Como Penso Como (2013) Como Penso Como (2013) –“I Think Therefore I Eat”– was a gastroperformance first offered at Sesc Pompéia, São Paulo, and again in 2015 at The Electrolux House. The rationale was to simultaneously use culinary, musical, theatrical, scenic and multimedia features to present a one-to-one correlation between, on the one hand, the act of eating and, on the other, certain critical questionings and ironic entanglements latent in some striking aspects of Brazilian history, literature, gastronomy and culture
The gastroperformance addresses the relationships between humans and food, their instincts about it and its significance throughout history. It throws a pondering look at totemic rituals, medieval banquets, and the symbolic value of food in its interface with faiths, up until the present day, when two diametrically opposed realities are perceived as equally banal: ‘fast foods’ and its antithesis, international haute cuisine, both of which become more and more like each other in their ingredients and procedures, both catering to publics who put consumption above thinking. EATING at a remove from THINKING is not what is expected from this gastroperformance insofar as it proposes a free-spirited gastronomy that is capable of thinking autonomously about reality.
Nearly everything in this gastroperformance was designed and produced specially for it: rooms, music, plates, glasses, food, poems, images. These created a unique tasting experience with nine different dishes served in the course of about 90 minutes, in two daily sessions for 30 people each.
The gastronomy pageant unfolded through a series of nine food design set-pieces that drew on four years of research, and its 60 different recipes composed a complete meal that symbolically represented various Brazilian aspects such as its religious syncretism, New Cinema, the 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto, Tropicalism, corruption, books of etiquette, as well as other various concepts. As a humorous revisiting of the quirks and customs that helped forge the national culture, it proposed a possible identity for Brazilian gastronomy without actually aiming to define it.
Procedures used in design proper –like 3D imaging, molding, various reproductive media– were repurposed to create such items as crunchy cassava lamps, edible papers, soursop lace, chocolate-printed text, 3D sardine heads, banana-shaped chocolates, and many other items which together made for a feast of Brazilian history through the experience of a gastroperformance.