Food as furniture? Let me sleep on it first

Food. You can grow it, cook it, and sit on it. Sit on it? Yes, food is the new furniture. Check out the sunny-yellow corn-cob stools at Melbourne-based lifestyle emporium Third Drawer Down, complete with a giant bite taken out of the kernels on one side.

For the same price ($250), you can house your favourite philodendron in a giant hamburger planter, the moulded-resin beef patties layered with lettuce, tomato and cheese in sesame seed buns. Inspired by pop-art pioneer Claes Oldenburg’s Floor Burger (1962), French Fries and Ketchup (1963) and Giant BLT (1963), it’s not only a bit of foodie fun, it could serve as a source of inspiration as to what to have for dinner. (Clue: not the philodendron.)

Or perhaps you’d like a giant version of those little plastic, fish-shaped, soy sauce dispensers you get with take-away sushi? Sydney product designers Angus Ware and Jeffrey Simpson of Heliograf have created a collection of hauntingly beautiful table lamps and pendants called “Light Soy”, the shades made using plastic that would otherwise end up in the ocean. Brilliant.

Then there is “Campari Light”, designed by Raffaele Celentano for Ingo Maurer, in which 10 original little Campari bottles are drawn together and suspended to shed a cochineal glow over proceedings.

But you can’t have a conversation about fetishising food without name-dropping Andy Warhol. The revelatory Andy Warhol Diaries on Netflix dished the dirt on the artist’s eating habits: he had a can of Campbell’s soup for lunch every single day for 20 years. Every single day. Liked the repetition and the consistency, apparently. So it wasn’t that much of a stretch for him to silk-screen that repetition and consistency into his seminal 32-piece Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1962.

So does living with an original Warhol – say, the Small Torn Campbell’s Soup Can (Pepper Pot) that sold for $US11.8m in 2006 – mean that you, too, would have canned soup for lunch every day for 20 years? Probably. And would the hamburger planter and soy-sauce bottle lamps work their way into my easily impressionable subconscious to dictate what I have for dinner? Probably. And would my Campari-loving partner ransack the overhead lights at cocktail hour if she ran dry? Absolutely. Maybe food should go back into the refrigerator where it belongs, after all.

theemptyplate@goodweekend.com.au

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