Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is the first modern artist to consider the preparation and consumption of food as an art form. Marinetti and other artists founded the avant-garde Futurist Movement in Milan, Italy in 1909. The movement embraced everything mechanical, from automobiles and airplanes to manufacturing techniques and city planning. The Futurists believed that cooking and dining should be at the center of their visionary, futuristic ideals.

Marinetti published The Futurist Cookbook in 1932. The Futurist Cookbook was more than a collection of recipes. It was also a manifesto. He viewed food preparation and consumption in a new light, where entertaining was transformed into avant-garde performances. The book outlined the elements of a perfect meal. This dining experience had to be characterized by originality, harmony, and sculptural forms, as well as scents, music interspersed between courses, combinations of dishes, small canapes with different flavors, and music. To prepare the meal, the cook had to use high-tech equipment. Politics were not allowed, and the food was to be prepared so that it didn’t require any silverware.

Marinetti could never have imagined the importance of food in contemporary art nearly a hundred years later. Food has been used by contemporary artists to make political, economic, and social statements. Artists have opened restaurants that are art projects. They have also staged performances where food is served and prepared in galleries. And they’ve created elaborate sculptures using edible materials such as chocolate and cheese. Marinetti might have found it horrifying, but some artists today embrace food to reject everything and everyone who is obsessed with the future.

Food has played an important role in the history of art. For example, Egyptians used pictographs to depict crops and bread. Giuseppe Arcimboldo was a painter at the Habsburg court of Vienna and then for the Royal Court of Prague. He painted puzzle-like portraits with facial features made up of fruits, vegetables, and flowers.

When I think about food and art, I instinctively recall the significant, beautiful still lives of the Dutch Golden Age that I first saw in a class on northern Renaissance art. The glistening feathered jackets of duck carcasses, the shiny silver platters, and the dewy fruit and berries are all carefully rendered in these magnificent paintings to give the impression that the feast was right there before the viewer. These paintings were a testament to the wealth and intellect of their owners in the 1600s. Foods depicted often had symbolic meanings, which were related to biblical texts. The arrangement of the items and the fact that they had been eaten conveyed messages about time’s fleeting nature or the importance of temperance.

As a young artist, Cezanne’s large-scale renderings of oranges and apples fascinated me. Cezanne and other Post-Impressionist artists used observational painting to begin a creative process. They preferred vibrant colors and energetic brushstrokes to the hyperrealism that had been the norm in the past.

Food became a metaphor for social life during the pop art period. Wayne Thiebaud painted rows and rows of pies in pastel colors, which reminded him of advertisements and toys for children. His arrangements, more like diner displays than the homely aspects of everyday life, reflected an itinerant society where desserts represented American abundance.

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Around the same time, real food began to be used as an artistic medium. Dieter Roth (also known as Dieterrot) was a sarcastic Swiss German artist who created a piece in 1970 called “Staple Cheese” (A Race )”–a play on “steeplechase”), which consisted of 37 suitcases full of cheese and other cheeses that were pressed against the walls to drip or “race” towards the floor. The exhibition in Los Angeles was a stench to behold a few days after it opened. Public health inspectors were threatening to shut down the gallery because maggots and flys overran it. The artist claimed that insects were his intended audience.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminist artists viewed the American relationship with food as a way of limiting women. Feminists believed everything, even everyday life’s mundane details, was political. In 1972, Miriam Schapiro & Judy Chicago transformed a 17-room Los Angeles house slated for demolition into a massive art installation. Schapiro and other female artists created an immersive installation in the living room that mimicked the process girls use to decorate dollhouses. The project, which was both a performance and an installation, called out the double standard in society, that is, the disparity between expectations and opportunities of men and women. Girls were expected to care for their husbands, while boys were taught to be successful in the world. In works such as “Kitchen Painting,” 1985, Elizabeth Murray and other feminist artists would argue that women were powerful enough to manage both worldly tasks and domestic duties.