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The relationship humans and our culture have with "nature" takes many forms, but arguably food is the most significant, intimate, and necessary of them. Aesthetics, cultivation, systematization, nutrition, desire - the wild caught vs. the domesticated, slow food vs. fast food - nature & culture are intensely negotiated through eat we eat and how we eat it.
The Japanese tradition prides itself on a close relationship to nature as well as to food. Click on any TV program and it is hard to not come across a celebrity carefully analyzing and satisfyingly eating a local specialty of some sort. As culinary traditions go,it is second to none, from sushi to "Iron Chef", Japan was a nation of "foodies" before the term was even conceived of. With this, the physical, visual, and performative forms that food takes in Japan are often unique, humorous, and at times absurd. The short films of the comedy duo the Rahmens, for example, illustrate the peculiarities of Japanese food culture and its forms. Current debates over whaling, tuna, GM foods, concerns over national food security and the controversy over recent film, The Cove (which after extreme resistance is finally being screened in Japan) are just a few examples of the serious side of things.
In this way food represents an intersection and pivot point for understanding the complex ways we conceive of nature, culture, and how they relate. In saying that Japan has a distinctive food culture, this includes the distinctive modes of packaging, processing, and utilizing food that reflect values and habits of a culture that are open to interpretation. The object-collages shown below were part of my daily exploration into the boundaries of nature/culture and form/material as manifest in food during my recent two-month stay in Yokohama. Since they are culturally specific, some of the meanings may only fully resonate for those quite familiar with Japanese food forms, while others make immediate cross-cultural sense.
1:Konnyaku is a refined form of starch from the konjac plant that originates from SE Asia and is used in Japan for creating sometimes white, brown, or gray blocks of jelly-like foodstuff. Its homogeneous character, pliable texture, and lack of distinct flavor is an interesting and very traditional example of food technology - of the natural contrived into the standardized and edible.
2: The Ooka River runs through Yokohama at different heights depending on the tide and different colors depending on water quality, cloud cover, and the vagaries of visual perception. It is full of trash: bent bicycles, umbrellas, and home appliances litter its muddy bottom like junk left by the astronauts left on the surface of the moon, very quiet and totally left behind. Leaves, cans, and styrofoam float upon it. But among all that, the diversity of life among its brackish waters is remarkable: fish very big and very small, crabs, turtles, ducks, oysters, a shocking abundance of jellyfish, as well a number of Japanese red rays. If it weren't a dirty river flowing through the second largest city in Japan it would be an aquarium.
Thinking of this space that flows right beneath my apartment window and the colors, shapes, and forms of life that animate it, led my mind to also wander on both the resonances and disparities with the forms of food people use - like konnyaku - and the otherwise anonymous connection the the nature from with they ultimately derive.
Taking two fine blocks of konnyaku I came to carve out the basic shapes of jellyfish and rays, creatures that I see so surprising in the river and which I find the most mysterious. Liberating the animal shapes from the vegetable starch felt good. They were wet and flexible and felt alive in my hand. I took them to the river and released them to swim - in some manner maybe of nature returning to itself?
The video can be viewed most optimally in the "Bunrui Bento Box" (classifying/sorting bento) that Christa Donner and I constructed. Many bentos are almost a cross between a cornucopia and Wonder Cabinet in terms of the diversity of amazing forms and creatures packaged within them. Along these lines the Bunrei Bento lets one engage in a compact, handy, and portable sort of terrarium experience.
Perhaps the annual Buddhist O-bon tradition of people making animals carved out of vegetables (such as "nasu-uma" eggplant horses_ to greet the returning souls of family members share some of the sensibilities in form and sentiment, Or perhaps not so much. Either way, animal, vegetable, and mineral; animate & inanimate - they are matters of continuum rather than category from a biological perspective. Everything makes everything on a very basic level - form, function, and their transformation are merely vehicles for these passengers.