cycledog

In my weekend sorting spree, I found this.

Years ago I read an interview with Jim Crace, and the interviewer asked him what his best ever purchases had been. He said his dog and his bike, but that since riding one interfered with walking the other, his best ever purchase would be when someone fitted a dog with pedals. I couldn't get the image out of my head and this, I imagined, was what Jim Crace on a cycledog would look like.

Food art

This site is simultaneously maddening and beguiling. There are two arms to it - food pairing and interchangeable foods. Grapefruit above is an example of the first; Rosemary an example of the second. Aren't they beautiful? But the maddening element comes from the incomprehensible rubric that accompanies them. The interchangeable foods seems to make some sense - the idea is that each of the branches represents a type of flavour, and by taking one element from each branch you can recreate the flavour of the central ingredient. So far so good. But there is no explanation as to why they are clustered as they are, any indication of proportions (if something appears on two different clusters can you double the quantity of it?) and it just doesn't seem to make any sense. I don't believe that a combination of 2 parts respectively of ginger, nutmeg and alspice will approximate to rosemary. The foodpairing aspect is either not explaining itself very well or is extremely underwhelming. They propose 'By comparing the flavour of each food product eg strawberry with the rest of the food and their flavours, new combinations like strawberry with peas can be made'. I desperately want this to be more interesting than it sounds. They add that the more flavours foods have in common the closer they appear to one another on the chart, but I am still struggling to make any sense of this. These diagrams are wonderful, I love love love the idea of the project, but I'm pretty disappointed with the outcome. I think we can do this better.