Gastronomica, the food and culture journal published by University of California Press that is celebrating their 10th anniversary this year, has a great gallery section on their site featuring a host of beautiful food photography and paintings. It's an area they specialize in — their raw, sometimes funny, sometimes aggressive cover art is half the reason I subscribed a year ago — but their gallery goes deeper into the artists' collections and provides some context for their work.

The photo above, titled "Burnt Croissants," is from a series of photography and still life paintings by California artist Aya Brackett. The series, called "Between Meals," "looks at the remnants and arrangements of food as it exists in states of preparation, consumption and decay." Check out more art by Aya Brackett and others at the Gastronomica gallery.

For several years now, the wife and I have had a running joke about the Pollo Campero mascot, this extremely giddy chicken who, with wings wide apart in welcome, appears to beseech us to enter his restaurant and eat all his little friends. We amuse ourselves, we really do.

But now, in the latest issue of Gastronomica, writer Mark Morton serves up a brilliant essay on the very subject. Here's the nut graf of the piece (which is regrettably not online):

This notion that the natural world is not antagonistic to humans—"nature, red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson put it three centuries later—but rather that it willingly bends itself to comply with human desire, is a version of what literary critics call the pathetic fallacy. Sometimes dismissed as jejune, the pathetic fallacy can, at its best, offer us a vision of a world where humans and their environment coexist in harmony. But at its worst, the pathetic fallacy can become a grotesque fantasy of self-indulgence. In the culinary world, that began to happen about a century ago in print advertisements that depicted animals perversely and gleefully seeking their own slaughter—all in a bid to satisfy human consumption.

Morton's article singles out a number of companies/advisory boards that have used animal characters to peddle their products: The Laughing Cow, Charlie the Tuna, and the California Raisins, among others. These cartoonish creations all encourage us to eat them or the products they make, a fact that, when you think about it, has sort of Jeffrey Dahmer overtones to it, particularly if you buy into this idea that food is the new sex.

If you haven't seen it already, there's also a Web site dedicated to the subject, Suicide Food, which posts pictures of lesser-known animal mascots who desperately want us to nibble on their flesh. The examples are so abundant, throughout so many difficult cultures, that I do have to think that, on some level, humans must feel guilty about eating animal flesh.

Image by Flickr user Daquella manera

The latest issue of Gastronomica has a smart feature by Alexandra Greeley titled, simply, "Finding Pad Thai." I call the piece "smart" because it willingly accepts and promotes contradictions about Thai cuisine's most famous dish, pad Thai, which isn't really Thai at all.

First quote:

If Westerners believe that pad Thai symbolizes Thai cooking, many Thais agree. "Whenever we try Thai food," says Nick Srisawat, a native of Thailand who now oversees a large Thai restaurant group in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, "we try pad Thai first, because that is a way to judge how good a restaurant is. That's true all over the world—except in Thailand." Because pad Thai is a specialty dish in Thailand, many restaurants choose not to compete with the street-food vendors, who make and serve only pad Thai all day long and thus have perfected the recipe.

Second quote:

Pad Thai is really nothing more than a regular noodle dish, one that is not even native to Thailand. Its full name, kway teow pad Thai, hints at its possible Chinese origins; kway teow, in Chinese, refers to rice noodles. It is likely that some early version of the dish came to Thailand with settlers crossing from southern China, who brought their own recipe for fried rice noodles. Certainly the cooking style—stir-frying—is Chinese, and most food historians credit the Chinese with the invention of noodles. And, as Chombhala Chareonying, former Minister-Counsellor at the Royal Thai Embassy in Washington, D.C., points out, Thai food is basically Indo-Chinese in origin. The cooked meats and vegetables in pad Thai resemble dishes prepared by the Cantonese and Tae Chiew (Chao Zhou in Mandarin) from China's eastern Guangdong province. Nevertheless, the flavors and textures are pure Thai.

Image by Flickr user basykes