Imagine this dining experience: The guests are dressed in pajamas made of various materials, “such as sponge, cork, sandpaper, felt, aluminum sheeting, bristles, steel wool, cardboard, silk, velvet, etc.” They are led into a dark room, where they have to choose dinner partners according to their tactile preferences. Then food is served. Some of it must be eaten without using hands, but with faces buried in plates of vegetables; other parts of the meal consist of identical-looking balls containing wildly different ingredients: raw meat, banana, peppers. There is music, dancing, spraying of cologne, and then more unusual food. All the while, “the guests must let their fingertips feast uninterruptedly on their neighbor’s pajamas.”
Is this theater? Performance art? A prank? All of the above. Its creator, the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, imagined and described it as “A Tactile Dinner Party” in his 1932 “Futurist Cookbook.”
Why was there never a revolution in cooking as there was in art, architecture, music and literature? Picasso, Le Corbusier, Joyce, Beckett and Schoenberg attacked every temple, challenged the authorities, mocked the bourgeoisie, questioned the value of history and called for a new aesthetic world order in which the boundaries between art and life would no longer exist.
Yet they never thought to include food — or its finer cousin, gastronomy — in the movement. In fact, according to tech visionary and cookbook author Nathan Myhrvold, the inventive playfulness of such 21st-century chefs as Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz marks the first time the creative force of modernism has entered the kitchen and dining room. That’s one of the reasons Myhrvold says he named his newly published tome “Modernist Cuisine.”
I beg to differ. There has been at least one serious — and nearly fatal — attempt to introduce what we might term “modernism” to cooking. The problem is, it wasn’t very successful. But had the world listened to the lone, mad voice of Marinetti, the way we eat might have changed dramatically, and today’s avant-garde cooks would be considered derriere-garde traditionalists at best.
Marinetti was the leader of the Italian futurists, a poet and demagogue closely associated with the ruling fascists but often in conflict with them. (He criticized them for being too traditional and for their anti-Semitism.) He is best remembered for his many manifestos calling for a break with the past. One of his most memorable and controversial was the “Manifesto Against Past-Loving Venice,” wherein he suggested that the “small, stinking canals” of Venice be “filled with the rubble of the past” and paved over and that it be rebuilt as a modern militarized and industrialized city.
His venture into gastronomy started in 1926, when in another manifesto he called for a ban on pasta, describing it as “an absurd Italian gastronomic religion.” The favorite food of Italians, Marinetti claimed, made them lazy, tradition-bound and pacifist. He was met with massive protests. Petitions were signed. Housewives took to the streets. An enraged nationalistic journalist even challenged Marinetti to a duel. Marinetti accepted and — as happened so often in his colorful career — lost. He was gravely injured.
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