The Restaurant at This End of the Universe: Edible Typography in New Zealand

Abstract

Large-scale food signage occupies a significant place in the landscape of New Zealand popular culture. As advertising billboard, it charms, distracts, and sells; as roadside marker, it enables simple or complex locating behavior; as outdoor sculptural installation, it functions as tourist commodity, identifying place with the sustainable objects of primary production. This paper examines the role of typography embedded on, dislocated from, and replaced by, edible foodstuffs in the production and consumption of visual culture. It questions why typography is placed on an edible substrate which, when consumed, facilitates both the acquisition of knowledge and its reprocessing into the communication practices of speech and writing. It explores why removable object labeling and separable packaging destabilize this integral and integrated association between food and knowledge, opening up a(n) in/visible space for the manipulation of desire and the politics of dissimulation. And finally, it traces the impulse to replace type with radically over-sized, non-edible representations of edible foodstuffs to create a virtual landscape of timeless, unsatisfied desire.