BEIJING, April 8 -- More than 100 well-heeled diners are sitting in the august British Library, eating a fennel slice, an olive and a kumquat while stroking pieces of velvet, silk and sandpaper. The scent of cloves wafts around the room as an airplane engine roars. And this is just the appetizer.

    The main course of this unusual banquet is "Alaskan salmon in the rays of the sun with Mars sauce". Dessert is Elasticake - a fluffy pastry ball oozing blood-red zabaglione and crowned with quivering licorice antennae.

    Welcome to the weird, sensory world of the Futurist Banquet - an eccentric but strangely influential combination of culinary experiment, political statement and artistic stunt served up at the library recently for an assortment of food-lovers, artists, academics and diplomats.

    The menu was based on the 1932 Futurist Cookbook by Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a combination of radical manifesto, practical joke and recipe book whose dishes include chicken with ball bearings, salami cooked in coffee and eau de cologne and the enigmatically titled "Carrot + Trousers Professor".

    "Futurist food is a revolution," said Lesley Chamberlain, editor of the cookbook's English edition.

    "The 20th century is a century of revolutions. This is perhaps the funniest one, the one you have to take least seriously - but one we are still living with."

    Marinetti coined the term Futurism for the art movement he founded in 1909. Intended as a celebration of modernity and a rejection of romance and sentiment, it was dedicated to modernity and speed, to the violent, the urban and the mechanical.

    Its followers were famed for playful, provocative pranks and manifestos.

    For the Futurists, food was about art, not sustenance. A meal should be a feast for all the senses, as well as a rejection of bourgeois values. Marinetti was the sworn enemy of comfort food - he caused a sensation by proposing that pasta be banned on the grounds that it promoted "lethargy, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity and neutralism".

    Turning Marinetti's exuberant vision into an edible meal was a challenge, said Giorgio Locatelli, the Michelin-starred London chef called in to oversee the dinner. Real-life Futurist banquets held in the 1930s were raucous affairs in which food was often secondary to sensation.

    Marinetti's cookbook includes descriptions of various dishes, as well as descriptions of meals appropriate to various occasions.

    In adapting Marinetti's freewheeling ideas for the table, British Library organizers were forced to strike a balance between the avant-garde and the edible.

    Curator Stephen Bury said he regretted the absence of chicken with ball bearings. "But we thought, 'Oh God, the liability if someone choked'."

    Entering the dining room, guests passed a "carne plastica", or meat sculpture - a towering pyramid made from 36 chickens, assorted guinea fowl, chunks of lamb, beef and sausage, topped with a honey-glazed tumulus of minced beef.

    Courses were served by waiters in striped flannel pajamas. Salmon with Mars sauce turned out to be an inoffensive piece of fish with a sauce of anchovies, capers and pesto, and was dismissed as "boring" by one diner. Almost everyone agreed the Elasticake was delicious.

    Other elements were more unsettling. After the appetizer, diners were ushered away from the table by a man with a megaphone and herded downstairs to chew on rice balls while listening to Futurist tracts read out in Italian and English.

    (Source: China Daily)