Play With Your Food
Youcanplay with your food. In fact, you should. All the details are in Joost Elffert's remarkablePlay with Your Food, which introduces readers to a new way of seeing the food they eat, then shows them how to transform that food into creatures of extraordinary personality.Put a navel orange on its side, pip facing you. See anything yet? What do the folds suggest? Carve ovals and insert beans and sliced almonds--voila, two eyes. Cut ears from the sides of the orange and pull them forward. Now you have it--a cat's face of amazing and endearing character. But that's only the beginning. Learn to make artichoke-leaf aphids, bok choy buffalos, okra grasshoppers, green-pepper camels, and pear mice--just a few of the 75 ingenious  projects.Consisting primarily of color photos of the creatures, first in portraiture and then in step-by-step "recipes" for their creation,Play with Your Foodteaches readers above all to see. In addition to limning techniques, the minimal text provides a short look at manmade and natural imagery that suggests or embodies the possibilities of metamorphosis. Then it's on to the creatures themselves and the fun of constructing them. Anyone  who enjoys play and the magic of transformation will want Joost's book--and having seen it,  will never look at eatables in the same way again.--Arthur Boehm