Your guide to… Food& magazine #1

We featured issue zero of Food& magazine in our 2016 roundup of some of the strangest titles we saw last year; with a mission statement of ‘unusual encounters with food’, the Berlin-based publication set out to find the most unlikely connections between food and the rest of the world.

Actually, make that the rest of the universe, because for issue one they have switched their attention to food and aliens. We asked the team to talk us through six of their strangest and most eye-catching features…

1. Intrepid space shrimp
“Comic number one in the magazine is the first part of the Smokey Trilogy, featuring five intrepid shrimp heroes. The work comes from the hands of Leopold & Ulrich, an Oslo-based duo who reached us through the outer Milky of the internet. We’re thrilled they’re in the issue, partly because they’re our first open submission.”

2. Exoticism
“Evan Crankshaw is the man behind the internet’s hidden gems Flash Strap and Explorers Room — a fantastic blog and radio show dedicated to exploring exoticism across music from all of time (and space). Alongside a colourful collage, he has kindly created for this issue a lovely one-hour musical podcast following the tastes and inspirations of a mixture of fruits, fish and vegetables (or ‘vega-tables’). You can listen to it and read his interview on our website.”

3. Poetry and typewriters
“Brian Sonia-Wallace is a travelling poet based in Los Angeles. On a good day, he’ll wander around carrying his typewriter offering people a glimpse of his talent. Lucky for us, he intercepted the signals of an alien voice – a message of existential angst that he managed to transcribe with precise language and great dramatic effect.”

4. Distorted imagery
“Joachim Lenz is a painter based in Berlin. There is something basic and pure about the shape of an apple, and his drawings are very much aware of that — he plays with colour and shape to create an eerie and distorted effect. The still lifes are depicted with holes and it makes one wonder whether they’re the work of a human or an alien. We’re immediately attracted to the strange fruits, but we’re even more attracted to what is missing.”

5. Cyber porn
“One of the first questions we asked ourselves for this issue was how aliens might perceive certain pleasures that are common to us. The internet is so saturated with porn that surely snippets of it must get out there into space. Diego Lopez Bueno explores this hypothesis beautifully with a video that conjures all sorts of mixed feelings, something between curiosity, awe, pleasure and confusion.”

6. X-ray vision
“Another question we kept going back to was the effect of manipulating or interfering with a piece of visual or written information, especially when it is information gathered by someone else. We were very excited to encounter Maximilian Gutmair, because he has a very open and playful way of working with photography and that particular playfulness says something about the way we rip apart or piece together information. We like to imagine that the images scattered in the issue could be archival or x-ray images of a collaboration between man and alien: a visual mind map of our and their favourite parts of our world.”