Berliner Cupcake
Where
did I get the idea that riding the subway is no fun? I took the
subway two days in a row, feeling too lazy for my usual bike ride.
Both times exciting things happened. The first time the lady next to
me had a poodle on her lap who without warning decided it was time
for a pee. The owner took it in stride and laughed it off. The second
time I sat down next to a lady with a platter of freshly baked
cupcakes on her lap. They looked and smelled so yummy I could not
take my eyes off. I ended up buying one of these what must have been
a Berliner cupcake because it had a gummy bear on top of it. My
neighbor was on her way to the museum island to sell her cupcakes to
the art lovers. The money is for an initiative called “cupcakes for
literacy”, providing children with learning resources. The Let's
Talk Cupcakes!-project,
so I checked online, also organizes language lessons – promoted as
the tastiest way to learn English. Even corporate team building can
be a piece of cake with cupcakes (www.letstalkcupcakes.com).
Sugarhigh
I arrived back in my neighborhood Kreuzberg. I actually happen to
live in a hood where many people are convinced that with food one can
make the world a better place. Food, for example, can surely revive
deserted places and tighten the community. Around the corner of my
place, in the Eisenbahnstraße, there is Markthalle IX. Built in
1891, the market hall's downfall started in 1997 when ALDI moved in.
Merchants could not cope and had to leave. ALDI is still there but in
2009 the neighborhood's residents started an initiative: Markthalle
Neun (http://www.markthalle9.de/konzept.html).
As a result there is now a market on Fridays and Saturdays with local
merchants selling pies, juices, flowers, regional vegetables and
meat. The cooking is glocal: veggie burgers, spanish tapas, Berliner
Blutwurst. The tables are covered with ecological food and the
neighborhood gathers around. During the rest of the week you can
still hit Markthalle IX for a five euro dinner at noon. Or you can
have a coffee at the central booth, which has been there
since 1989, surviving the market hall's harshest times and apparently
enduring stoically its recent upgrading.
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| Booth at Markthalle IX since 1989 |
At the other end of my street food meets art: Hungry
City,
curated by Anna Kersten in cooperation with Stéphane Bauer at
Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien,
features art that deals with the significance of food in culture. The
nexus of food and art has a long history, food being the perfect
object for still live paintings or the ideal material, preferably in
decomposed condition, to move the boundaries between art and life. No
such thing in Hungry
City: Environmental Art,
Rural Art and Guerilla Gardening are at the fore. You can follow the
food chain of your morning yoghurt personally tracked down by
Jekaterina Anzupowa during a worldwide trip. The artist collective
Fallen
Fruit maps the places where
the urbanite can do harvest picking for free in the city. Kultivator
shows you how to build a worm tower for your urban compost. A story
is told about the breeding of potatoes in the GDR (Åsa
Sonjasdotter), farmers in Poland go into great detail about their
self-made machinery (ŧukasz Skąpski), and personal tales bring
together Croatian and Hungarian milk production (Kristina Leko). You can see happy pigs being fed with acorns (Isa Winkler), a 1982 wheat
field in front of the former World Trade Center in New York (Agnes
Denes), and a 1970s San Francisco farm project under a highway
crossroad (Bonnie Ora Sherk).
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Insa Winkler, Das Eichelschwein, 2006. Standbild aus dem Video. © die Künstlerin |
Hungry
City's
accompanying program makes you experience food from a different angle.
An
evening dinner, for example, was served by
Dinner Exchange Berlin,
using the leftovers of the city's supermarkets and gastronomy. I happened to wander through the exhibition spaces while
dinner was being prepared, its smell rising up. Believe it or not, it was right after my
cupcake experience. Needless to say, all my senses were blown. I went home where my roommate Asier Solana
was doing some home-cooking – his aim of the week being to cook a
different meal every day, leaving out spaghetti. The empanada, Spanish style, was so divine. That's when the music set in: “You
have to get a tongue for the taste, it's the kind of food you don't
waste / food for your mind and your belly, not when you're in front of
the tele / the kind of food that keeps you strong, keeps you balanced
all day long / you got to feed up your foundation – information.”