The Cuisine Cards by Laurie Goodhart

With every wonderful, heart-wrenching, deeply researched, and inspiring  post I read on F.A.R., I feel less inclined to share my own somewhat out-of-step contributions to this world. Nevertheless, I keep reminding myself that they are the things that I do, and I do them because I feel compelled, and have consistently been compelled in those two specific directions — art and agriculture/wildcrafting — since childhood. Also, the paintings and prints are a product of my always thinking about and feeling into both feminism and spirituality, and the fruits of the intersection of the two. So here is another offering.

I’ve always had a fondness for the visual aspect of playing cards, and collect books on them. One image of an uncut sheet of cards printed in 1585 in Frankfurt, where the black and white cards were jammed in every which way on large sheets of paper, inspired the look of these four prints, The Cuisine Cards.

They are conceived as celebrating food and cultures from various parts of the world. The face cards are non-hierarchical in terms of rank and gender. The 10 is a Table of the suit’s food, then there are the Shaper, Mover, and Taster, who, although usually carrying on in a certain sequential order, each contribute equal value to the whole experience of eating food. Two suits have all female face cards and two all male.

                                                                                   Suit of Spices

Four food types were chosen and then situated geographically, with some arbitrary zeroing in on their specific associations. Tomatoes above are set in the ancient Mediterranean, even though they are native to the Americas, and apparently didn’t make it to Europe until the mid 1500s. Instead, the suit of Spices is situated in the tropical region of the Americas, because, well, I love cacao (the 3 of Spices), and because after 15 years of delivering our farm’s cheeses to scores of kitchens and farm stores around the Hudson Valley, I especially wanted to honor the huge gift northern latitude people are always receiving from the people who come up here from way south to do much of the hard work in our food supply chain.

Suit of Onions

Onions were placed in North Africa because ancient Egyptians ate a lot of them and also included them in their embalming techniques. Herbs, not Spices, were placed in India because of a magical month I once spent there, and the herb we call here, Curry Plant, that I associate with the trip.

Almost all the writing on each of the prints says the pertinent titling word in various scripts of the particular region, from some of its different periods and cultures.  I’ll be happy to further identify any of the images or scripts if you are interested, just comment here or contact through my website(link below in bio).

Suit of Herbs

When I look at all the cards complete and together, I see a larger vision that formed itself — of our human “world” as it is, and could more fully be when we free ourselves from obsessions with power and greed. A world of beauty, delight in simplicity, creativity within the humble and the constantly renewable. A bottomless magical treasure chest of jewel-like people and their offerings, like in an Arthur Rackham painting, but with all the thieves and little kings having left the picture, feeling content and securely part of the community too.

Laurie Goodhart has been pursuing the mythic as an artist, and the fundamental earth processes as an organic farmer, for well over thirty years. She infuses ethereal inspirations with an up-close working knowledge of the natural processes of life, death, and healing. Much more art is at Lauriegoodhart.net and these prints are available directly or through Big Cartel.