Staring into a forlorn fridge which is shrine to, well, nothing, the very idea of food as art seemed as remote as Himalayan tea (unless of course you are thinking Minimalism). And when formal hall elicits more laughter than admiration from its main course of ‘mattresse of lamb in a blankette of jus with clouds of garlic foam’, the very notion of a pedestalised pie seems absurd. Gone are the days of tomatoes parading as swans, the only food institutionally recognised as art, qua art, is rotting meat a la Damien Hirst (something my fridge is currently plagiarising)

A nourishing, if specific, history is at hand, for food art is not a passe relic of 70s culinary tastelessness, but has a venerable tradition with no less than the papal court as its patron. With its very own room in which these so called sugar trionfiwere prepared and artists as famous as Bernini designing them, the 17th-century Vatican took its culinary art seriously. When they had the heavenly host in gilded sugar, our own Angel Delightsuffers by comparison

Thankfully these religious tableaux were for eyes alone, for whatever one’s religious affiliations or sympathies, the thought of biting off the Messiah’s head might be difficult to stomach. Such culinary feats of Golgotha and the Last Supper in sugar, were no doubt exercises in the treasured art of wit and metaphor, but one cannot help think that these were merely the sugar coatings of a moralising core: your stomach rumbling whilst contemplating the agony? Proof is in the pudding that one’s bodily wants and yearnings are debased and sinful. Pandering to a Catholic obsession with the body and sensual pleasure, gustatory or otherwise, these sculptures were not only virtuoso culinary monuments but probed the intense relation between art and consumption, literal or imagined.

Consumption and art is all the more pronounced today. If art’s condition in the 20th and 21st centuries is to circumvent a greedy culture industry, then cooking might provide an alternative. As a gourmand friend declared, cooking is a way to create, enjoy and consume without corporate middlemen and without the culture industry sticking its fingers in your pie.Of course there is a food industry; corporate, distended like a stuffed trout and voracious, making TV shows and probably owning the patent for the food foam machine©. But cooking, especially if you source produce locally and ethically, allows us to be creative in a world that is increasingly merely productive.

It is easy to be irreverent about something which is generally so available in our society. Food remains highly politicised, often ethically dubious and hardly universally available. Roland Barthes has warned us of the politics of margarine to know that food and cooking is not a saintly affair. But there is something to be said for a greater sensitivity to its creativity and wider social and ethical permutations that should make it as precious as Pope Urban VIII’s Messiah in sugar. Even(and perhaps only) if we decide to bite into it.