“Looks Delicious!: Exploring Japan’s Food Replica Culture” Is the Inspiration You Need for Your Tacky Thanksgiving Table: A (Mostly) Photo Essay

Thanksgiving Day. The turkey is cooked without being dried out like an avian husk. Marshmallows melt into a slimy sugary goop on the sweet potato casserole. Crispy onions wilt on top of the green beans. Cranberry sauce slides out of the can with a thick thwack. Your polite guests help bring these steaming dishes to the table, only to discover a vision, a uniquely tacky centerpiece: a crab, resembling an armored spider with its rounded, roughened shell, parked at a sea creature-sized picnic table, taking a long, slurping, messy drag on a glass of refreshing pilsner with just the right amount of foam. His second drink, or so it seems, given the nearby glass, nearly empty with just a flat sip of crustacean backwash left. But who knows—with the sheer amount of foam spilling drunkenly over his carapace, maybe this is his eighth! Either way, this crab is getting hammered and who wouldn’t want to do the same right with him?

Sure, a crabby drunk is an unusual table setting for Thanksgiving (though your table may already include a crabby drunk!). However, all those pumpkins, squashes, and crusty corn cobs are oh-so-tired. Done to death! Over! Way too natural for us devotees of camp artificiality! Toss all those gathered pinecones back in the park where you found them. It’s time to discover Thanksgiving inspiration elsewhere, namely the gloriously kitsch tradition of Japanese food replicas!

My newfound obsession with Japanese food replicas, otherwise known as shokuhin sanpuru, and this beer-guzzling crab, in particular, comes courtesy of a delightfully bonkers exhibition based on this craft, Looks Delicious!: Exploring Japan’s Food Replica Culture, at Japan House London. Yes, I realize the irony of returning to the British motherland to find Thanksgiving centerpiece ideas, but here we are. More than maniacal holiday motivation, Looks Delicious! was, in fact, the best show I saw while in London recently.

Yes, even better than the Tate Modern’s current Mike Kelley retrospective Ghost and Spirit. Although I take any opportunity to bask in the grody glory of one of my favorite artists’ Rust Belt trash aesthetics, Ghost and Spirit seemed both overstuffed and under-baked. Part of this was due to an unavoidable spatial issue. There is no way the Tate’s exhibition space dedicated to Ghost and Spirit could hold the entirety of Kelley’s large-scale installations like Superman’s clingy homesick Kandors or the psychotic high school glee club Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction. While I recognize this restriction cannot be changed, I could feel the loss, particularly in contrast to the expansive conceptual perfection of Kelley’s definitive 2013-14 retrospective at MoMA PS1, a former school with enough spooky stairwells and unnerving basements to hold its own repressed memories. In contrast to that thoroughness, Ghost and Spirit came off as a truncated greatest hits. Yet, this doesn’t mean I wasn’t thrilled to revisit Kelley’s grimy bargain bin stuffed animals, colorful and cheery tapestries emblazoned with phrases like “Fuck you. Now give me a treat please,” and, perhaps the most valuable to Kelley-heads like me, concluding vitrines of scratchy tossed-off to-do lists and notes, including a particularly Lynchian musing on the intersection of “the teenage term” dreamy and poltergeists: “It makes sense the adolescent drawn to the beauty of the dreamer is also susceptible to the poltergeist. The dream state made material. One can become dreamy. Strange though how the ideal is calm and the actual is chaos.”

Even so, Ghost and Spirit cannot compete with the American Dream made manifest in the precarious specter of a gravity-defying burger skyscraper, somewhere between a lettuce, tomato, onion, pineapple, bacon, and whatever else Jenga game and the leaning tower of ground beef, on display in Looks Delicious! And I suspect Kelley, with his stubborn adherence to snoot-presumed unserious low cultural schlock and folk art forms such as the shiny shiny, magpie-like memory ware, wouldn’t mind taking second billing to this cornucopia of fake food.

Looks Delicious! makes it all too tempting to give into gushing about the kitsch alone, writing love letters to a fork hovering in mid-air holding a twirl of saucy noodles as if slucked down by a ghost, the melty cheese pull strung between slices of toast that would satisfy even pre-weight loss Nikocado Avocado’s exacting mukbang precision, and the mouthwatering yet inedible plate of fluffy circular pancakes plunked with a hilariously flawless cube of never-melting butter. And that’s even before getting to the ambitious and astonishingly camp central installation: a showcase of local Japanese cuisine—stagnant bowls of brothy noodles, orange sushi wrapped in banana leaves, a see-through squid—each corresponding to one of Japan’s 47 prefectures, displayed in the shape of the country. However, the exhibition is more than just a feast for the eyes and a synthetic soup for our souls. The show provides a history of shokuhin sanpuru, as well as a glimpse into the careful craftsmanship that goes into a PVC version of spicy-as-hell mapo tofu.

The practice of shokuhin sanpuru dates to the early 20^th century in Japan when restaurants, namely the then-popular department store dining halls, started serving unfamiliar Western dishes, known as yōshoku, and needed a good marketing hook to quell customers’ hesitation about what exactly this bizarre food was. Clearly, fading illustrations on a menu would not cut it! According to the wall text, there were several food replica pioneers, starting with Nishio Sōjirō” who “was invited by Shimadzu Corporation to produce food models for nutritional guidance” in 1917. Nishio also tossed off some food replicas for the company. As seen later in Looks Delicious!, food replicas are still used for nutritional guidance and quality standards like the finger-wagging, anti-French display of a faux croissant, half deathly grey, warning the public about too much fat intake. Over a decade later, the fake food business went pro in 1932 when Iwasaki Takizō commercialized the industry by creating the first food replica company, which still exists today under the umbrella of the Iwasaki Group with companies in Tokyo, Osaka, and Gujō Hachiman. The Iwasaki Group continues to dominate the industry with “approximately 70% of the food replica industry’s domestic market share” and made most, if not all, of the models on display in the show.

Rather than rely on history written on a wall label and scattered black-and-white photos of glass cases prominently lined with false food, Japan House London also honors several landmarks in food replica production through food replicas themselves. This includes a hilariously unappetizing omelet fold splattered with a squirting finish of ketchup. An omelet, it turns out, is one of the nastiest food replicas—just a brown-flecked sulfuric yellow lump. HURK! However gross, this omelet represents a key achievement for Iwasaki Takizō as he was able, through wax and agar jelly, to mimic “the wrinkled texture on the surface of an omelet his wife had just made in the kitchen.” So special was this cold slab of egg that he named it “Kinen Omu,” “Celebration Omelette.” Let’s have a party for it! Next to Kinen Omu sits the first exported food replica: a wet beef steak that winged its way to the USA in 1958. It’s no mistake that this hunk of glistening brown meat encircled by a froofy icing-like ring of potatoes, the plate sprinkled with a garnish of soppy caramelized onions, recalls the retch-inducing, queasy, roiling nausea of vintage food recipes in mid-century advertisements, a genre I’ve celebrated frequently on this website in time for the holidays. There remains a certain rewardingly kitsch parallel between those aspic, mayo, and mystery meat horrors and the uncanny silliness of food replicas.

As amusing as Japanese food replicas are, the artists—and I do see their creators as artists with each food replica made individually to order—deserve our marveling respect alongside the giggles. Looks Delicious! screens a video tracing the production of a fake steak, including the particularly transfixing process of airbrushing perfect little singes on the meat’s crisp edges. The painter’s focused attention devoted to methodically nailing sizzle marks can only be described as love. After watching the video, that loving craftsmanship traverses the rest of the show: intricate tanned grains of fried rice, flawless orange balls of salmon roe, Exorcist-like green projectile vomit goo of Zunda-mochi, and uncannily angular tea sandwich triangles. Beyond the realism of the replicas themselves and the skillful mastery that goes into their production, Looks Delicious! also contains a few easy-to-miss mischievous installations such as a replica broken bottle of spilled milk and a growing black ooze puddle of UCC Black, both of which reminded me of Fischli and Weiss’s recent synthetic anti-art Polyurethane Objects at Matthew Marks. And since I checked, the abandoned baby sock tossed on the ground was made of actual footie fabric.

The similarity between Fischli and Weiss and Looks Delicious!’s playful curation has nothing on the serendipity of returning to the good ole U.S.A. and almost immediately visiting an exhibition that included Japanese food replicas as artistic materials. At text-based camp art master Cary Leibowitz’s since-closed You Really Let Yourself Go at New Discretions, I was floored to discover dusty saltines and fruit-topped cupcakes slapped on the edges of two paintings, Don’t Ask and I Need A Typewriter. What are the chances? Clearly, we stand at the precipice of a coming renaissance of food replicas. So act accordingly.

Now, realistically, it’s probably too late to order your own Japanese food replicas for this Thanksgiving. Too bad! But, it’s never too early to plan for Thanksgiving 2025! What will your faux centerpiece be? The old standby turkey and gravy? Something more avant-garde such as a Godzilla-ish robot crab threatening a city on two legs, like on display in Looks Delicious!? What about recreating sickeningly vile vintage foods like a crown roast of frankfurters or ham and banana hollandaise? BLERK! That’ll really make your guests squirm! The possibilities are endless! To help you brainstorm, here are some more visual inspirations from Looks Delicious!: