Vanessa Dualib's Playful Produce

It's that time of year when all the little potatoes come out to play, so get your craft box out and your googly eyes ready. This incredibly charming creature is called Potatosaurus Dulcis and will gladly munch up all that extra parsley you don't know what to do with. I discovered prints of him and his descendant (or ancestor?) Potatoctopus (below), along with other delightful produce pals at the Greenpoint Food Market while I was in Brooklyn last month. These cartoonish creatures sprang from the mind, fingers, and camera of Brazilian artist Vanessa Dualib, who has assembled a book of slightly psychotic yet endearing characters, like radish mice, baby carrot figures, fruit fish, and a mischievous fellow named Eggbert.


In addition to the book, Playing With Food and its main website, Vanessa also has a flickr photo gallery and tumblr blog, for those who have strong Internet interface preferences or just prefer their website names to confuse people by deleting vowels from commonly known words.

Here is Pepe the Pepper flanked by his less embarrassed and perplexed companions. He moved from his native Mexico to Avery Island, Louisiana to work for the Tabasco Co. and married a hot jalapeña, according to Vanessa.

Not only is Ms. Dualib a fellow weird food fetishist and Brazilian (I have a long-standing relationship with the country and its cultural production, though I swear to you by my Freud reader and Havaiana flip-flops that I do not belong in the dubious ranks of Brazil fetishists), but she also shares my soft spot for children's stories, which earns her a permanent place in my vegetable heart. Here, a carrot version of Le Petit Prince:



And... she made an eye-popping fruit 'n' veggie Where the Wild Things Are tableau that was featured on We Love You So, a web collage of art, music, and inspiration by people who worked on the Spike Jonze film version.


They also interviewed her on the site if you want to know more. Now, if only she would cross paths with Wes Anderson and make some Fantastic Mr. Fox-inspired dioramas. How excited I am to see that movie!