Andy Warhol loved food, which isn’t to say that he loved good eating. He loved what he painted: Campbell’s soup, hamburgers, Coca-Cola and fast food of all types. (Also speed, but the Guardian refused to pay for that.)
I start my dinner with a tin of Campbell’s cream of tomato soup, the only time anything resembling a vegetable crosses a plate in the whole meal. I have always been agnostic about soups: with the exception of the very best, what tends to happen is that the first sip one enjoys, the second sip confirms your good opinion, and the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and through to the final sips are increasingly boring. This is no exception.
I follow that with hamburgers, which I make myself. Warhol’s relationship with food was bound up with the poverty of his childhood: he ate luxuriously, often in restaurants, but harboured terrible guilt about the waste, handing out leftovers to homeless people or his employees. Simply ordering an expensive burger to my house feels contrary to the spirit of the exercise, so I decide to make my own, using really classy mince. Happily, this exactly emulates the Warhol model of “eating a lot while wrestling with an overpowering sense of guilt”, as the burgers I make are functional but not spectacular. With every bite, I feel acutely aware of better uses I could have put the mince to.
Dessert is an effective punishment: a bar of chocolate between two pieces of bread, which Warhol used to call “cake”. He once wrote that he was kidding himself when he went “through the motions of cooking protein: all I ever really want is sugar”. In that spirit, I went for the sweetest, heaviest-in-additives loaf of white bread I could find. My filling? A Galaxy bar.
My first thought as I bite into it is: yuck. My second thought is that Warhol really was the luckiest man alive, seeing as he survived well into his sixth decade despite being shot, living largely off grease and amphetamines, and rounding it off with a trip on the Diabetes Express.
I decide not to take a second bite. An artist might need to suffer to create, but I think I’ll stick with fruit and vegetables in the future.
Stylist: Stephanie Iles. Grooming: Nicky Weir.
