The Raw and the Cooked

    In The Raw and the Cooked, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss used the word “raw” and “cooked” to distinguish between wild nature and nature that has been manipulated. What do you think he meant by this and how it relates to food and artists who use it in the work?

    
    In our daily life,we usually have food as raw or cooked. One of the important characteristic that distinguish these two elements is "fire" or "heat". After human discover how to use fire as a tool, we have the simple and direct way of food processing. As technology advanced, there is a variety of ways to process the food either through boiling, baking, barbecuing. Most of these ways trace back to use different forms of heat. 

   In the art world, we picture raw and cooked in different colors. "Raw" usually associated with cold tone and "cooked" often associated with warm tone. I believe such association could be used by food artist to manipulate the appearance of the food to surprise people. Normally people would have a expectation just based on the appearance of the food, however, it is not always accurate. Thus, i believe artist could take advantage of this to make their artwork unique and impressive to people. 

  As human evolve, food has become not only a source of energy but also a form of art that brings people enjoyment and pleasure. Throughout our history, many artist have done their works by using food. As in Giuseppe Arcimboldo's painting, he used a great amount of raw food to composite human faces. As in yum tang's food photography, she used both raw and cooked food to represent unique elements of different cities landmarks.