Provocatively packaged food for thought

Sylvia Carter |
A La Carter

June 2, 2004

An egg crate arrived in the mail. No, actually, it was a book inside an egg crate.

It was shipped that way not because this book, called "Art and Cook" ($59.95, Allan Ben Studio, Inc. / Digital in Space) was particularly fragile, but because everything about it is a statement.

Allan Ben, president and chief executive of Allan Ben Studio Inc. in Brooklyn, was the photographer, and Emmanuel Paletz was the designer and art director. The project also required one recipe developer, Einav Gefen Dubnikov, and two food stylists, Liron Meller and Melanie R. Underwood.

The book is like no other cookbook, ever.

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It takes on issues about animal rights and animal treatment, conflict and war, technology, environment, you name it.

Next to a recipe for Middle Eastern chopped salad, there's a picture of a bowl with the salad, tossed with plastic toy soldiers. Unmistakably, this is a political reference.

Other photographs are playful. The recipe for herbed ricotta-stuffed zucchini flowers with balsamic reduction sauce is accompanied by a headless doll wearing a zucchini flower skirt.

A couple eating in a restaurant, nude from the waist down, save for grape leaves in strategic places, is the illustration that goes with a recipe for stuffed grape leaves. The bottom part is from the 16th century artist Albrecht Durer, depicting Adam and Eve.

A worm decorates a green apple in the photograph with a recipe for celeriac and green apple gratin.

A recipe for stir-fried chicken in peanut sauce over rice noodles and sauteed snow peas features a large chicken looking down at a small Alfred Hitchcock on a plate.

I confess, I don't get it, the chicken with Hitchcock.

Definitely, however, this handsome book is food for thought. Its creator, Ben, has said that the book blends Surrealism and Dadaism. Lamb on a Lego Board, for example, expresses the Dada movement, he said.

With the help of an index of art references, I do get some of it.

A bar code on a fish relates to cloning. I got that.

The zipper image on the side of a Black Angus steer implores us to think about what goes inside a beef animal. I got that.

But do we really care to think about that if we have already committed to making beef and pear skewers over crisp sweet potatoes and greens, the recipe on the facing page?

And when I set out to make orange and Cognac beef stew over egg noodles, what am I to think about the matador holding a piece of red meat instead of red fabric?

That is exactly the point, Allan Ben said. "Animals should not have to pay a price because we want a sport or to be entertained.

"We bring the truth to the plate," he went on. "Now when you eat you know where it's coming from and what the results are, for better or worse. All other cookbooks - everything is wonderful, romantic, beautiful landscape, but it is illusion."

Nothing escapes acidic commentary in "Art and Cook."

For the recipe for crisp duck breast with mango relish and yucca fries, Ben said, "We took a baby duck and photographed it in many positions. Then we photographed an open antibiotics pill. Then digitally we combined the two images and it looks like the duck was photographed inside the pill. In this image we emphasize how technology could have us grow the duck to enormous sizes in such a short time, to have another zero added onto the bank account. ...Another way to look at it is that we give the animals antibiotics and it all comes back to us eventually."

This book is the right size and quality to be a coffee table book, but it is too thought provoking, and sometimes just provoking, for most coffee tables.

Or maybe it is just ahead of its time.