The midnight buffet – Visual Medium
No one could resist cooked penguins, carrot finned eggfish, and spoon fish eggs to resemble the ship’s pool. Standing between the Styrofoam busts of Napoleon and Josephine, the head chef, a Swede, nodded in response to countless compliments. His staff managed to create sculptures out of food and transform the cruise dining room into a floating museum.
It was the fifth night of our European cruise – a gift from a generous father – and we were accompanied by more than a thousand merchants who had received the trip as a commercial incentive. A line of these passengers, many of whom were in formal attire, began to form at quarter past eleven, though the French doors did not open until midnight. The ushers informed them that for the first half hour of the midnight buffet the food could be seen but not eaten. Inside, they would be greeted by a windmill and a cannon made of bread; so would a styrofoam Eiffel Tower and the casually leaning Tower of Pisa. There would be vases carved from watermelon rinds that looked like pieces of Venetian glass, game birds carved from apples, Gaudi-inspired cakes, and numerous questions about the tools that had been used to make the radish mice. It would be a sensorium of edible art, camera flashes, and compulsive eating; a race to consume, both visually and tastefully, the icons of Europe and the good life. However, embedded within this display of European taste and decorum, other flavors were also present. At both ends of the buffet, we detect a bovine presence, namely matching cow and bull heads carved in butter and festooned with garlands.
with flowers of fruits and vegetables. The Scandinavian cruise employed 720 people from more than fifty countries, but we learned that many of the hundreds of kitchen staff came from the Indian subcontinent, particularly from the Christian communities of Goa on the west coast of India. Although waiters, bartenders, sommeliers and assistants had been recruited from port cities in Asia, South America and the poorer countries of Europe, ethnic difference was put on the proverbial background or made palatable. During dinner one night, for example, our Romanian waiter and his Indian assistant joined the rest of the kitchen staff in entertaining the guests, singing some vigorous verses from “O Sole Mio” in English, in what was described as as “fifty-two”. different accents.” Australian and British staff members, however, were closer to the microphones.
Despite the multicultural nature of the crew, the cruise primarily catered to travelers from the United States. The food featured at most dinners was pseudo-continental fare, tailored to American palates and waistlines, complete with low-sodium minestrone and fat-free crème brûlées. A ship’s employee bearing the noble title of “foreign ambassador” sat at a small walnut-paneled table surrounded by a miniature United Nations flag. When we asked him what his job consisted of, he replied that he helped passengers who did not understand English.
Even the waiters used English as the lingua franca; despite the occasional song from an Indian movie sung softly by a waiter as the table was set, no other language was heard during meals or in public spaces. money to relatives who were finishing other professional careers. No country could tax crew wages; once on board, they became citizens of the ship. in exchange for months of
grueling hours, last-minute calls for overtime, and few moments of privacy in their shared quarters, the ship’s employees would receive free room and board and a healthy salary, though little free time to spend it. Crew members had little opportunity to leave ship and treat themselves; However, one such occasion occurred when the ship arrived early in Barcelona. We invited our Romanian waiter to go dancing, and upon departure he was made to deposit his ship’s ID card as security with the only crew members required to remain on board: a core of Filipinos, the lowest group in the ship totem The staff did not need passports. The ship was his floating nation.
In struggling to define the style of art represented by the midnight buffet, one may be drawn to the notion of kitsch, but there was absolutely no irony in evidence in the display or reception of his edible sculptures. In fact, the midnight buffet may have more in common with Dutch still lifes, especially 17th-century pronk paintings (“pronk” meaning “to show off”), which offered lavish displays of food to the viewer to “lubricate the skin.” of man”. gaze in the midst of his domain.”1 In any case, the cow and bull heads require a different interpretation. Made of butter, which together with milk, urine, dung and curd make up the ritually pure and purifying “five products of the cow” for many Indians, these divinely garnished bovine heads physically support the midnight buffet. While this may suggest the midnight buffet as a hallowed setting, such a reading could hardly have been anticipated by the predominantly American passengers on the ship. Since these bovine heads were the only edible items on the buffet that weren’t even tasted, their role was more performance than speech, produced by and for the staff, perhaps in-game, but surely not in jest. Still, questions linger: To what extent does a visit to the midnight buffet, replete with symbols of cities the ship had visited (or those that could and should be visited by a sister ship on the cruise line), constitute a visit? to every site/sight in Europe that is worth eating? What are the logistics of such consumption by proxy? As an Indian parallel, consider the twelve jyotir lingas, or fiery phallus emblems of the god Shiva. Although these lingas of light are conventionally located in twelve different Indian cities, they have their counterparts in the city of Benaras, so by visiting one, many locals claim, one can visit the other. Or better yet, as it is inscribed on a souvenir plaque containing representations of the twelve sites, a devotee can have darshan or embodied visual engagement of all the jyotir lingas through darshan of this plaque. As one scholar has written, “the important thing about the location of these…is not that being in one place makes them more convenient to visit, but that, being in this one place, they do not need to be visited at all.”