DO PLAY WITH YOUR FOOD—FOR SOCIETAL AWARENESS

“FEARLESS. IRONIC. SUPERCOOL. BORDERLINE ESOTERIC. BRILLIANTLY OBSERVED. It is difficult to encapsulate provocateurs Martin Hablesreiter and Sonja Stummerer.” This, from their YouTube intro. 

“The couple,” it recounts, “were practising architects in Vienna until their favourite obsession—food design— became an overwhelming compulsion and set their careers on quite a different course. The University of Applied Arts Vienna graduates both worked at Atelier Arata Isozaki & Associates in Tokyo, but found that few people in the city could pronounce their surnames, so they began to refer to themselves as ‘Honey and Bunny.’ What started as a joke determined their new identity in their new roles as they set about focusing on the ethics and aesthetics of eating. The duo opened their interdisciplinary design atelier, Honey and Bunny, in Vienna in 2003.”

I learned about Honey & Bunny through Eve M. Kahn’s “Playing With Food Is a Life’s Work for This Couple” The New York Times, May 8, 2025. And Googling the couple’s website under construction offered an earlier article in Nora Caplan-Bricker’s “The Wastefulness of Modern Dining, As Performance Art,” The New Yorker, August 26, 2016.

Following here are tidbits gleaned from both of these articles together with several Honey & Bunny YouTubes. I highly recommend them all. 

Nora Caplan-Bricker observed in The New Yorker, “Many of us reflect, at least occasionally, on how our gastronomic habits affect the health of the planet. We regret that our takeout dinners come in a Styrofoam container inside a paper bag inside a plastic bag, with white plastic utensils in their very own plastic sheaths. We feel guilty when we order too much food at a restaurant and resign half an entrée to be scraped into the trash. But the pull of convention is most often stronger than these feelings. We eat in the manner we’ve grown accustomed to eating.”

Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter during an Austrian performance. This and other images by honey & bunny/Daisuke Akita via The New York Times. I’m reminded of “Simon Jeffes’ Penguin Café Orchestra.”  

Kaplan-Bricker continued, “The sly and playful Austrian performance artists Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter want to make us reëxamine the culinary mores that we take for granted.”

And, indeed, sly and playful they are.

The subtle importance of a natural resource—namely water.

On Sustainability. In one bit of performance art, the couple is seated in an idyllically pastoral setting. At their feet, though, are farming utensils—being used to dig up plastic bottles and cans of beverage. 

Packaging Overkill. Caplan-Bricker describes, “In another video, released in March, Stummerer and Hablesreiter sit at a café table wound in so many layers of Saran Wrap that the food underneath looks suspended in a spider’s web; Honey and Bunny themselves are similarly mummified, sporting only their underwear beneath their transparent binding. They snip casually at the plastic with silver scissors until they reach their plates and forks and start to eat.”

Doses of Levity. Eve M. Kahn recounts in The New York Times, “The couple have collaborated with scholars in many related fields, including nutritionists and biologists. Honey & bunny’s doses of levity have come as a welcome relief from battles against misinformation about climate change and from studies of the devastating environmental impact of industrial food processing.”

Touring the World With Food Info. Kahn relates, “From Cape Town to Brooklyn, they have dissected sandwiches with scalpels and handed out pickled vegetables as gaming pieces for rounds of bingo. Last week, a show of photos and videos of their recent mealtime experiments opened at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Rome (on view through July 18). And they are planning coming events, in Sweden, Germany and as far afield as China, that may call for descending into trenches to feast on edible soil.”

Submarine surgery. See from 1:16 on “Honey & Bunny: Sustainable Food Design.”

Always Playful. Kahn quotes Fabio Parasecoli, a professor of food studies at New York University: “They never take themselves too seriously.” 

Gateau DOGEing? Image courtesy Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter via The New Yorker.

Kaplan-Bricker recounts in The New Yorker, “It is laughable, from a certain angle, how little reason governs the way we eat. Stummerer and Hablesreiter can only hope that once they help people notice that, they won’t be able to unsee it.” 

And how much more refreshing than the hypocritical blathering of our Secretary of Health and Human Services telling Congress, “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.” For once, I agree with this jackass, all the more to question his governmental position. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025