Domic Davies is responsible for the photographies displayed in the famous Big Fat Cookbook:

In this enormous, beautiful book, we hear the full story of the meteoric rise of Heston Blumenthal and The Fat Duck, birthplace of snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream, and encounter the passion, perfection and weird science behind the man and the restaurant.

Heston Blumenthal is widely acknowledged to be a genius, and The Fat Duck has twice been voted the Best Restaurant in the World by a peer group of top chefs. But he is entirely self-taught, and the story of his restaurant has broken every rule in the book. His success has been borne out of his pure obsession, endless invention and a childish curiosity into how things work – whether it’s how smell affects taste, what different flavours mean to us on a biological level, or how temperature is distributed in the centre of a soufflé. (from the editor’s website)

See more excerpt from the book over at Daily Icon. Visit The Fat Duck official website (before being a book, it’s a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the UK). Learn more about chef Heston Blumenthal on Wikipedia. If you can’t afford the full version of this book (it sells at around 150$ dollars on Amazon) don’t worry : there’s a lowered-price edition of it, selling at around 30$:

The cookbook hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “showstopper” and by Jeffrey Steingarten of Vogue as “the most glorious spectacle of the season…like no other book I have seen in the past twenty years” is now available in a reduced-price edition. With a reduced trim size but an identical interior, this lavishly illustrated, stunningly designed, and gorgeously photographed masterpiece takes you inside the head of maverick restaurateur Heston Blumenthal. Separated into three sections (History; Recipes; Science), the book chronicles Blumenthal’s improbable rise to fame and, for the first time, offers a mouth-watering and eye-popping selection of recipes from his award-winning restaurant. He also explains the science behind his culinary masterpieces, the technology and implements that make his alchemical dishes come to life. Designed by acclaimed artist Dave McKean—and filled with photographs by Dominic Davies—this artfully rendered celebration of one of the world’s most innovative and renowned chefs is a foodie’s dream. (Amazon)

In any case, be sure to take a look at the Big Fat Undertaking blog: someone actually attempting to do more with this book than looking at the picture.

In Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet—scientists, inventors, and accomplished cooks in their own right—have created a six-volume 2,400-page set that reveals science-inspired techniques for preparing food that ranges from the otherworldly to the sublime. The authors—and their 20-person team at The Cooking Lab—have achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes. It is a work destined to reinvent cooking. (About)

Download a 20 pages preview of the book (PDF). Learn more about the authors (Myhrvold was the first chief technology officer at Microsoft : check his wikipedia page). The 6 volumes are all sold together. They can be pre-ordered on Amazon for a meer 500$

The ad was run during the 70s. See instance of it in 1970, 1971 and 1976 (from a National Geographic issue). Its rhetoric is discussed in S. Morris Engel’s book Fallacies and pitfalls of language: the language trap (1994).

Emily Burns has a BFA in painting and photography. On her resume, we learn that she’s (or was) an artist assistant over at the Jeff Koons Studio in New York.

First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness.

“Infographic narrative poster that explores Chicago’s historical and cultural relationship with the production and consumption of meat. Project was created for the Select Media Festival 7 Infoporn exhibit.”

First spotted via Information About Information.

This is Niemann’s latest instalment published on his New York Times’ blog Abstract City :

“Christoph Niemann’s illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Newsweek, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration. His work has won numerous awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Art Directors Club and American Illustration.”

Previously on Skandalon: Christoph Niemann, maps.

Meatpaper

“Meatpaper is a print magazine of art and ideas about meat. We like metaphors more than marinating tips. We are your journal of meat culture.

At once divisive and universal, delicious and disturbing, funny and dead-serious, meat polarizes us unlike any other food. Us, we’re ambidextrous here at Meatpaper — no agenda except to gnaw on the ideas, artistic excursions and bone-deep emotions the subject inspires. We invite you to dig in with us.” (more)

Previously on Skandalon