Sketches Of Harvest

Harvest: Art, Film and Food is a celebration of food in art --past, present and future -- and of food's power to bring people together. With discussion and imagery ranging from magnificent seventeenth-century still-life paintings to bold contemporary works and culinary cinema, this keepsake volume explores the production, consumption and symbolism of food. Featuring thematic essays and interviews with artists and filmmakers, as well as a sumptuously illustrated food section sharing prized recipes from some of the biggest names in the Australian restaurant industry -- including Shannon Bennett, Alejandro Cancino, Brenda Fawdon, Peter Gilmore, Dan Hunter, Josue Lopez, Ryan Squires, James Viles, Ben Williamson, as well as two-Michelin star Danish chef René Redzepi -- Harvest: Art, Film and Food offers a feast for all of the senses and prompts us to consider how what we eat defines who we are.

Most cookbooks are designed to answer the question “What do I want to eat?” Practical Food for the Curious Cook tackles the more realistic and fundamental question, “What do I have to eat?” Did turnip turn up in your local farm CSA? Maybe chard was marked down at the local market, or your neighbor had a surplus of zucchini. Flip through each page to find a beautiful illustration of a raw ingredient, like carrots, beets, kohlrabi or okra and a description of all the ways to prepare it. Roasted, steamed, boiled, grilled! Also available, is a list of ingredients it goes well with. Fortunately, you can mix almost anything and you are well on your way to a colorful roasted vegetable medley. There are no measurements to follow, no timers to keep track of. Maximus Thaler and Dayna Saffertein will guide you to provide cooking inspiration, not cooking dogma. Practical Food for the Curious Cook is for everyday people who want to regain a relationship with their food.

The mutual history of art, agriculture, and American identity as told through the theme of the harvest. The harvest has traditionally been a productive season, both on American farms and in its artists’ studios. Before the early nineteenth century, the ideal of the Jeffersonian yeoman, singly cultivating a subsistence plot for family use, dominated the American imagination; after World War II, the advent of big agribusiness proved less immediately attractive for artists. In We Gather Together, Charles C. Eldredge examines the period in between—when many Americans were farmers and much of America was farmland. Organized in a series of case studies each devoted to a single crop, We Gather Together initially focuses on familiar commodity crops such as corn, wheat, and potatoes, and then expands to other yields by Native American harvesters and California floriculturists, as well as winter ice cutters and coastal seaweed gatherers. This novel history of agriculture and art traces parallel developments on land and canvas, highlighting breakthroughs in each field. Artists such as Winslow Homer, Doris Lee, and Georgia O’Keeffe are joined by innovators in agriculture, whether mechanical inventors such as Eli Whitney, John Deere, and Cyrus McCormick or genetic hybridizers such as Luther Burbank, W. Atlee Burpee, and Theodosia Shepherd. Surveying an astonishing amount of material and a wide range of paintings, prints, and other artworks from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, We Gather Together gorgeously demonstrates how the use of agricultural metaphors permeated American visual culture. The harvest, we see here, came to signify and dominate politics, poetry, and popular culture, ultimately representing a primary facet of American identity and nationhood.