Karen Lemke - Art as Relationship to Food, Who Feels Beautiful in a Jar Together?

A meal that is an art project about the food system is fun.  The standard rules do not apply.  Suspend judegement to enter the imaginative remembering of possibility, playing with practices.  Attune to beauty.  What does your body experience as beauty?  The sublime? Paying attention to color, pleasure, joy of the senses of smell, form, color, arrangement, composition.  

Saying hello to the flowers.  Notice the plants around you.  When you say hello,  do they seem to respond to your attention?  Is this the conversation my body wants to be having right now?  “You are so beautiful!  How are you in the world today?”

Microbiome in our gut is connected to everything, our memories, our ancestors’ memories of foods, the micro- and the macrobiome in conversation.  I am a garden of microorganisms in my belly based on what I am attracted to or repelled by.  Listen to your reactions.  

We are making a botanical soda of plants, water, honey and patience.  Which of these plants want to be combined together in this jar?  So grateful for the blue color of the corn flower, which wants to be nestled with this vibrant magenta echinacea.  

Being tuned in to what is the medicine I need in this moment helps me tune in in other ways to subtle messages around us.  Thai basil, reminding me of how basil this time of year is precious to collect just before the frost.  Honey acts as a desiccant. It also captures the essential oils and aromatics of the flowers.  

The microbiomes of the plants get to feed on the sugars of the honey, making their own nutrients which become available to us when we drink the beverage.  A relational connection to the foods and teas which have made beauty and deliciousness as an offering of love expression.

Karen Lemke lives in Milwaukee, USA, and focuses on building bioregional just transition systems for the health of our communities, using principles from the Good Food Purchasing Plan (https://goodfoodpurchasing.org) and the Permaculture Principles (permacultureprinciples.com) for design coherence and integrity.