AFTERIMAGE. Fruits of labour

No one paints food like the Dutch did in the 16th and 17th centuries. It began as an exercise in moralising. Juicy peaches blemished by tiny wormholes, half-peeled lemons to remind us that beneath that vibrant sheath is a bitter-sour reality, musical instruments to stand in for music that, like life, is intangible and ephemeral. This is called vanitas, a genre of painting meant to depict “the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death.” But artists soon ditched the cautionary tone and adopted a boastful and sensual one — the depressing skulls, hourglasses and worms were replaced by sparkling goblets, fine china and expensive produce such as lobsters and oysters. Under the guise of a Bible lesson, vanitas paintings turned into pronkstilleven , or ornate still life.

In the painting by Pieter de Ring titled ‘Still Life with Golden Goblet’, reproduced above and painted some time between 1640 and 1660, the lemon with its swirling peel is the only trope that connects it to the vanitas tradition. Minus the lemon what we have on display is a table heaped with aphrodisiac foods and the curious relationship between wealth and labour.

The rise of the genre of pronkstilleven coincided with the Dutch Golden Age, a period of economic prosperity in the Netherlands as a result of its colonising activities in India, Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, and so on. So, unlike still life before and after it, pronkstilleven wasn’t only about capturing the beautiful colours and forms of Nature’s bounty but also about displaying opulence. Chinese porcelain, for instance, is depicted in many of these paintings as a symbol of the Dutchman’s global reach and of his ability to possess something so exotic. This ability is of course economic but it is not related to a straightforward marketplace where a farmer or artisan makes something and a consumer buys it with money or barters with an equivalent product. In the context of colonisation, wealth is generated not by one’s own labour but by the ability to usurp someone else’s. The labour that went into making that porcelain dish becomes invisible because it was practically free. Instead, what is visible is the labour that went into creating this highly detailed, shimmering, almost-alive painting. The owner of this painting then is not just rich enough to eat lobster out of a Ming porcelain dish but is affluent enough to possess this extravagant painting depicting extravagance.

Pronkstilleven is no longer a fashionable genre in painting, but its fetishistic spirit thrives today through food photography and reality TV cooking competitions. Food is capable of arousing all our senses and leaving us with pleasing memories, but before Instagram we did not feel the need to make an image of the plate before us and share it with everyone we know. Last year, a controversial study by the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s claimed that this fetishising of food is the reason why the UK wastes 15 million tonnes of it in a year. The study claimed that “millennials (those born in or after the mid-1980s) are preoccupied with the visual representation of food to photograph and share on social media, while failing to plan meals, buying too much and throwing it away.” Millennials were also more likely to create Instagram-friendly dishes involving exotic ingredients that are harder to reuse.

To add insult to the already injured reputation of millennials, last month, celebrity chef Alton Brown spoke about how the generation’s fixation with photographing food was leading them to only buy produce that was photogenic. To translate that in real numbers, 1.4 million perfectly edible bananas are discarded every day in the UK because of the blemishes on them.

While the Sainbury’s study presents millennials as being irresponsible as compared to the older post-World War II generation that grew up on government rations, it fails to take into account the role of corporates like itself in this despicable scenario.

The Dutch East India Company (1602-1799) that brought home the wealth required to give rise to the Golden Age is considered to be the first multinational corporation in the modern sense of the term. Along with its sister concern, the Dutch West India Company, it made available pepper and sugar, pearls and rubies to the aristocrat at a price that did not take into account any real cost. This is not very different from supermarkets selling Himalayan pink salt or Mexican Hass avocados at prices that don’t take into consideration the environmental damage caused by long-distance transportation or the exploitation of third-world resources that makes exotic food affordable. What has become highly visible is the labour of the amateur cook/contestant who has to recreate an ethereal dessert involving a hundred steps, with ingredients that shouldn’t even be in a dessert.

Sometimes, however, we do get a glimpse of the blistered heels and rough palms of debt-ridden farmers marching to remind us that the food that adorns our Instagram feed has a human price tag.

Blessy Augustine is an art critic based in New Delhi; @blessyaugust

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