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Food and Drink

Looking at dinner in whole new ways

"You'll never look at dinner the same way."

That's the tagline for the 2008 documentary, Food Inc. , by award-winning filmmaker Robert Kenner. If you've seen the doc you likely haven't looked at your dinner - or even a doughnut - the same way since.

The tagline also suits to a T the works by a number of artists practising a relatively new genre of contemporary art called bioart, appropriately enough, given it straddles the worlds of science and art and uses living tissue.

Bioart arises from our brave new technological world where human organs and meat can be grown from cells and harvested with equal aplomb; where eggs, sperm and even DNA can be banked and traded, bought and sold; where scientists inject "antifreeze" genes from a North Atlantic fish into tomatoes so the plants can withstand colder temperatures; where GMOs in food and beyond are the norm not the exception. And where we have few, if any, moral and ethical way-finders to guide us.

The art work itself might be a flower carefully bred for certain aesthetics - one of the more approachable works in the bioart pantheon, which isn't exactly known for being a particularly accessible genre but nonetheless remains one worth taking the time to explore.

It could use mould or DNA or, as is often the case, the artist's own body as the medium - an arm, say, used to grow an extra ear with a microphone implanted inside, as was the case with the Australian-based artist known as Stelarc.

Or the artist's own blood, as demonstrated by Brit artist Marc Quinn, who had his head cast as a bust from nine pints of his own frozen, congealed blood, giving the idea of "self-portrait" new meaning. Yes, the sculpture did eventually melt, but not before it landed in Charles Saatchi's collection, or rather his freezer.

All of this points to even more symbiosis between the worlds of food, art and technology than one might otherwise assume, and reveals another highlight of the world of bioart - bringing together seemingly disparate media and ideas in sometimes unexpected, even shocking ways, forcing us to not always believe what we think.

The term "bioart" was actually coined in the late '90s by one of the better known artists practising in the field, Eduardo Kac. He went on to create what's commonly known as the glowing green bunny. Google that phrase and you'll come up with Alba, more formally known as the GFP Bunny - GFP for green fluorescent protein.

Much like the tomato plants laced with white flounder fish genes - transgenetic creations all, manipulated by us and for us - Alba, who started life as a regular albino rabbit, was created by Kac working in conjunction with scientists who injected her (him?) with a green fluorescent gene found in certain wild jellyfish.

The rabbit glowed a pleasant far-out green under certain lighting conditions but otherwise looked and acted normal, at least normal for an albino rabbit.

It could have been that, with Alba being an exceptional but one assumes perfectly palatable rabbit and Kac, coming from France where rabbits are commonly eaten, she might have ended up on the dinner table. But she likely didn't.

No one knows exactly what happened to Alba. Despite the fact that the artwork was as much a social and ethical project as a scientific one - Kac and his family had originally planned to take loving care of Alba at home, advocating that humans should take full responsibility for things technological that they create - the laboratory Kac worked with unexpectedly decided to keep the green glowing bunny at the end of the experiment.

Given Alba was born 10 years ago, there's a good chance she is probably not alive today (rabbits have an average lifespan of 8-12 years, and even less in captivity). Other than that, we cannot guess the fate of this odd engineered animal that was created at the whim of humans using technology. Or can we?

One of the many articulate people featured in Food Inc. is Joel Salatin, a dedicated farmer whose parents started Polyface Farm - "the farm of many faces" - in Virginia in 1961. The Salatins intentionally took one of the lousiest, most worn out, abused pieces of farmland in the Shenandoah Valley and turned into a thriving model of how "honest" food can be produced.

Joel makes a lot of good points in Food Inc . One that stood out, if I might loosely paraphrase him, is that we North Americans (he actually refers to America but Canada is right there, too) have become a nation of technocrats concerned with the "how" of food production while we don't ask about the "what," as in what the heck are we doing, using GPS to grow corn, but we never ask if we should even be feeding corn to beef cattle when they're meant to eat grass.

After Food Inc. shows us some pretty upsetting footage of pigs being killed at the now infamous Smithfield plant in North Carolina, the world's largest pig processing plant where some 32,000 pigs are processed daily, Joel raises another interesting point: If we see a pig only as something to be poked, prodded and manipulated to meet our needs, we'll see all life that way - and lose respect for it.

A bioartist might have said that, such as Kira O'Reilly. O'Reilly is a graduate of the Cardiff School of Arts and a practising Buddhist. For years, she's been an experimental performance artist - sometimes a very controversial one - often using her own body as the medium, along with pigs.

Throughout her work, she raises some pretty provocative questions about our relationships with animals that can uncomfortably reposition our place at the dinner table and beyond.

In one variation of a piece called inthewrongplaceness, audience members could spend 10 minutes, one at a time, in a room with O'Reilly, otherwise known as the human animal, who is nude and has her head inside the rib cage of a non-human animal - a 48.5 kg pig. The audience can move around the space, or simply sit, or touch either of the two animals, one dead and one alive. But they must first put on gloves and spray them with ethanol.

They are cautioned not to do anything they don't want to do.

O'Reilly describes the experience of being inside the pig carcass: "...Warm and cold... Her skin draping around me. Her unrelenting flesh and weight... I carry her and carry her, in absurd futile attempts to achieve some kind of animation... I hear someone burst into tears softly as they leave the room? I weep my head inside her..."

Dinner will never look the same again. Nor should it.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who spends a lot of time and energy looking for sources of thoughtfully raised "clean meat."