Marina Zurkow Offers a Taste of Hydrocarbons
"Outside the Work: A Tasting of Hydrocarbons and Geologic Time" dinner. This recent headline in the Houston Chronicle announced that Marina Zurkow served approximately 50 guests a seven-course dinner hosted by the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University.
The Gulf Coast location provided most of the ingredients. It included jellyfish and Japanese knotweed, both invasive nuisances that are known to contain health properties.
Zurkow commented,"It's a trope in foodie culture: Eat your enemies, the invasive species, to get rid of them."
Each of the seven courses (prepared for the event by Lucullan Foods) was served on a different reusable placemat. Dishes from previous courses were piled onto a centerpiece sculpture of Styrofoam packing materials. With each course, diners peeled off layers of reusable place mats that doubled as a geology lesson.
Zurkow explains, "I'm not blaming anybody but looking at the role of petroleum usage in anthropogenic changes."
The unusual edibles, which included an Airless Spaces: Anaerobic, Fermentation course, is described by reporter, Molly Glentzer:
“In the beginning, there was water – Newfoundland-sourced glacial water in PET bottles – polyethylene terephthalate, a petroleum-derived plastic. We were warned they would not be refilled.
As Zurkow proposed a toast to microorganisms, we squeezed droppers of blue-green algae into shot glasses of local water, watched it bloom and drank. We wondered if real food would arrive.
Thankfully, a beautiful red algae and frisee salad appeared, the first of three small plates in the “Salt of the Seas” course. We shaved salt-cured mullet roe onto the salads like Parmesan. The sardine skeleton chips – whole fish stripped of their flesh and deep fried – turned out to be crunchy delicacies; and the flesh of the salt-baked Gulf striped mullet tasted surprisingly sweet and moist. Getting to the mullet required some cracking and digging through a thick crust of salt, and as we hacked away, Zurkow got us all singing the chorus of the Rolling Stones’ “Salt of the Earth.”
The salt hit continued for the “Airless Spaces” course, but it offered welcome substance in a big slice of Old Mother Sourdough Texas Toast topped with umeboshi butter; plus a tastier drink in bottles of St. Arnold’s Icon beer. “We are now halfway to oil,” the program promised.
Next came a de-constructed gumbo that included Aspic Domes of Marine Life. We were starting to feel full, and everything was salty, a reminder of the oceans’ changing state. Relief came with a “brief pause” – the granita of Texas grapefruit and cannonball jellyfish, which was topped by a succulent oyster on the half shell.
“This midmeal amuse may cleanse your palate of preconceptions,” Zurkow said. “We hang, in an interlude, on a gradient, in uneven time. An inter-species, temporal collusion between oysters and jellyfish and humans: cleaners versus consumers, cultivars versus competitors, delicacies versus detritus.”
Servers piled the dirty dishes on Styrofoam sculptures that ran like a spine down the table. After three hours, we’d made a glorious mess. We were almost giddy by the “Digging for Black Gold” course, a dessert that combined a Composed Strata of Hard Sugar Caliche, Dark Chocolate Clay, Gingered Sorghum Sands, Black Licorice Coal Tar and Crude Texas Liquid Gold (a reward of straight tequila).”
Diners were left with more than food to digest. This intimate encounter with creatures that live in their habitat provided a generous portion of contemporary dilemmas. Zurkow explains, “What is the relationship between this complicated, displaced material – petroleum – against the site-specific things that matter to people? That tension is the backbone of the meal.”
Zurkow teaches graduate students in the interactive telecommunications program at Tisch School of the Arts where she teaches “weird classes around the environment like ‘fabrication with fungus'”.