The Land of Cockaigne

 

      Food Insecurity is a major topic of concern these days. The closing of the border and the disruption of supply chains has caused food shortages and higher prices and increased our awareness of the facts that we can't grow a lot of it here and, if we can, we don't have anyone around to get it out of the fields for us. That we might not have enough guacamole for the Super Bowl was of real concern to those who were already worried about not having enough avocados for their toast. But, I am not going to talk about Food Insecurity. If you are disappointed, you can read all about it in this report from the Library of Parliament: Covid-19, Food Insecurity and Related Issues. 

   Recently there has been a lot of good news about food in London as these headlines indicate: "Federal Funding Plants Seeds for Agri-food Growth in London," and more recently: "Innovative Factory Turning London Crickets Into Food Nets $17M Backing," by Norman De Bono, LFP, Feb. 18, 2021. It is a good thing that some of our land is now being used for food processing facilities, rather than for just supplying shelters for those retirees from Toronto who we see increasingly in our grocery stores. For really good news about food, however, one needs to look to the past, when we actually grew crops and constructed palaces out of grain and corn and used cereal in our architecture.

   To learn about such things, the book pictured above is useful. It "explores the background, history, development, and meaning of corn palaces, crop art, and butter sculpture from 1870 to 1930, concluding with a consideration of the implications of food art for today.” Such items were icons of abundance and provided visual evidence that we lived in a land of plenty. Definitions are provided: 
“A word about terms: corn palaces and their sister grain palaces are sometimes referred to as “cereal architecture.” These large exhibition buildings are covered inside and out with a cladding of grain and other natural products. “Crop art,” as the term is used here, refers to sculpture and smaller-scaled architectural forms such as street kiosks covered in grains, seeds and grasses. Butter sculpture is simply sculpture made from butter; it might be layered over an armature or carved from a solid block, but butter sculpture must be cooled in some manner to survive.” (p.x.)

Butter Sculptures

  

   The book focuses on the huge corn palaces in places like Sioux City, Iowa and Mitchell, South Dakota, but crop art also existed in Canada, as did butter sculpturing. One of the practitioners of this fine art lived close by and produced the "Life Size" sculpture made of butter pictured above. Simpson provides this information:

 “Ross Butler, a Canadian artist known for his lifelike animal sculptures, began working for the Canadian dairy industry in the 1940s, and in 1952 modeled an equestrian Queen Elizabeth II for a Toronto show. It drew so much attention that he was invited to re-create it for the coronation that summer in London. But the thought of so much butter being wasted in a sculpture drew angry newspaper letters from Britons, who were still facing food shortages. The anger was compounded by a newspaper typographical error that reported the sculpture was to be made of 15,000 pounds of butter rather than 1,500. The incorrect amount would have been enough to supply a week’s butter ration to 120,000 people. Butler and his sponsors defended themselves, first by correcting the typo, then by pointing out that the Canadian industry was shipping tons of butter to Britain as part of the celebration, and finally by assuring people that the butter would not be wasted but would be recycled. Nevertheless, it took considerable effort to offset the unexpected bad publicity.”

I suppose it would be in bad taste if the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair (upcoming virtually in March) displayed a lot of food that was being wasted.

   Lest you think this is all ancient history, having occurred in the early 1950s, there was another butter sculpture incident in Toronto sixty years later in 2012.  If you think a Life Size butter sculpture of Winston and the Queen was huge, imagine how big this one was. 

   That is a bust made of butter of the late Rob Ford, brother of the current Premier of Ontario, which was on display in the CNE in 2012.  The 230 kg depicts the Mayor reading a Margaret Atwood book, while resting against a steering wheel. Apparently Ms Atwood and others were upset about library funding issues and Ford had recently been chastised for driving while distracted.

But What About The Land of Cockaigne?

   I sometimes use trickery to try to get someone to read this blog. For example,  I wrote earlier about London's new cricket factory, under the heading ENTOMOPHAGY. The assumption is the reader will see such an odd word and peek at the post rather than go to Wikipedia, where there is, for example,  a good definition of  "The Land of Cockaigne."  It is written about in the book above as well. It is a land of plenty where fences "were made of sausage and houses were roofed with bacon." (p.9) The kind of place mentioned in the song, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain", where there are lemonade springs, where the bluebird sings and the farmers's trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay and the chickens lay soft boiled eggs. 

While Canada can never be an agricultural paradise or Cockaigne, perhaps the current pandemic will at least teach us to pay more attention to the food we can grow and eat and where it is from.

Sources:

 Although there is a Wikipedia entry for Ross Butler, there is information about him close by in Woodstock. See: Ross Butler Gallery; this exhibition brochure - "Ross Butler, Branding, Butter, and Bulls" and the Ontario Agriculture Hall of Fame. 

   The Ford butter sculpture did indeed exist. See: "CNE Masterpiece: A Well-buttered Ford Reading Atwood, Leaning on a Steering Wheel: Who Said Rob Ford Wasn't Smooth," Niamh Scallan, The Toronto Star, Aug. 23, 2012 and "Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Made Into Massive Butter Sculpture," ca.news.yahoo.com, Aug. 24, 2012.

The book above: Corn Palaces and Butter Queens: A History of Crop Art and Diary Sculpture, Pamela H. Simpson. U of Minn. Press, 2012. I have the only copy in London. I am not sure why.

The Bonus: Miller & Miller Auctions  LTD.

 This provides yet another example of the bonus being better than the content. While doing the kind of exhaustive research required for an endeavour such as this, I stumbled upon this about Ross Butler: "Ross Butler, Canadian Artist. How Dawes Black Horse Brewery Made His Sculptures Famous," [he sculpted using things other than butter.] 

If you bother to check that link you will see it comes from the website of Miller & Miller. 

And, if you bother to check that link you will find The Miller Times - "an online magazine sharing intriguing stories and little-known facts about the unique items we come across at Miller and Miller Auctions." 

There is much on these websites that you will enjoy and you are likely to spend the rest of your day on one or the other of them.

Miller and Miller is apparently located in New Hamburg. I have never been there and they don't know me - that is, this is not a promotional gimmick. Given the way their website and blog looks, they would likely be embarrassed to find out they were mentioned in a blog that looks like this one. One is reminded of another classy establishment, RM Auctions in Blenheim. It was purchased by Sotheby's.