Recipes for Geese and People
and Jeremijenko’s OOZ

March 2, 2004

2nd course of the dinner for geese and people was called Vegetable Matter Underfoot, (salad carpaccio) visually references the trampled vegetation at the sides of ponds and lakes where waterfowl like to hang out.

Natalie Jeremijenko is developing a zoo without cages, and she’s calling it 00Z. That’s ZOO spelled backwards and in this OOZ animals and people come together voluntarily. I was honoured that Natalie asked me to be the culinary interface designer of the 00Z project, you know, Bat Bars and Goosesteraunts, totally up my street.

Pasta di larvae, imitate a species of larvae that live in cool ponds and streams and that cloak themselves with leaves and gravel as camouflage against their predators.

42 recipes later, and I was in the throes of designing Recipes for Geese and People for Jeremijenko’s OOZ, in which food is bait for interspecies social contact. I designed the culinary interface to lure animals and people together to share the urban space and to get to know one another. Both the Recipes for Geese and People and the four course tasting dinner represent the visual landscape that geese encounter during their migration. The visual materiality of the ‘ingredients’ is central to this work.

Pasta di larvae

In February 2004 Jeremijenko held a dinner for both geese and people at de Verbeelding in Zeewolde, an art organisation that houses the world’s largest landscape art collection in the world and where she was artist-in-residence with OOZ. I titled the dinner with the palindrome, ¿ Do Geese See God ? and the fête was enthusiastically attended by both geese and people.

Pasta di larvae, is a tribute to the cloaking technique of worms about to be eaten by geese.

Aquatic insect powder, seeds and seepage emulsified into a dressing for the Vegetable Matter Underfoot

00z
dinner
for geese
and for people
¿do geese see god? Menu

- Spilt Peas Soup with Split Mung
- Vegetable Matter Underfoot
vegetable carpaccio with aquatic insect powder, seeds and seepage
- Pasta di Larvae
glutinous seed pasta
and leaf-cloaked pasta
with cress emulsion
- Muddy Water Feather Leather and Murkish Delight

Recipe for a dressing including grass sprouts powder, a favourite food of geese