We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian writer and father of Futurism. He wrote during the first half of the twentieth century and passionately advocated for a new art that rejected tradition for vivid, exciting, and violent new directions. Marinetti rejected traditional art for a bolder, more violently creative new direction. His poem Zang Tumb Tumb, for example, described the Battle of Adrianople in the manner of a punk zine, with wild typography bursting across the page. Marinetti's rejection of the old extended to food and cooking.
Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook (excerpt here, further reading here) does not provide traditional recipes. Instead, Marinetti describes vivid scenarios in which diners experience food. The scenes involve the senses in strange and totally unconventional ways. For example:
RAW MEAT TORN BY TRUMPET BLASTS: cut a perfect cube of beef. Pass an electric current through it, then marinate it for twenty-four hours in a mixture of rum, cognac and white vermouth. Remove it from the mixture and serve on a bed of red pepper, black pepper and snow. Each mouthful is to be chewed carefully for one minute, and each mouthful is divided from the next by vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself.
Marinetti's dishes are certainly unique. Aerofood demands eaters snack on fruits and vegetables while stroking various textiles. Frozen onion is eaten with ice cream. The dishes aren't good in a Top Chef way. Rather, they're meant to create new ways for the diner to engage with food, to live in a new and wild manner.
Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!
On October 17,
SFMOMA will present a banquet inspired by Marinetti's Futurist Cookbook. The event intends to present food as a performance, as a kind of theater. Also, they plan on serving beef ice cream cones. It sounds exciting. I'll plan on bringing my trumpet.
