So, this week, as the fascination in the novelty of the love sausage has given way to the realisation that people (not necessarily the ones you've been anywhere near, but nevertheless real live people) have been giving each other Bacon Bouquets for years I found myself discussing ideas for a themed dinner party. But what to call it? The flower show dinner? Chelsea chops? Ah of course, the Magical Meat Garden meal....
But this being the world, and radical carnivory definitely being a thing, three American boys with a bacon salt obsession have roundly beaten me to it:
The watering can full of beer is a nice touch. The bacon tulips could have done with a bit more work. The prioritisation of calorie count over flavour doesn't gel with what I want from a meal.
The edible garden is not a new idea - the diorama that you can consume goes back to Hansel and Gretel's house, to Willy Wonka, it's a childhood idea with a touch of the sinister; doesn't the world look good enough to eat? What if it then turned around and ate you?
It's also greed and destruction, the human effect on the environment rendered down and made safe as a toy for children, an amusement for adults. Variations like Heston's edible graveyard below (look out for some great reactions from Ulrika Jonsson!!!) make the links to death and destruction explicit:
It also links me back to a garden toy I had as a child, where you could plug tulips into flower beds. The tininess and the contrast with the messy perfection of real flowers fascinated me, as did the tulips. There weren't many tulips where I was growing up. Daffodils in spring and irises in summer, yes; but tulips had the touch of the exotic and impossible, luxuries you bought for a season, needing gardeners and lifting, and who-knew-what, and frankly providing worse value for money than Dahlias, for all their earwig-attracting ways.
I remember finding the toy (a cheap plastic import toy from the continent called something like Gemma's German Garden) very easily last time I was looking, but now it's been eclipsed, Brexit-style, by the rather union-jackish Britain's Floral Garden, though looking at some of the pieces, maybe it's just the case that everything's now being labelled with the name of the more famous toy, irrespective of which set it came from.
This weirdly compelling video juxtaposes the fantasy suburbia of Floral Garden with a hospital set and a stable set, creating a disquieting, unfocused contrast, and a curious reminder of childhood obsessions with tiny models of ordinary life:
There's also a certain fascination in the idea of presenting food grown in a garden as a miniature garden, although "Eat my Garden" is probably not the best name for the dinner. And of course I have to persuade the allotment to actually grow something first.
Happy Valentines, anyway, meat gardens, food garden and model gardens alike, or maybe (following this year's fashion for mangling the world valentines into something you're genuinely interested in) Happy Hortentines.
But this being the world, and radical carnivory definitely being a thing, three American boys with a bacon salt obsession have roundly beaten me to it:
The watering can full of beer is a nice touch. The bacon tulips could have done with a bit more work. The prioritisation of calorie count over flavour doesn't gel with what I want from a meal.
The edible garden is not a new idea - the diorama that you can consume goes back to Hansel and Gretel's house, to Willy Wonka, it's a childhood idea with a touch of the sinister; doesn't the world look good enough to eat? What if it then turned around and ate you?
It's also greed and destruction, the human effect on the environment rendered down and made safe as a toy for children, an amusement for adults. Variations like Heston's edible graveyard below (look out for some great reactions from Ulrika Jonsson!!!) make the links to death and destruction explicit:
It also links me back to a garden toy I had as a child, where you could plug tulips into flower beds. The tininess and the contrast with the messy perfection of real flowers fascinated me, as did the tulips. There weren't many tulips where I was growing up. Daffodils in spring and irises in summer, yes; but tulips had the touch of the exotic and impossible, luxuries you bought for a season, needing gardeners and lifting, and who-knew-what, and frankly providing worse value for money than Dahlias, for all their earwig-attracting ways.
I remember finding the toy (a cheap plastic import toy from the continent called something like Gemma's German Garden) very easily last time I was looking, but now it's been eclipsed, Brexit-style, by the rather union-jackish Britain's Floral Garden, though looking at some of the pieces, maybe it's just the case that everything's now being labelled with the name of the more famous toy, irrespective of which set it came from.
This weirdly compelling video juxtaposes the fantasy suburbia of Floral Garden with a hospital set and a stable set, creating a disquieting, unfocused contrast, and a curious reminder of childhood obsessions with tiny models of ordinary life:
There's also a certain fascination in the idea of presenting food grown in a garden as a miniature garden, although "Eat my Garden" is probably not the best name for the dinner. And of course I have to persuade the allotment to actually grow something first.
Happy Valentines, anyway, meat gardens, food garden and model gardens alike, or maybe (following this year's fashion for mangling the world valentines into something you're genuinely interested in) Happy Hortentines.
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