Playing With Your Food

As children we were never allowed to play with our food. There were no such things as mashed-potato volcanoes exploding with gravy lava or pea-flicking contests at the dinner table. Some of us accept our fate and food remains food. Others rebelled against proper food etiquette and years later have formed their own genre of art.

Joost Elffers and Saxton Freymann

Elffers and Freymann want to change the way we eat. For years they have been trying to reverse the strict rules associated with food play and several children's books later, they're well on their way. They published Play With Your Food in 2002, a 109-page anthology full of fruit and vegetable creatures with smiling faces. From then they've been expanding their collection to include titles such as Fast Food (cucumber cars with speedy pepper drivers) and How Are You Peeling? (veggies with faces mirroring human emotions). Too bad constructing such cute little food creatures is so intricate, or else kids everywhere would be chowing down on the most adorable snacks. If only parents could add food artistry to their long list of responsibilities.

Carl Warner

Warner's "foodscapes" play mind games. At first glance his vivid photographs looked like top-notch landscape paintings. Then viewers notice that something's not right — trees are actually giant pieces of broccoli and mountains are loaves of crusty bread. "Aha!" moments ensue.

What makes Warner's work so unique is the process. He spends a lot of time in London's grocery stores staring at produce (a little strange, but worth it). Next he takes two to three days to construct elaborate landscapes like ocean voyages, rolling forest hills, and little villages. The foodscapes, however, are on time constraints. Under the bright lights necessary for such detailed photographs, the landscapes' ingredients wilt. Even so, the finished product lives forever as an imaginary world where everything is food. No complaints here.

Robin Antar

Antar doesn't actually make art out of food; she makes food out of stone. Her sculptures of common food products, cleverly referred to as "things we can eat, but can't," begin with slabs of marble or limestone weighing up to 10,000 pounds. What results are realistic sculptures of Oreo cookies, M&M's and Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies.

Based in Brooklyn and a mother of three, Antar wants her sculptures to go down in history. Essentially she is preserving chunks of American life — who doesn't think of Oreos when thinking about American cuisine? Even more, Antar doesn't disregard the wear-and-tear of American life. Her Milano cookies are spilling from a crumpled bag and her soda can is kicked and crushed. It all looks good enough to eat. Maybe that's why the York Peppermint Pattie piece, made solely of stainless steel, has a bite taken out of it.

Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle

Since 2002, Ida and Javelle have been creating microsculptures and their "Minimiam" series contains about 60 pieces to date. They stage miniature action scenes on top of food and present their sculptures in photographic diptychs. The first image is always a close-up of Ida's and Javelle's tiny action figures in an indeterminable scene. In the second image, things get a little bit clearer.

The only way to understand what's going on in the sculptures is to zoom out. Astronauts roaming on a burnt-looking planet in the first image become miniscule figures investigating a crème brulée. In another pair, construction workers are peering into a crack in an éclair. The shots are amusing, making viewers laugh at the relationships we have with food. Who knew that a sprinkled donut could also be a golf course?

Maurice Bennett

Bennett knows how to make burnt toast look good. The New Zealand native gave up his grocery store business to dedicate his life to art. Most known for his portraits of famous figures such as Elvis, Peter Jackson and Obama, Bennett chose toast as his medium 10 years ago because no one else had.

His technique seems simple, but in fact it's quite complex. He lays out huge images and gathers a lot of sliced white bread, although he has noticed that the quality of bread has decreased over the years. Bennett then takes a blow torch to each piece, burning it in gradients with a cast iron stencil. If this seems tedious, just imagine the work it took for Bennett to break the Guinness World Record for the world's largest toast mosaic — 6,000 slices.