#147 | Edge of Excess
Food, art, and the nausea line
There's a moment when you've eaten too much cake and pleasure tips into regret. Our Fall issue lives in that dangerous space. Every meal's become a Rorschach test lately. It happens when you stare at food for too long. This newsletter is the result of that obsessive exploration, where we're examining how art and food intersect at the edge of excess.
Without giving too much away, we’re diving into the moral tension of abundance in our next issue. You know the feeling: the recognizable discomfort when you see something so thick, full, rich, and visually sticky that you become embarrassed. Or that brief, panicked moment when you realize you’ve gorged beyond your limit and are toeing the line of nausea.
That playground of tension is where I’m at these days.
Since our first issue hit newsstands, I’ve been shooting inspiration to capture this feeling as authentically as possible:
The best food art lives in this dangerous intersection of desire and revulsion, where a cake with seventeen layers isn’t a cake anymore. It’s about ambition, delusion, joy, and the human desire to push “past enough” to discover what happens next.
But not everything needs to live on the edge of nausea. Sometimes, you need proof that food can be joyful, and the whimsical moments where art and food intersect can coexist without tension.
My current obsessions:
🦪 Clam spectacle—Sarah Mason recipe for a giant sugar clam with salty shortbread sand and fruit explosion innards. Perfect poolside centerpiece that’s equal parts sculpture and dessert.
🥢Discarded ephemera—The Letterform Archive in SF received 500+ vintage hashibukuro (“chopstick sleeves”), and you can see the collection here. It’s a charming window into Japan’s history of design and culture.
🧊 Melting cocktails—SF Cocktail Club’s solution to wasted garnishes: freeze them into popsicles that transform your drink as they melt. Adrian Spinelli has the whole story and recipe on our site.
🍮 A brief history on moulded meals—I’ve been studying 1950s recipe cards: those jiggly meat jelly towers with suspended peas, crowned with mayo. The quintessential weird food trend that became a symbol of suburban status anxiety.
Before the 19th century, only the wealthy could afford gelatin. Then powdered gelatin and refrigerators democratized it. Post-WWII, food companies needed peacetime customers for their processing plants. The result was an arms race of grotesquerie: salmon suspended in lime JELL-O, sausages jutting from tomato aspic. The more unnatural the combination, the more modern you appeared.
Which is why Bay Area artist Laura Rokas’ art hits so hard. I saw her photorealist paintings at Rebecca Camacho Presents in Jackson Square—vintage Betty Crocker and Weight Watchers disasters rendered with serious precision, making art from recipes that should have stayed buried.
[CONTEST] Your grandma’s about to be famous. Can she feed 20 people for $100? We're putting her recipe against a pro chef and a grocery store.
Submit the recipe & high-res feast photo by 7/23.
Prize: full print magazine spread in our September issue
And as a palate cleanser, here’s the pure joy department:
🐶 Coming up: A three-legged dog picnic party (7/13) is exactly as wholesome as it sounds. Celebrating all dogs that come beautifully imperfect: dogs with cones, one eye, no teeth, casts, and wheelchairs. Photo-op of the season.
💰 An anonymous AI engineer millionaire is secretly funding whimsical art installations via Venmo. A dating musical, a Beyblade tournament, and a citywide scavenger hunt are just a few recently funded projects. Local philanthropy is still a thing, and I’m for it.
Sometimes the best art is knowing when to push past enough, and when to simply celebrate what is.
Here’s to finding the perfect amount.
See you soon,
—Melody