Marisa Mori's Edible Futurist Breasts

F.T. Marinetti's “Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine” (1930) and the subsequent Futurist Cookbook (1932) called for a culinary revolution and a new edible aesthetics. Futurism enacted its demands for destruction, violence, and transformation through the microcosm of the human intestine. While F.T. Marinetti's avant-garde chauvinism has left a notoriously bad taste in postmodern mouths, Futurism's extensive experiments with taste and touch represent a curious reversal of Western traditions that regarded the “lower” senses as feminine. Unfortunately, Futurism's theoretical liberation of the so-called “feminine” senses is eclipsed by the cookbook's daunting inventory of recipes that metaphorically devour the female body. Only one woman left her essence among the pages of the Futurist Cookbook. Marisa Mori's recipe for Italian Breasts in the Sun calls for two mounds of almond paste topped with two candied strawberries on a bed of custard and cream, sprinkled with hot pepper. Her punning metaphorics have a masculinst flavor as the female body is presented in fragmented and sexualized terms; however, this article argues that there is a more satirical taste to Mori's edible breasts.