Romances of the Meal
2000

Performance
Festival Laboratorium, Brussels

Before an audience, three women in evening dress read from a script that traces the myths and histories of coffee, chocolate, and Coca-Cola. The script touches on chemistry, health impacts, and connections to colonialism and slavery. Interspersed are tips on how to brew the perfect cup and bizarre recipes such as dioxin-contaminated chicken in Coca-Cola sauce for four hundred and exploded meat as a method of tenderizing beef. Projected images offer related charts and statistics. The audience is served coffee, chocolate, or Coca-Cola. For dessert, as one of the women reads guidelines for throwing a pie in the face of an official, accompanied by projected footage of Bill Gates being pied in Brussels in 1989, Rosier throws a pie at the curator, seated at a front-row table.