-Hello, I'm Philip Kennicott,
the art and architecture critic at "The Washington Post,"
and I'm here at the National Gallery of Art
in Washington with my colleague, Tom Sietsema,
who's "The Post" food critic.
We're here to have a conversation about how food
appears in some notable works of art.
Now, Tom doesn't like to reveal his identity
when he's working, so this interview may look
just a little bit different than you're used to.
So let's go over to the West Building
and catch up with Tom.
Hey, Tom. -Hey, Phil.
Fancy meeting you here.
-Well, why don't we start with one of the great treasures
in the National Gallery Collection.
This is a painting called "The Feast of the Gods"
from the first half of the 16th century.
It shows the gods from classical mythology
out on a sylvan landscape, maybe a little worse for wear.
-You can't really tell what they might be eating --
apples, pears --
but certainly wine is everywhere.
You've got cups and jugs.
It reminds me that wine is sort of an ageless companion.
You've got signs of people having a little too much wine.
Perhaps you've got the spilled cup up front
and the nymph in the corner in the right hand corner there.
She seems to be going to sleep.
And I don't think it's the conversation that's boring her.
I think it's probably a little overindulgence.
-And if we look at the subject of feasting
and eating about a century or a century and a half later,
you see a whole genre of paintings
in which this kind of overindulgence is attributed
to the working class or to peasants.
There's a sense that food is a kind of gateway
to danger for them, a gateway to other sins,
to gluttony and licentiousness.
-Danger and food goes back to Eve in the Garden of Eden,
right?
But there are plenty of examples of food being a source for good,
for enjoyment as well as sustenance.
-To move on to another painting
from the second half of the 17th century
by a painter not terribly well known named
Jacob van Walscapelle.
Very spare, very simple.
But I wonder if what we're looking at here
is actually food at all or something else.
-Everything has a reason for being there.
You've got the wine and grapes representing the Eucharist.
You've got hazelnuts which are ancient symbols of wisdom,
and then these bright red pomegranate representing
sort of the the suffering or the blood of Christ.
Only the wine looks as if it might have been
fetched from a cellar.
It looks cellar temperature to me.
It's been poured into a really beautiful
what looks to be a Venetian glass.
-So one of the things I really love about this painting is
the thing that the fruit sits on.
And I love the fact that this base,
this stone thing that should be the permanent thing,
it's got some chips and cracks in it,
as if they're asking us to think about the idea of food
and time and what persists and what doesn't.
That brings us to two paintings that I'd love to look at.
They actually hang next to each other in the National Gallery.
One is a painting of "White Bread"
by James Rosenquist,
and the other is a painting,
a classic painting by Wayne Thiebaud of "Cakes."
-I am definitely team pie, but this painting, with its pastels
and all the rich detail, makes the case for team cake.
I can almost imagine what they taste like.
I mean, look here, you've got that
what appears to be little lemon custard on one,
maybe some mocha icing here.
The bread appears to have been spilled from its plastic bag.
There's no branding here. It looks mass produced.
-It's laden with symbolism. White bread is a symbol
of a certain blandness in American culture,
a certain lack of identity. We often refer to people
who have sort of white bread dreams or white bread lives.
We have a certain familiarity with the food culture
suggested by these works.
And I'm wondering how you read these two paintings.
-This may fill you up, but not satisfy you.
It says a lot about what's bad about America and consumerism
and the problems we have with food in this country.
-It's really interesting how when you start putting food in,
as soon as you put it there,
it brings up all these ideas we have about food.
-There's a reason, for instance,
so many diners bemoan the loss of bread baskets right now.
You know, bread feels like the start to a meal always
in a lot of cultures.
And where would a birthday be without cake in the picture?
Both make life more worth living.
They're not just mere sustenance.