Turning Leftover Food into Art: Phagomania

Christmas is most certainly a time for eating, and for that we rejoice. Belt-adjusting levels of feasting ahoy! However, ironically, it is also a time for massive amounts of waste and leftovers: the epitomic turkey sandwich combined with a deep fridge raid of ingredients.

Now as Christmas is also a time for giving – and we fully encourage you to donate your time and money to soup kitchens and the like – we looked for creative answers to that leftover banquet in true Phagomania style. Our suggestion? Make some leftover art.

Some perfect exemplars to help you get going come from the playful Face Time series, a recent zine courtesy of an eye-catching wee photography publisher in California called Hamburger Eyes. Borne out of two photographers having fun, the photo series catalogues casual leftovers along with more extravagant full meals constructed into whimsical faces. A classic case of pareidolia in action. You can get started with a couple of Brussels sprouts and a chipolata, and see where things go from there. Discover a lot more of their food faces on Instagram by checking out #snackiefoodart and #kappyfoodart.

Once you’ve got a bit more practice in, you may want to take things up to the level of food artist Lauren Purnell. Lauren’s finely crafted creations started out from playing with leftovers, with her first creation of “the spaghetree” (a tree made out of pasta), encouraging her to explore further. “From there I just kept on going” she exclaims. Now she has created work for Zizzi restaurants and appeared on US TV network CBS.

“Originally I used leftover bits of food from my meals,” recalls Lauren, “but over time I realised that some of the best colours, textures and such were actually from the often dismissed or inedible parts of the foods such as peels, pips, skins, rinds, etc. So I then decided to also incorporate these items into my creations in order to re-purpose and transform them before they’re thrown away.”

Lauren describes food art as “a bit of a killer combo” as it “combines two things many people already love – food and art”. With a playful eye she aims to subvert our expectations. She explains: “I like to change people’s perceptions of ordinary foods by transforming them into something else that we’re familiar with. I’m not making any changes to the food, I’m just presenting it in a new and different way.”

Lauren has shared some Christmas themed creations with us to get us roused up with the festive spirit. So this year, break the ice with that relative you never see and skim the bad chat with some leftover food art on your plate – it can’t be worse than those cracker jokes and paper hats.