Food-related objects

This class of objects includes: food harvesting tools and equipment such as scythes, pitchforks, fish nets and tridents, hunters guns, arrows and traps; food production related objects from a plough, to rolling pins and bread pans, peeling and skinning knives and all preparing, cooking and roasting devices such as spits and barbecues, vats, mixers, slicers, pasteurizers and homogenizers. It includes packaging, canneries and all storage from barns to deep-freeze. Food distribution symbols include wheelbarrows, pushcarts, market stalls, food stores, shopping bags and cash-register tape receipts. Food consumption related objects are those found in a home kitchen, as well as restaurants, their equipment and furnishings and personnel.

Food-related objects, on one level of symbolism are self-referring, to food or particular items of food or activities related to food. On another level, food is a symbol of knowledge or experience, what the self takes in from its environment (the Pauline Epistles use milk and meat in this sense). Thus food-related objects, psychologically, may represent what is used to handle or process knowledge or experience. Sifting, sorting, distilling, mixing, etc, are operations metaphorically extended to the mental sphere. Some food archetypes, that is milk and blood, are present in the deeply structured imagery of the psyche, evoking the associations of life and death.