Appetite: How Artists Turn Food into Desire, Power, and Performance

The Art Lens is Dandelion Chandelier’s ongoing exploration of how art shapes the way we see, remember, and make meaning—examining artworks, exhibitions, and creative movements through culture, history, and lived experience rather than chronology or trend.

With the feasting season upon us, it feels like the right moment to look up from the menu and ask a bigger question: what does it mean when artists turn their attention to what’s on the table? Across centuries, painters, sculptors, photographers, and conceptual tricksters have used food to talk about desire and discipline, class and culture, love and loss. Sometimes dinner is just dinner. Sometimes it’s a quiet manifesto.

Originally published in November 2019 and refreshed for 2025, this story now reflects a decade in which the world has only become more obsessed with what we eat, how it’s grown, and who gets a seat at the table. Museums are mounting serious shows about food and identity; record-breaking still lifes are setting auction houses ablaze; and yes, a single banana has sold for the price of a town house. The result? A rich body of museum-quality work that treats food as metaphor, memory, seduction, protest—and occasionally as punchline.

These works aren’t provocative for shock’s sake; they use food to expose appetite as a cultural force shaped by power, ritual, and desire. This is a curated tasting menu of that world: five themes artists return to again and again when they think about food and feasting, and fourteen unforgettable works that bring those ideas to life.

And should this turn into a craving as much as an intellectual exercise, our Extra Fine guides to the best apple pies in America and the most decadent hot chocolates in the world are basically the edible counterparts to this visual feast.

why food in art still fascinates us

Food is never just fuel in art. Like a beautifully lit dining room, it’s a stage where other dramas unfold.

First, there’s desire. A glaze of oil on a cherry, a perfect slice of cake, the glow of a café table at night—artists know how to make us feel hunger with our eyes. Food is one of the easiest ways to talk about pleasure and restraint, indulgence and denial, without saying a word.

Then there’s scarcity. Perishable food is an almost too-perfect stand-in for time. Fruit rots, bread goes stale, a feast ends. Painters and sculptors lean into that perishability to talk about mortality, illness, and grief, turning a basket of strawberries or a pile of candy into a memento mori.

Food is also a social script. What’s on the plate—and who is serving it—has always been shorthand for class, race, gender, faith, and national identity. A silver tea service in Paris, a chipped bowl in a farmhouse, neon signage for a late-night takeout joint: each is a portrait of power dynamics far beyond the table.

And finally, food in art is about memory and belonging. We all have a story about a perfect meal, a fraught dinner, a table we’ll never forget. When artists paint, sculpt, or photograph those scenes, they’re also documenting rituals of care, community, and sometimes quiet rebellion.

If you’re the kind of person who likes to pair a museum visit with a book and a meal, our Reading Room selection of books for Thanksgiving week is essentially a literary tasting menu for this time of year.

This essay looks at art about food not as still life or spectacle, but as a way artists explore appetite itself—desire, power, ritual, and the cultural meanings we assign to eating.

what artists tend to reveal when they create work about food

1. food and the fleetingness of life.

Food is one of the fastest ways to show time passing. It bruises, wilts, molds, evaporates. Artists have always used that built-in clock to talk about mortality—sometimes with great tenderness, sometimes with dark humor.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991).

In “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), Felix Gonzalez-Torres piles 175 pounds of brightly wrapped candy in a corner—the ideal body weight of his partner Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS-related complications. Viewers are invited to take a piece; the museum replenishes the pile to maintain its weight.

From across the room, it looks like a party favor. Up close, it’s devastating. As the candy slowly disappears and is restored, it becomes a cycle of loss and care, a portrait of a body eaten away and reconstituted through collective memory. The sweetness only sharpens the ache.

Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit (for David) (1992–97).

Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit (for David) consists of nearly 300 fruit skins—bananas, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, avocado—stitched back together with thread, zippers, buttons, and bits of wire, then scattered across the floor.

Made after the death of her close friend, artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, the work is part memorial, part act of impossible repair. The emptied shells are tender and absurd at once, as if Leonard were trying to heal what can’t be healed by sheer, obsessive care. Time is visible here: in the dried skins, in the fading color, in the knowledge that even these “repaired” fruits will eventually crumble.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Basket of Wild Strawberries (1761).

Chardin’s The Basket of Wild Strawberries looks almost shockingly contemporary: a wicker basket overflows with ripe berries, flanked by a glass of water, pale blossoms, and a few modest pieces of fruit. The still life is intimate, quiet, and precise—nothing flashy, everything perfectly calibrated.

In 2022, the painting set a record for 18th-century French art at auction before being claimed as a national treasure for France. The market loves its rarity; viewers respond to its restraint. The strawberries are moments away from over-ripeness. It’s food as distilled elegance and a reminder that the most exquisite things in life are always on the verge of disappearing.

2. meals as power, status, and identity.

Who sits at the table, who cooks, who serves, who is turned into a feast—all of that is raw material for artists thinking about hierarchy and selfhood. Some of the sharpest works about food are really about the politics of the body.

Salvador Dalí, Retrospective Bust of a Woman (1933).

Dalí’s Retrospective Bust of a Woman is one of Surrealism’s strangest food sculptures: a porcelain bust adorned with a loaf of bread, corn cobs, feathers, and ants that appear to be swarming toward crumbs.

The figure is half goddess, half garnish. She’s crowned with sustenance yet also being consumed. Desire, decay, and objectification are all there—an unnerving reminder of how often women’s bodies, like food, are treated as things to be displayed, devoured, and discarded.

Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party (1974–79).

Chicago’s The Dinner Party, permanently installed at the Brooklyn Museum, remains one of the most important works of feminist art in the 20th century. A massive triangular table holds 39 ceremonial place settings honoring mythical and historical women, each with customized porcelain plates and textiles; another 999 names are inscribed on the floor below.

Food here is pure symbol: a banquet not of actual dishes, but of histories that have been erased and are now being served up in public. It reverses centuries of visual culture in which women appear as servers, not guests, and asks us to reconsider whose achievements we consider worthy of celebration.

Sophie Calle, The Chromatic Diet (1998).

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle created The Chromatic Diet after novelist Paul Auster based a character on her in his book Leviathan—a woman who eats monochrome meals, one color per day. Calle responded by making that fictional quirk real: seven days of rigorously color-coded meals, photographed and presented with menus and text.

The result is funny, but also quietly revealing. Food becomes a ritual of control and self-invention, a performance of identity carried out in the most intimate space. In an era of diets, wellness content, and “what I eat in a day” videos, Calle’s meticulous plates feel eerily ahead of their time.

Carrie Mae Weems, Black Woman with Chicken (1987–88).

Part of Carrie Mae Weems’s series Ain’t Jokin, Black Woman with Chicken shows a somber, elegant Black woman staring directly at the camera, a piece of fried chicken held prominently in the frame. The photograph riffs on grotesque racist stereotypes, only to expose and destabilize them through Weems’s characteristic combination of beauty and refusal.

Food here is a weaponized image: a prop historically used to demean, reclaimed and turned back toward the viewer. You are not just looking at her; she is looking at you, asking what you’ve been trained to see.

3. national myths, pop culture and the supermarket.

Supermarket shelves, burgers, and bakery cases have become some of the great icons of 20th- and 21st-century art. Through them, artists look at branding, mass production, and our very modern blend of comfort and anxiety in front of the fridge.

Wayne Thiebaud, Bakery Case (1996).

Thiebaud’s glossy cakes and candies are the original American dessert fantasy—thick with paint, shimmering with color. In Bakery Case, rows of pastries line up behind glass, each meticulously rendered and perfectly lit, like a jewelry display of sugar and fat.

It’s deeply pleasurable to look at, but there’s a catch: everything we might want is sealed away behind a sheet of glass. The painting captures the modern condition of permanent temptation, the way consumer culture keeps abundance close enough to covet but just out of reach.

Claes Oldenburg, Floor Burger (1962).

Claes Oldenburg’s Floor Burger is a nearly 700-pound soft sculpture of a hamburger, sewn from canvas and stuffed with foam and cardboard, originally installed alongside similarly outsized Floor Cone and Floor Cake.

By inflating a fast-food icon to monumental scale—and making it sag, wrinkle, and slump—Oldenburg turns American appetite into something both hilarious and faintly grotesque. It’s pop art with a hangover: the joy of cheap abundance curdled into absurdity.

Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian (2019– ).

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—better known as “the Art Basel banana”—debuted as a real banana duct-taped to a gallery wall, priced at $120,000; a later edition would sell for millions.

The work is pure concept: the banana is replaceable; the artwork is the certificate and the idea. It’s a perfect collision of supermarket ordinariness and art-market excess, asking how value gets assigned. And what, exactly, we’re buying when we buy “art.”

4. food, labor, and justice.

Behind every meal is work: farming, cooking, serving, cleaning up. Some of the most powerful food-related art insists that we acknowledge those invisible hands and the political structures that shape who eats what, and when.

Vincent van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (1885).

The Potato Eaters shows five peasants eating a humble meal of potatoes under the light of a single lamp. Van Gogh wanted the painting to convey the “harsh reality of country life,” emphasizing rough hands and gaunt faces to show that the diners have “tilled the earth themselves with these hands they are putting in the dish.”

This is food as proof of labor: calories won with effort, not excess. In a world of endless brunch photos, the painting’s darkness and seriousness feel almost shocking—a reminder of how precarious sustenance has been, and still is, for much of the planet.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green) (2010).

Tiravanija is famous for cooking curry for museum visitors; in (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green), he transforms the gallery into a communal dining room. Visitors are served Thai curry while artists and volunteers draw protest scenes directly onto the walls, linking the colors of the dishes to the colors of political factions in Thailand.

Here food is both comfort and confrontation: a way to bring people together physically while asking them to digest a history of conflict, repression, and resistance. Eating becomes inseparable from thinking about who has power—and who doesn’t.

5. comfort, nostalgia, and the communal table.

Not all food art is critical or mournful. Some works are love letters to domestic rituals, to the care behind cooking, to the memories that cling to certain recipes and objects. Even then, the comfort is rarely uncomplicated.

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Ginger Jar and Eggplants (1893–94).

On view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Cézanne’s Still Life with Ginger Jar and Eggplants is a masterclass in how a “simple” kitchen table can become a laboratory for color and form. Eggplants, patterned fabric, and the blue-and-white jar are all slightly off-kilter; the table tilts, the objects shimmer, perspective feels unstable.

It’s easy to imagine this as a quiet domestic moment, yet nothing sits entirely at rest. Cézanne uses familiar ingredients to suggest that home—like perception—is always shifting. The still life becomes a portrait of the way memory warps even our most ordinary meals.

Carrie Mae Smith, culinary art paintings (2000s– ).

Painter Carrie Mae Smith—daughter of a butcher and former private chef—has built a body of work that treats meat, pastries, and porcelain tableware with Old Master seriousness. Small oil paintings of roasts, cream-laden desserts, and historic dinnerware evoke nostalgia and celebration while quietly examining how “special occasion” foods signal class, care, and the performance of taste.

In her hands, a slice of cake or a piece of bone-in meat becomes a portrait of labor behind the scenes and of the emotional weight we assign to the things we serve the people we love. If you adore this intersection of memory, ritual, and the breakfast table, our Extra Fine guide to the world’s most extraordinary jams does something similar with toast and marmalade.

It’s comfort with sharp edges: beautiful, appetizing, and aware of everything that effort represents.

where to see provocative art about food right now

If all this talk of still lifes and conceptual banquets has made you hungry to see art about food in person, there are several exhibitions (and one modern classic) worth building into your 2025–2026 travel plans. All are current or confirmed as of November 2025.

For a broader view of what’s happening across galleries, museums, and performance spaces throughout the year, our monthly Luxury Almanac keeps a running list of the cultural moments that are worth building a trip around.

1. future of food, science museum, london.

In South Kensington, the Science Museum’s exhibition Future of Food explores how what we eat will need to change to protect the planet—tracing food from ancient loaves to lab-grown proteins, and asking what a sustainable global diet might look like in the decades ahead. Extended until September 1, 2026, it’s an immersive mix of historic objects, interactive media, and speculative futures.

2. street food city, museum of food and drink (mofad), brooklyn.

At MOFAD’s new home in Brooklyn, Street Food City (opening December 2025) turns the museum into a celebration of carts, stalls, and night-market favorites from around the globe. The exhibition uses photography, design, and multisensory displays to tell stories of migration, entrepreneurship, and flavor, treating the humble street snack as an object of serious cultural study.

3. farm to table: art, food, and identity in the age of impressionism, seattle art museum.

Running from October 23, 2025 through January 18, 2026 at the Seattle Art Museum, Farm to Table looks at how 19th-century European painters depicted markets, meals, and agricultural labor at the dawn of industrialized food. Expect still lifes, café scenes, and rural tableaus that complicate the fantasy of the “simple” peasant meal and foreground who actually grew and prepared the food on display.

4. new nordic: cuisine, aesthetics and place, national nordic museum, seattle.

Developed in collaboration with Norway’s National Museum, New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place travels to Seattle’s National Nordic Museum from November 15, 2025 to March 8, 2026. The show examines the New Nordic food movement through photography, design, and art, connecting tasting-menu minimalism to regional landscapes, architecture, and visual culture.

5. cooking up change: women’s agency and community building through cookbooks, schlesinger library, harvard university, cambridge.

Opening March 2, 2026 at the Schlesinger Library’s Lia and William Poorvu Gallery and running through January 8, 2027, Cooking Up Change mines a collection of more than 4,300 community cookbooks to trace how women have used recipes to raise funds, build networks, and document their worlds from the 19th century onward. Cookbooks from diverse regions and communities sit alongside archival materials that reveal the labor, creativity, and strategy behind these “everyday” publications—an exhibition about food on the page, but also about power, mutual aid, and who gets recorded in the first place.

6. eating together: food in japanese america, japanese american national museum, los angeles (announced for 2026–27).

Looking a bit further ahead, Eating Together: Food in Japanese America is a major exhibition in development at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Scheduled for 2026–2027, it will explore Japanese American food traditions through art, photography, and historical objects, paired with pop-up programs in cities across the U.S.

faqs: appetite, art, and the cultural meaning of food

how do curators and critics think about “art about food”?

In this context, food isn’t decoration or still-life filler—it’s the subject. Curators tend to focus on works where eating, cooking, serving, or consuming carries symbolic weight, whether emotional, political, or bodily. That can include classical still lifes, feminist installations, performance-based banquets, or conceptual works where food becomes a stand-in for time, care, desire, or loss.

What matters isn’t the presence of food, but what it’s being asked to carry.

why does food in art so often point toward mortality or absence?

Because food is inseparable from time. It ripens, decays, disappears. Artists have long used that perishability to talk about bodies, illness, grief, and the finite nature of pleasure itself. A meal is temporary by definition; its beauty lies partly in the fact that it cannot last.

In art, that impermanence becomes a way of speaking about lives and relationships that are also marked by disappearance.

is art about food always a critique of consumer culture?

Not always—and that tension is part of what makes the genre compelling. Some artists are genuinely attentive to the visual pleasure of food: color, texture, abundance, ritual. Others are sharply critical of excess, commodification, or spectacle. Many of the most interesting works manage to do both at once, seducing the viewer before complicating that pleasure.

Food is uniquely positioned to expose the thin line between desire and discomfort.

where can these kinds of works be seen in person?

Food-related artworks appear regularly in major museum collections and exhibitions, even when they aren’t grouped explicitly under that theme. Permanent installations coexist with rotating displays, and many contemporary works surface through focused shows on feminism, labor, climate, or the body.

Rather than chasing individual pieces, the most rewarding approach is to notice how often food appears once you start looking—on tables, in hands, on floors, dissolving, offered, withheld.

what’s a good way to begin thinking about food in art if this is new territory?

Start slowly. Choose one artwork that stays with you and ask why. Is it the intimacy of the act? The excess? The restraint? Follow that thread outward—through other artists, other periods, other mediums. Reading about food history alongside art history helps, but so does paying attention in the gallery to works you might previously have passed without pause.

Food rewards close looking.

are there books or films that resonate with this way of seeing food?

Absolutely. Some of the richest parallels live outside the gallery—in photography books, essays, and films where meals are treated with the same visual care and narrative weight as paintings or installations. Works that linger on preparation, waiting, serving, and eating often share the same concerns as visual art: power, ritual, intimacy, and time.

Seeing how these ideas move across mediums sharpens how you notice them on the wall.

why revisit a post like this now?

Because the meaning of food keeps shifting. Artists are increasingly using it to think through climate, labor, care, identity, and inequity—often with a level of nuance that mirrors how we live now. Revisiting the work allows the conversation to mature, shedding provocation for its own sake in favor of deeper cultural insight.

Appetite, after all, is never just about eating.