Feast Your Eyes on Japan’s Fake Food

A few years ago, a group of scientists announced that the behaviors of the muon, a subatomic particle, might unsettle a decades-old model of particle physics. “We’re about to see the difference between brilliant and lousy writing,” a colleague wrote about the explanatory challenge facing science journalists. Shokuhin sampuru—”mesmerizingly lifelike handmade food replicas”—presents a similar challenge, albeit for descriptive writing. Lauren Collins rises to the occasion for The New Yorker, even trying her hand at shaping salmon roe sushi and ginger ribbons. A pleasure to read, if not to taste. (For more, check out Kyoko Hamada and Tejal Rao’s piece for The New York Times Magazine.)

Shokuhin sampuru can be wondrously intricate: iridescent slivers of shrimp; striated sirloins with fatty crusts; bouncy poached eggs on the brink of first ooze; cross-sections of cabbage with the labyrinthine swirls of an elevation map; a banana split with two scoops of chocolate ice cream, their granularity evoking just a whisper of freezer burn. So it is a bit surprising that “Looks Delicious!” begins with, of all things, a humble sack of yellow onions. Simon Wright, the director of programming at Japan House London, told me, during a tour of the gallery, that a different kind of exhibit might have begun with “a whole gantry of sushi,” but that he preferred the alliums for their exuberant plainness. “Remember those strings of plastic onions that might have hung in a restaurant in the nineteen-eighties?” he said. “These are nothing like them.”

Nor did they resemble the flimsy, skinless orbs of children’s play kitchens, daring you to bat them around like Wiffle balls. The onions sat on a ceramic plate, tumbling out of a burlap sack. Breaking protocol, I picked one up. Crafted in PVC, using a silicone mold, as most food replicas have been since the nineteen-seventies, it was offensively light. I felt almost as though I’d been pranked. I could all but hear the whisper of the onions’ peeling skin, smell the green-white flesh leaking juice under my nails.