Food Performed

For our inaugural Vienna gathering we called on contributors to bring courses of food and/or drink, but with only one rule: their “course” had to involve an element of performance. The result? A twelve-course Crossmodalist feast.

Courses included:

Pancake Pictionary: a edible game created by the artist Anya Vero. Two teams were formed and arranged either side of a large table on which a pile of homemade pancakes and chocolate sauce were set. Each participant had to take a scrap of paper with a word and then draw it for their team as quickly as possible. The reward, once the word was guessed...? The player could eat their own picture.

Murder At The Ritz: an interactive murder mystery served with afternoon tea. ‘Murder at the Ritz’ was an original short story by Ned Stranger with a solvable murder, under eight hundred words in length, performed to the audience with a backdrop of lounge jazz. Audience members were invited to solve the murder, giving their logic, whilst supping on homemade scones and earl grey tea.

Edible Neuroscience: Patrick House, a phD Neuroscientist and published author of Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, created a model of the brain and spine out of cauliflower and round crackers for each of the vertebrae. Before eating the model, the audience was treated to a talk about two seminal neuroscience studies published over a century apart.

Chocolate Truffle Roulette: a variety of foods, including ginger, garlic, dates, mango, carrot and almond, were coated in homemade chocolate truffle. Each audience member had to eat a truffle picked at random while their reaction was photographed with a polaroid camera.

Reciprocal Feasting: participants were arranged in pairs and instructed simultaneously to feed each other a homemade soup using long spoons built by Alexander Grunsteidl, the founder of Sensesthesia.