Spiral Theory Test Kitchen is an artist trio who use food as a psychosexual object. For Precious Okoyomon, Bobbi Salvör Menuez, and quori theodor, their work is guided by “bliss frequencies beckoning the songs of our spiraling life.” When I went by the Brooklyn apartment that Bobbi and quori share, they wasted no time in feeding me. I was served toast made from einkorn, a pre-industrialized wheat, paired with a decadent butter that’d been crafted with triple cream Brie from Upstate New York and cultures out of France’s Normandy region. Hanging with the Spiral gang, you’re always being fed something with lore, made by a friend named Orchid (who made the butter) or Mountain (whose pie I ate before). Woven into a constellation of collectives like Anti-Conquest Bread Co. and Chaseholm Farm, Spiral is part of a larger food-world queer family. You could say, they’re the holy fools in the clan, their practice specifically putting an emphasis on experimentation and play. At the apartment, there were jokes right away, about tying me up with licorice string. Then Precious Facetimed in from the bathtub and I started recording our conversation.

Whitney Mallett: What is the origin story of Spiral Theory Test Kitchen?

Bobbi Salvör Menuez: There are a couple versions of the story. But I would say summer 2017, we were all upstate and just spending a lot of time together. Doing lots of cooking. Then, there was a sex party that we all had. I think that was the proto-Spiral Theory dinner. We were feeding each other fresh homemade pasta and playing weird sexy games.

Precious Okoyomon: We just kept making different foods. I bought this octopus, so there was this very strange, slowcooked, bruised octopus pasta. I feel like we just kept having dinner until 3am.

BSM: There was always another course we forgot about that needed to be attended to. There were these thorny vines someone brought that were part of the tablescape. We used them to spank each other. But technically, the first thing we called Spiral Theory Test Kitchen wasn’t a dinner party, it was kind of a band.

quori theodor: But not really a band. We didn’t actually play music.

BSM: We only did three performances. One was at this DIY venue in the East Village. We read poems while hitting a xylophone and feeding each other. The second was at [the poet] Eileen Myles’s opening party at Bridget Donahue gallery, apparently, it was the best puppet show of the year according to some random person’s blog.

qt: The money we made on these gigs, wasn’t really enough to split between us, so we would spend the entire rate on these glam dinners.

PO: It literally just started because we have a dinner party problem. The problem is how much of our money goes into throwing elaborate parties for ourselves and our friends.

qt: Each of us already had a dedicated art practice with a food element. Looking back, it’s the most obvious thing that three people who make work about food might make work together about food. But we weren’t drawing those connections at the time.

WM: If you had made a straight line from A to B, that wouldn’t be very spiral.

qt: Exactly. No straight lines around here!

BSM: Our third and final performance as quote-unquote band was at the music venue, Elsewhere. We were an opening act for a sold-out show.

qt: It was a really big platform for people who don’t play music.

BSM: We passed an egg yolk between our mouths, like the scene in the film Tampopo [1985]. That was a trick we would do at dinner parties, passing the egg yolk and seeing who would be willing to join in.

qt: It was a litmus test to see which guests were on our level. The food edge we were riding was to see who can show up to this reality that we were building. Who wants to get as freaky as we do?

Preparing a slime bath. Unclebrother Residency, New York, 2023

“fuck the sun,” poems suspended in gelatin orbs with fennel candies, made on the occasion of Black Power Naps, Performance Space New York, 2019

The Nothing. Installation view, Aspen Art Museum / Pine Creek Cookhouse, 2021

WM: You posted a photo of yourselves in the bath on Instagram that had a lot of people talking. There was a question in the air about how much you were all having sex, and what was happening outside the frame of the photo. What the photo is showing is already a pretty collective erotic experience. But are you all having sex? What is sex?

BSM: That picture from the bath. It’s all different bodies, and there are latex gloves.

qt: And a service dog leash.

BSM: Definitely someone peed on that pile of people at some point. I think “what is sex” is a very relevant question.

qt: Spoiler alert: Food is sex.

PO: It’s ultimate love. It goes inside you and it changes you. We’ve honestly had some really radical sexy experiences around the dinner table. It’s collective play. The nicest thing that comes out of it is people having these unexpected reactions. Once we started doing actual dinners, there were flavors people hadn’t experienced before. Even being willing to be moved to a place of spice, or a place of pain, and the social activity of sharing that. This is how we all bonded. Coming over to your house and being fed. The collective joy that comes out of that.

WM: Precious, the first presentation of your art I went to was that show you did with the artist, Hannah Black …

PO: When I served everyone dirt cake!

WM: You just showed up right away in my reality as someone who’s like, “I’m gonna put dirt in food.”

PO: I was really into dirt at that time because I had Georgian soil – the best you can get – and clay. So I made this dirt-clay mix.

WM: There’s a lot you can learn about someone by what they choose to put into food – especially when it’s something taboo.

PO: That’s our M.O. I was recently looking back at pictures from the Telfar [2020 Milan fashion week] dinner we did. No one knew how to eat the lamb because we had no knives to cut it open. So everyone had to basically rip it apart with their hands, which is a very confusing experience for people. We ask, “who is willing to disassemble a whole lamb with their hands?” You have to be willing to play a little bit.

Kitchen Dinner, Bloodshed Meal, in collaboration with Telfar, Florence, 2020

“No1. Invocation,” rain on compact disc, calcium, tardigrades, negative ions. First course of the Bloodshed Meal, Florence, 2020

BSM: It also reveals dynamics in the group that might already be hidden under the table. Suddenly one person rolls up their sleeves and is dismembering the creature so that everyone can eat it.

qt: There’s an invitation to step into that role.

BSM: In a light and playful way. We all get to see how we feel about it together, and laugh and feel uncomfortable Also, maybe a little aroused.

qt: Thinking about food as sex – when sex radiates out from that one spiral layer, and it’s not just a classic penetrative genital-to-genital experience, it is also an invitation for a different kind of spiritual experience. The way in which you’re transferring and trust building. You’re making your body vulnerable and we are asking something of you. It’s not without stakes. But when it’s further than that first level, we’re in another realm and the spiritual rushes in. And in comes all the psychosexual stuff. That more psychoanalytic weird zone. It’s a special offering. It’s a category of experience that doesn’t have a lot of social venues. What is the zone in-between an appropriate dinner party and hardcore fucking? That gray area is a really big opportunity spiritually.

BSM: When we did our residency [July 2023] at Unclebrother [an experimental restaurant in New York], we made food available to the public in a way that we’d never done before. “We’re serving food, you can buy it here,” is antithetical to our practice. But then there were more intimate shared experiences and research happening at the same time. One night, on quori’s birthday, we filled a blow-up pool with slime, and everyone was having this slime pool experience. At a certain point, someone brought us the sundae we’d designed for the menu, but it was in this monolithic version, in a huge metal bowl. So we were all eating this sundae in the slime pool. It was very, “This is Spiral Theory.” [The director] Sam Max was like: “I still feel like my brain chemistry was changed by that night in the pool.”

“Hostage of Heaven, allegory of the long spoons pudding with fermented cranberry purée + a black sugar window.” Perpetual Care Meal in collaboration with Tiffany Jaeyon Shin, Recess, New York, 2020

“Chlorophyll soursop kombucha served from communal glass carmat heart with labyrinth straws.” Perpetual Care Meal in collaboration with Tiffany Jaeyon Shin, Recess, New York, 2020

qt: We want other people to pick up on what is Spiral Theory and make their own version of it. It’s really cool to have it become bigger than ourselves. That event was also my birthday party and earlier that day, we brought a giant table to where the water was low in the river, and we had my birthday brunch there. We were all sitting on rocks having a giant brunch spread. We’re not fucking around here. It’s a life practice too.

BSM: Not to be overly precious about it – no pun intended – but I feel like our work gets to be its most authentic version when it’s farthest away from capital as possible. But expanding it into circles beyond our personal friends, it sometimes requires that we accept invitations. We were hired to do this weird thing with H&M. The reason that happened was because we had done a fundraising dinner for a parole organization in New York with someone who had a relationship with someone who tells H&M what’s cool. That was when we had [the actor] Indya Moore try our food. Indya was saying all these amazing things about our food, like “it makes you transsexual if you eat it.” We were like, “Oh my god, you get it. We just met you, but you understand what we’re trying to do.” Somehow it was. translating, even in this unexpected context.

River table installation, Unclebrother Residency, New York, 2023

PO: That dinner upstate was interesting because it birthed two things, the H&M thing, but also it was the first time Babak Radboy [Creative director of Telfar] ate our food.

qt: That was the parole dinner we were just talking about.

BSM: Where the vegetables were served with gynecological tools.

PO: No one knew how to eat it. Everyone was super confused. They were like, “Is this a dish? Are we allowed to touch it?” Babak was the only one who went up there. Then two years later, we’re doing the Telfar dinner in Milan.

Custom-made plates for the Parole Prep NYC fundraising dinner at Willbees, Andes, New York, 2019

Parole Prep NYC fundraising dinner, 2019

BSM: We’re always going back to the question, “What is edible?” For that fundraiser dinner, we really wanted to have ants on the menu, but they were really expensive, and we were trying to save money on materials. So we just left these plates of honey outside and collected ants that way. The for-culinary-purposes ones have a more distinct flavor. Sour, mostly.

WM: quori, you brought up psychoanalysis at one point. And I wanted to ask you a question related to the Freudian categories of the anal retentive versus anal expulsive.

qt: We would definitely identify with the latter. We have always been aware of the literal food-to-poop pipeline. It is just such a special medium of artwork in which the audience is literally embodying our craft and our input and our histories in a way that encourages expulsion.

BSM: Thinking about expulsion and explosion, we did try to make these edible pepper sprays.

qt: The idea was you could have it in your bag and you could spray it on your eggs – like hot sauce in your bag, remember when that was a thing?

BSM: You could also spray it in someone’s face if you had
a situation, which comes from a story about P’s mom. Blowing spices into some man’s face.

PO: My family had a restaurant growing up, the only Nigerian restaurant in Cincinnati at the time. Someone tried to rob the restaurant. And my mom – she’s a very powerful Nigerian woman – instead of freaking out, just takes out a whole bag of pepper and blows it in this man’s face. He’s trying to run out, but he’s blinded, literally.

qt: And Precious doesn’t mean black pepper.

PO: It was a pepper blend of three different hot peppers used to make [the Nigerian dish] suya.

qt: P’s mom is really our Spiral Theory mama. She’s a baddie.

PO: Her whole life is Spiral Theory. She’s so good at spiraling.

WM: Isn’t poisoning big in Nigeria too? A common weapon?

PO: It is. Low key food is poison. I think often about how food is medicinal and healing. And how it can actually destroy somebody. Through a Spiral Theory dinner, we put people through these trials. There are all these negotiations, between suffering and pleasure. Spice can open new neural pathways.

Twine of the Sky Shine Through Utterances from the Chorus vol 2, Danspace, New York, 2020

BSM: We’re interested in induced states and cooking with aphrodisiacs.

qt: Witchcraft.

PO: I’m trying to have out-of-body experiences continuously.

WM: Let’s talk about each person’s different food styles.

BSM: For me, there’s a bit of body horror. I like gross things and texture-specific stuff. There were these clear Jell-O things I made that had corn hair suspended in them. It looked like you were eating hair.

qt: Bobbi is always trying to use sesame, and citrus. They will say, “Let’s make it more bright.” And Bobbi always wants to make wet bread. Like, “What if the bread was wet?!”

BSM: Precious, you’re a feeder.

qt: Most likely to be on the app Grommr [for the gainer community].

PO: I’m definitely a feeder. One of my food styles is romantic punishment. Floral is so big for me. Dirt. Blood. Textured grain. Harsh things with a soft undertone. You’ll be slapped with the spiciest pepper you’ve ever eaten but it’ll be wrapped in rose honey. I live in the extremes and I love time. “Does this take fourteen hours? Are we going to cook this for two days?”

Kitchen Dinner, Bloodshed Meal, in collaboration with Telfar, Florence, 2020

BSM: Precious is the pot scorcher for sure.

PO: quori’s style is sexy-holistic.

BSM: Witchy cauldron potions.

PO: And there’s always a scientific element. quori is the baker. I might have the crazy baked idea, but then with baking, you have to measure things; you have to be patient. I’m too much of a chaos master.

qt: We have a lot of dreamers here, but Precious is the most unconnected or unconcerned with reality. I’m the bridge between reality and these esoteric conversations – all imagination and vision, not connected to physical limitations or fire hazards.

BSM: A great example was when we were very briefly in the band category, we only ever met once to try and come up with a plan for what we were going to do for that third show. There was this funny thing that would happen in the middle of meetings, Precious would be like, “And then we’ll play our song.” quori would be like, “What song? We don’t have a song.” And then Precious would be like, “Oh, right.”

qt: Five minutes later, Precious would say again, “And then we’ll play our song.” And I’d say, “What song?” It happened like five times.

[All laugh]

WM: When I say the word appetite, each of you say the first word that comes to mind. Appetite!

PO: Desire.

qt: Hunger.

BSM: Hunger.

qt: Do another one, I like this game.

WM: Bread!

BSM: Butter.

PO: Jam.

qt: Body of Christ.

WM: Noodle!

PO: Wet.

BSM: Wet.

qt: Dangling here, dangling there.

BSM: Precious, you said wet too?

qt: It’s funny that we’re getting doubles.

WM: Apple!

BSM: Sauce.

PO: Hole.

qt: Platonic ideal.

WM: Living up to the theory part of your name.

BSM: Get ready because we’re going to write a book!

Portrait of Spiral Theory Test Kitchen, Unclebrother Residency, New York, 2023

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This text was originally published in print in Spike #83 – Food. Snag one of the last copies in our online shop.