A taste sensation: the art food movement

In most restaurants, the bread basket arrives unnoticed. But at Brick Lane nightspot The Brickhouse, the loaf arrived on a bier, wrapped in a shroud and topped with a wreath made of butter. It had been baked into a lifesize effigy of the baker herself, and we diners were invited to cut it up with axes.

Welcome to the world of surreal food. The trend has been simmering for a while, thanks to chefs including Heston Blumenthal and Ferran Adrià. Now it's boiled over into the mainstream. The Experimental Food Society's Spectacular (an 'edible exhibition') was attended by 2,500 visitors last month, with another 100 paying £75 a head to attend the dinner at which the body loaf was carved up. Guests quaffed colour-changing cocktails made with cabbage juice and even the menus were edible. 'I was absolutely amazed by how popular it was,' says its organiser Alexa Perrin, the society's founder.

Perhaps it's a reaction against the worthiness of the eat-local, eat-healthy lobby, or maybe we're tired of taking food as seriously as Gordon Ramsay's histrionics demand. 'If you've eaten an elaborate tasting menu at a fancy restaurant, it can be rather pompous,' says Sam Bompas, of Bompas & Parr, the jelly architects at the vanguard of this food-as-art trend. 'Food shouldn't get in the way of a bloody good meal, which is about enjoying yourself with your friends.'

Bompas & Parr have been conducting what they describe as a 'full-on sensory assault' on diners in the Hendrick's Horseless Carriage of Curiosities, a restored Victorian train
carriage owned by the gin company and temporarily parked in Clerkenwell. Food has been fluoresced using a combination of bio-luminescent chemicals (a reaction that occurs naturally in fireflies), levitated with electro magnets and, at one point, all the air in the carriage was replaced by pure oxygen. 'It acts like a turbo-charged caffeine shot,' explains Bompas. Last year, he put leeches in the fingerbowls. 'Suddenly there was this
terrible outburst of screaming from the diners,' he chuckles.

The Tasting Sessions, founded by two London-based Aussies, run similarly surreal food and drink experiences – a recent tequila tasting involved participants being clad in Guantanamo Bay-style orange jumpsuits and taken away in a Black Maria.

And 28 October sees the opening of Eat Your Heart Out, the world's first over-18s cake shop in the 'dungeon' of lifestyle shop Maiden on Shoreditch High Street, whose mission statement is 'pushing the concept that cake can never be offensive to the extreme'. 666 gory works of art will be on display, including edible road kill as cake decoration from sculptor David A Smith, a vagina dentata cake by Miss Cakehead, and a Russian Roulette cookie section with flavours including mustard to appal the unwary. There is also a hangover cake that aims to give consumers 'all the taste sensation of this not so delightful experience'.

Miss Cakehead, aka Emma Thomas, creative director of arts and cultural PR agency Idea Generation, thinks the move to surreal bakery is down to increasing pressure at work. 'There are loads of creative people who come home and bake crazy things,' she says. 'It's a way of expressing yourself that's easily shared. You can't take a painting to work and show it off to people but everyone loves it if you bring in a cake you've made.' But why the juxtaposition of guts and glacé cherries? 'You can be gory and dirty, but if it's cake, it's acceptable and people aren't threatened by it. It's just good fun,' she says.

A rash of cookery books has been published to inspire people who want to play with their food at home, notably A Zombie Ate My Cupcake by anarchic baker Lily Vanilli, which shows you how to make Morbid Meringue Bones Dripped in Raspberry Blood Sauce. Stefan Gates' Extraordinary Cookbook suggests gilding your Sunday roast and making liquid nitrogen and lemongrass ice cream, while Bompas & Parr's jelly bible contains a recipe for bacon cola jelly.

Now the big food manufacturers are catching on. Unilever has just produced a milk chocolate bar flavoured with Marmite, while Jelly Belly (in a rip-off of JK Rowling and Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans) has brought out a Bean Boozled range, which includes vomit, mouldy cheese, dog food, snot and centipede flavours. What would Willy Wonka say?
Lydia Slater