw whole milk supplemented with live yoghurt and gelatin (for digestion), coconut oil (for immunity), and cod-liver oil (omega-3 fats for eyes and brain).

The latest edition of Observer Food Monthly in the U.K. is devoted to eco-food heroes.

Their clarion call is local, traceable, guilt-free foods, underscored by an article of faith of the Prince of Wales:

I am enormously encouraged by the increasing interest in quality food, where it comes from and how it is produced.

In Vietnam, people eat dog.

Dogmeat is locally reared, eaten only at the close of the lunar month and  is a modern-day expression of an historic rural and ethnic tradition of hunting for and eating wild dogs.

In other words, however ethically hard to stomach, dog is a local, seasonal and authentic ingredient.

Where does our heroic, liberal attachment to traceability, honesty and native tradition end and the morality of what we eat kick in?

In Vietnamese cooking, there are seven ways to cook a dog.

In a culture of grass-fed milk and hardcore food provenance, could one of these recipes ever make an eco-hero's menu? Or is this a dog's breakfast of food ethics?

1. Thit Cho Luoc - Steamed dog
2. Cha Cho - Grilled  dog
3. Rua Man - Steamed dog in shrimp sauce, rice flour and lemon grass
4. Doi Cho - Dog sausage with dog blood, peanuts, vegetables and neck bone
5. Gieng Me Mam Tom - Steamed dog in shrimp sauce, ginger, spices and rice vinegar
6. Canh Xao Mang Cho - Bamboo shoot and dog bone marrow
7. Cho Xao Sa Ot - Fried dog in lemon grass and chilli

Lonesome Cowboy

This is one of the last photos of actor Heath Ledger.

The 28 year-old actor was found dead by a housekeeper at his apartment in SoHo, New York last week.

At the scene of death, six prescription drugs were found, including Ambien, Valium, anti-depressant Zoloft, Xanax, Zoplicone and Donormyl.

Inevitably, rumours have circulated that the death was suicide, driven by an infatuation with the death of folk singer Nick Drake and endorsed by circumstantial odds and sods. The Times reports that

In the disturbing video for the song Black Eyed Dog, named after Sir Winston Churchill’s “black dog” phrase for depression, Ledger used a hand-held camera to film himself slowly drowning in a bath.

Ledger's family and friends have denied suicide and a roll-call of depression-deniers have stepped forward, including an Australian artist, quoted in the Sunday Times newspaper as saying

He was very easy and professional to work with. He was not drinking, nor was he interested in drugs. He spoke very positively about his future and future plans. I believe his passing was an accident.

Without a definitive cause of death, it isn't surprising that people reach for their own conclusions. But  is something going on beyond idle speculation?

Eight years ago, I made a documentary film that investigated the death of INXS-singer Michael Hutchence for Channel 4 Television in the U.K.

While the Coronor of New South Wales judged that the cause of Hutchence's death was suicide, there was significant and substantial evidence in the testimony he received to suggest accidental death.

As a result, Hutchence's immediate family urged that the artist was depressed and took his own life; while his lover Paula Yates and his brother argued that he died messing up on auto-erotic asphyxiation.

With Ledger, as with Hutchence, there seems to be a need for a conclusive narrative of death.

Some seem to want tragic lonely depression; others accidental mishap.

In life, we seem to be happy to understand human action in terms of needs and aspirations.

But in the case of death - and death in inconclusive circumstances in particular -  we seem to want a larger, more epic narrative.

Why?

Extreme embroidery

The only exciting thing in this month's American Vogue is an advert from Balenciaga for its Spring 2008 collection.

What a fantastically weird look this is!

Fashion writer Sarah Mower describes it as

standout shoulder lines, hand-span waists, and belled (almost panniered) hip volume, marched in on vertiginous knee-high woven-leather gladiator boots.

The creative director of Balenciaga describes graphic volumes that are like car bodywork.

Others allude to crosses between Laura Ashley, a Poision video, cocoons and general extreme embroidery hell.

What I like about it is that the fabric design may well be printed flowers but from a distance the collection looks like  it's modelled on Frida Kahlo's corset.

The look seems to have no place in contemporary lifestyle which thrives on the soft, blousey and myth of normality. 

There's something bizarre and ugly about this collection that reminds me of the work of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin.

The multi-colored, lace-up, peep-toe knee-high boots are pukey Grecian urn-ism when set against embroidered carpet.

But then in a world of gauche  D & G, gold-glittery Burberry and fin de siecle, flourish-of-a-brush Prada, these robotic hydrangeas, pansies, peonies, daffodils and anemones look beautiful.

It's dramatic, baroque and a look that's close to a circus or cocoon freak-show.

And for some completely incomprehensible reason, it works.

I love it.

Bankrupt avatars

The Wall Street Journal reports on a bank collapse in the make-believe world of Second Life.

The company that runs the online world has 

pulled the plug on about a dozen pretend financial institutions that were funded with actual money from some of the 12 million registered users of Second Life.

Linden Lab said the move was triggered by complaints that some of the virtual banks had reneged on promises to pay high returns on customer deposits.

According to The Inquirer

Avatar bankers have ruined the game where people pretend to own land, run businesses and build homes.

The banks of Second Life courted deposits by offering interest rates. While some paid interest as promised, others used the money for dodgy SL land and gambling deals.

In a virtual re-run of the panic surrounding Northern Rock

The shutdown has caused a real-life bank run by Second Life depositors. Though some players managed to get their Linden dollars out, others are finding that they can no longer make withdrawals from the make-believe ATMs.

I haven't a clue what this means for Second Life.

But ten minutes after reading the story - spread-eagled in Seat 66c on a flight from Bangkok to London - a thought from free software pioneer Eben Moglen jumped off the page of my book:

It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone.

Sure.

But if people suffer from the dodgy-dealings of bankers in Second Life, we're reminded that digital networks can cause not just cure isolation.

And I do wonder: are the rivers of Second Life lined with the remains of bankrupt avatars?

Are foodies killing us?

This is a picture of some radishes I saw at a market in New Delhi, India last year.

They look delicious, weird - like something out of a David Lynch movie - and their abundance would warm the hearts and pans of all foodies.

But is fawning appreciation of abundance in food culture actually killing us? Is the explosion of popular interest in food, supported in part by thoughtful, conscious 'early adopter' foodies actually making us all fat?

An article in a journal recently published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services makes a compelling case that Eating is an Automatic Behavior.

Rather than being naturally abstemious and stopping eating when we've had enough, the article draws attention to recent scientific studies that suggest that

People served larger portions simply eat more food.

The natural trajectory is for eating to continue. So much so that in a clever experiment carried out by the Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab

researchers secretly refilled bowls of soup while people ate from them and found that people ate 73% more soup when this occurred.

If eating is an automatic behavior, influenced more by how much we eat rather than what's on offer, should those who worry about the 'obesity epidemic' be arguing for reducing cues that encourage eating in general and stop having a go at convenience foods - or fat people?

Should health Czars and mini-Czarinas cruising the heaving aisles of Whole Foods Market be cast as villains rather than idols?

At the moment, English and American culture is full of food.

Thousands of hours of TV are devoted to the stuff. Farmers across the world are failing to meet demand. Of the two Gordons, Gordon Ramsey commands more column inches. And magazines are full of alluring and complex dishes involving hand-reared authentic lamb and cheese produced in a particular Dingley Dell.

For sure it matters what we eat.

But for starters, take statistics on obesity.

For entrees, weigh it up against the overpowering number of foodie fads.

And what might be on the menu for afters...more illness and more dead people?

Luxury erotic

Some collect Panini stickers of soccer stars. Others porcelain ducks. I....I seem to be collecting JPEGs of photographer Steven Meisel's series Four Days in L.A.: The Versace Pictures.

Meisel made his Versace photos over four days in two L.A. mansions in 2000. As Pernilla Homes writes, nearly-identical supermodels Amber Valetta and Georgina Grenville are

primped and preened within an inch of their lives, dripping in gems and gold, they are surrounded by orderly opulence from Old Master paintings to hyper-groomed poodles.

So why am I collecting these things?

Because they're gorgeous. But also they're vacuous.

Nicolas Ghesquiere, the creative director of Balenciaga, once said the most fantastic thing:

We have idols but no models to follow. You have to define your own model.

Meisel gets this.

In the L.A. series, he creates a model from an idol - and vice-versa.

And rather than be political and meld and switch between the authentic and ambiguous in a Hillary Clinton kind of way, these images are totally inauthentic *and* ambiguous.

Pure sheen. I love  it.

The Three Food Musketeers

This is a picture of The Three Musketeers of food politics in the U.K. - chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey.

The Three Tenors will feature heavily in Channel 4 Television's Big Food Fight, a season of factual programming that starts tomorrow and aims to change the way you think about food.

Across the season, Athos, Porthos and Aramis will be up to all sorts of jolly japes designed to raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating.

They'll parry with intensively farmed chickens and supermarket hegemony; alongside Dr Gunther von Hagens who's due to carry out an hilarious - or is it tragic? - autopsy of a fast-food addict.

Just a decade ago, food didn't have such a prominent, extensive place in the TV schedules as an issue of consumer rights or current affairs.

Of course this is about food as popular culture, lifestyle and environmentalism. But is something more important going on?

Two weeks ago, I had a drink with a well-known auteur chef. Because I don't know which-chefs-do-what, I ended up treating him like an installation artist and asking a totally embarrassing question: "What's your signature dish?"

Fifteen years ago, I made documentary films about architecture since it was a useful prism for understanding contemporary culture, especially the ball and chain of 1960s modernism.

At the moment, I'm making a film for Channel 4 on contemporary taste and morality but not with an up-tight messianic designer, over-paid cultural commentator or Young British Artist - but two chefs.

The Strategy Unit at the U.K. Cabinet Office has just published an analysis of issues in food. And three headlines deserve attention:

UK consumers are spending a smaller proportion of their income on food than ever before and allocating a greater share of that outlay to eating out of the home.

Eating is becoming a more public than private phenomenon with more people spending time eating out than at home.

As well as looking for healthier options, people also want to indulge in food, particularly for reward, special occasions and at the weekend.

Take this increasingly public nature of food, add in all these chefs binning chopping boards for consumer rights, animal rights and cultural morality and you've got the makings of a tantalising recipe.

You have food not as fuel but as a key currency of public life.

And you're left with one - er, slightly pretentious - question for afters on the politics and needs of modern life:

Are chefs the new architects of the public realm?

Emotional design

According to The Times newspaper's Year of Ideas

Next year is the year that emotional design moves mainstream.

Now that it's 2008, let's explore that emotion further. 

Lucia Van der Post cites writer Ilse Crawford as a harbinger of change. In her latest book on interior design Crawford

pointed out that, very often, the language surrounding the home reeked "simply of the balance sheet", when what people craved was much more the notion of home as "a safe place, a loving place and a creative place. A place where we can explore our inner life."

Van der Post goes on:

Looking  back, it seems amazing that the cold logic of "form follows function" and the almost universal aversion to anything decorative reigned so supremely for so long.

And on:

Today, more and more designers acknowledge that their job is not just to produce efficient products but also to provide things that give much deeper, emotional pleasure.

Rather than pious simplicity, this is a vision that's decadent as well as spiritual.

'Emotional design' sounds like sitting in a room reading the complete works of guru Sri Aurobindo while occasionally glancing at walls decorated with paintings by Gustav Klimt.

Spin through other pages of The Times and Sunday Times magazines and the idea of gilt-edged naturalism writes itself large:

- A recipe by chef Gordon Ramsay for Pineapple Ravioli with iced Mango and Mint

- An inside view of Trudie Styler's new range of organic jams, created at her

Jacobean manor house set in 198 acres of farmland, grounds and walled gardens, with a picturesque hamlet of barns and outbuildings

- And a frill-free retreat to a yoga camp in the Turks and Caicos, retailing at £3185 per person, previewed by a supremely cheese-on-cheese byline

Just when did life get so busy? We all need time to think to de-stress, to recover, to lose weight, to get fit, to find inner peace - and spas have evolved to just do that.

If 2008 is to be a year of 'emotional design', we're going to need a road map to help us through this mash of aspiration and austerity.

And rather than renew that subscription to the anarchist journal Black Flag, I can see 2008 as the year of finding ways to celebrate but also turn this  new emotionalism in to something other than an expression of surplus wealth.