A hunter hangs off a ladder, hoping to plunder the wild bees’ nest above them. This acrobatic act—depicted 7500 years ago in a Spanish cave painting—reminds us of food and art’s historic connections. The world’s oldest beer recipe was carved into Sumerian clay nearly four millennia ago, while Australian Indigenous rock art ranges from a 17,000-year-old kangaroo depiction in the Kimberley, to cattle that escaped the First Fleet, immortalised on sandstone walls in Bull Cave, Sydney.

Centuries before traditional galleries were established, humans were telling stories about how they eat. And appetites are pushing art beyond conventional spaces today—leading to culinary walking tours, live cooking demonstrations, recipe swaps and pantry-inspired discussions.

It’s a trend that Claire Lefebvre backs, especially as white cube galleries can intimidate people. “I’m still scared of [them and] I’ve been doing this like 20-25 years!” says the Melbourne-based artist, who has exhibited across Australia and won the RMIT Alumni Award in 2014.

With private galleries located in affluent suburbs, exhibitions with sizeable entrance fees and shows that cater to big-budget art collectors, some cultural institutions can feel elitist or alienating.

But food “draws a lot of people in”, Lefebvre says. She demonstrates this with What Artists Eat, which comprises a podcast, recipe library and live events. Run with Zoltan Fecso, an artist who also stages Hungarian culinary pop-ups, it celebrates creators who use food in fascinating ways, such as Fred Mora of Long Prawn art collective. His grandfather Georges was known as Monsieur Mayonnaise during the French Resistance: Georges smuggled documents in baguettes, hidden under mayonnaise dollops. Gestapo officers wouldn’t inspect the condiment-rich sandwiches thoroughly (it messed up their uniforms), so Georges saved many children during World War II by moving papers across checkpoints this way.

“For that reason, mayonnaise is very dear to me. I always try and teach people how to make it on my grandfather’s birthday,” Mora explained on the podcast.

Georges Mora’s mayonnaise recipe can be found on the What Artists Eat site. Although people mightn’t know Monsieur Mayonnaise by his French Resistance alias, they may recognise Georges as a prominent gallerist who was also married to Melbourne artist Mirka Mora.

Their grandson Fred connects art and food well beyond stereotypical exhibition-opening cheese platters. His Long Prawn collective has collaborated with various cultural institutions, such as Melbourne Design Week walking tours (involving dim sum and Indigenous food ways) for the National Gallery of Victoria. Long Prawn also worked with the Melbourne-based architecture platform MPavilion to stage events such as Hot Bonnet Cooking in 2021, which maximised car-engine heat to prep “baked beans a la highway” and Frugal Lunchroom in 2023, which fed uni students ramen brewed with campus leftovers.

Self-described ‘gastro-architects’ Playte also resourcefully marries appetites and art. Last year, this group of food sculptors created a bread garden for a London deli and presented a traditional Māori Hangi featuring spring-green bouquets for Melbourne Fringe’s Cooked: Seasoning The Grill party. Fecso recalls Playte’s event where attendees sketched displayed produce. “After you drew them, the ingredients were then cooked into a meal you ate.”

Bringing food into a gallery can trigger responses far beyond the frame. Libby Haines’ Table Manners did this at Melbourne’s A-N Studio last spring. “She’d made candelabras out of meringue and this huge cabbage sculpture,” Lefebvre says. “At the end of the night, she’s like, ‘Oh my God, it’s going to be warm overnight. There’s going to be people in here tomorrow and it’s going to smell terrible!’” Luckily, “nothing fermented”—unlike Dieter Roth’s Staple Cheese (A Race) which was exhibited at Eugenia Butler’s Los Angeles gallery in 1970. The artist’s 37 suitcases of rotting cheese succumbed to flies and maggots and was shut down by health inspectors.

Throughout history, artists have showcased meals spectacularly (in 1941, Gala and Salvador Dali staged a surrealist dinner party where frogs jumped from trays and fish were presented within satin slippers) and in contemplative keys (see 17th-century Dutch still life paintings). In the past, Australian artists—Mirka Mora in Melbourne, John Olsen in Sydney—were known for their involvement with restaurants. But more recently, there’s been a hunger for confronting tough issues through consumption. Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) has generated headlines about food waste by serving pig’s eye margaritas in 2018 and presenting its Eat The Problem invasive species cookbook and exhibition in 2019.

Mona’s lawsuit-attracting Ladies Lounge installation in 2024 also sparked media coverage – this time about gender inequality. Indigenous chef Chris Jordan has addressed climate change at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. In 2022, his catering company Three Little Birds presented dishes like Bleached Coral, formed from crystal bread, smoked roe taramasalata and tapioca crisps. At 2024’s Biennale of Sydney, he conducted a native foods workshop, where participants interacted with curry myrtle leaves and native ginger pods and were served anamas dish inspired by Torres Strait Island Elder and climate change activist Aunty Rose Elu.

Justine Youssef has also used food to explore difficult topics. At Meet Me At The Table at Sydney’s Western Terrace last year, she demonstrated an ancestral rosewater-making process from her family’s village in the mountains of Lebanon. The performance is based on an earlier work, an other’s Wurud (2017). Instead of distilling rosewater with flowers native to Lebanon, as is tradition, she uses what’s available in Australia: introduced species that “subjugate native land and imitate British pastoral fields”, Youssef says. Participants were served knafeh desserts made with rosewater and the “next artist presented similarly on food and occupation”. When she staged an earlier iteration of this work at Sydney’s 4A Contemporary Asian Art, the program featured a Lebanese breakfast—a chance to discuss the artwork with olives, labne and za’atar manoushe.

During one performance, Youssef noticed the gallery’s increasingly floral fragrance and people detecting rose in their wine. “Our lungs and our bodies would be filled with this scent, with each breath that we take,” she says, “It became a very potent metaphor for the… insidiousness of colonial power structures, just how they impede every aspect of life and you can’t see them.”

Youssef says it’s “instinctive and intuitive” for her to work with food, given her family’s background as farmers from a Lebanese village. “We didn’t grow up with classical paintings or anything on our walls. For us, food was our means of communication and storytelling.”

Chef Xinyi Lim works in a similar way: during the pandemic, she mailed sourdough starters to help unite people during COVID lockdowns. Today, she’s program manager for Vitocco Kitchen at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. The demonstration kitchen at Powerhouse Parramatta will be completed in 2026, so her events currently happen offsite: at farms, restaurants, markets and shops. Like Art Gallery of NSW incorporating Soul of Chinatown walking tours into its Cao Fei: My City is Yours exhibition, she thinks this attracts more diverse demographics.

“Museums have realised they’ll reach a limited audience if all they do is provide a box for artworks to hang,” she says.

Different approaches are needed, as “[n]on-white artists and curators are underrepresented in the Australian art industry,” Stephanie Beaupark and Aneshka Mora stated in The Conversation in July. The University of Wollongong academics also quoted Diversity Arts Australia’s 2018 Shifting the Balance report, which showed that “in the visual arts, craft and design sector, 89% of leadership positions were held by people who identify as Anglo-Celtic”.

Interactive events can help attract people typically overlooked by the art scene: Lim hopes to draw in migrant communities from Western Sydney with her upcoming program. It could showcase a tofu-maker from the Vietnamese-Chinese community in Cabramatta, Italian cheese producers, or shops and butchers beloved in the Arabic community. “Food is something everyone relates to and it’s very personal,” she says. Lefebvre believes a post-lockdown hunger for connection has spurred this rise in art and food collaborations. “It creates community,” she says.

Gemma Leslie’s Pantry Study achieved this last winter: the exhibition celebrated multicultural kitchen shelves the artist depicted across Melbourne (including Fecso’s Hungarian pantry of pickles, paprika, Unicum liqueur, capsicums and sauerkraut). The North Gallery show included a discussion panel of people whose shelves were featured: Fecso, as well as Jaclyn Crupi, Kira Hosking and Adriana Bradica Watson, talked about staples from their respective Hungarian, Italian, Japanese and Croatian heritages. “We cried,” Lefebvre admits.

“What would our ancestors think of us being here, talking about them, their food and what they’ve passed down?” Fecso says. “It’s pretty amazing that… the food they had to fight so hard to preserve when they came to this country is still being talked about and being passed on by their grandchildren or children. It was a very, very special thing.”

It’s reminder of how food provokes people via art—and will continue to do so for generations. “I love that it will never get old,” Lefebvre says.