In Good Taste

Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness. ~Pablo Picasso

everywhere, new york

If every week of life had a theme, this would be Food & Design week. It all started when I popped my head into the new The Future Perfect pop-up store in the Chelsea Market. The store, based in Brooklyn, is a design junkie mecca, and since their holiday pop up store focuses on Food & Design {read, vintage plates hand painted with bold colored silhouette, hand-blown glass and not-so-perfect teapots}, it was the perfect aesthetic start to my week. My favorite thing on their shelves is the new book CrEATe: Eating Design and Future Food{where the fish picture above comes from}, an understated visual history of food packaging, branding and design that will make you rethink everything in your grocer's aisles.

Mid-week, I attended a Social called East Meats West, in honor of two free-thinking independent food magazines from either coast, The Diner Journal, from Brooklyn, and Meatpaper magazine, a journal of meat culture based out of San Fran. The Social amounted to a meeting of the minds {creative ones, that include the folks behind Marlow & Sons, Bar Tartine and Chez Panisse among others} over artisan mortadella and porky propoganda. There, I met one of Meatpaper's talented illustrators, Katherine Streeter, who turns the art of stuffing sausage into fine art. Brilliant.

The week crescendos today, when culinary and aesthetic masters Frank Bruni of the New York Times, Victoria Granof {famous for her provocative work with Irving Penn}, and Mitch Feinberg join forces in a lecture about The Design of Food Presentation at Parsons The New School of Design in Manhattan. As they say, be there, or be square. Then again, in design, square can be quite a good thing.