COPIA "Tipsybot" is one figure in Clayton Bailey's "A Fun-Loving Robot Family," made entirely of pots, pans and other discarded kitchen items. It is part of the exhibit "Return Engagement," devoted to recycled materials.

Food facts
’n’ fun

A museum of American culture
explores what, why and how we eat

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By Betty Shimabukuro
betty@starbulletin.com

NAPA VALLEY, Calif. >> We are what we eat, they say. This means that consuming a formidable number of doughnuts will turn you into a formidable doughnut-shaped individual, but the phrase has greater significance than just that.

Food shapes our culture, our lifestyle, our sense of who we are. This is the point of Copia: The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts, which opened a little more than a year ago on 12 acres along the Napa River.

Named for the Greek goddess of abundance, Copia is growing into the nation's storage facility for in-food-mation.

They grow food on these grounds, serve food, study food, teach about food, serve wine with food (very important here in California's wine country) ... let's see, is there anything left? They even show movies about food.

"We are a combination cultural institution and a museum," says Daphne Derven, curator of food, a title that pretty much sums up Copia's priorities.

BETTY SHIMABUKURO / BETTY@STARBULLETIN.COM Tasting carts, such as this one featuring olives, are scattered throughout Copia.

The center is a perfect way to add value to a winery-hopping Napa Valley excursion, helping to put it all in perspective.

The mission of the center, Derven says, is to merge art and culture with the pleasures of food and wine. This may sound somewhat esoteric, but Copia makes it fun.

Here you will find a 4,000-year-old alabaster feasting bowl from Egypt, housed with reverence in a glass case. A few feet away is a display of PEZ dispensers -- happy, colorful, plastic mini-heads -- treated with only a bit less reverence.

At Copia, you will learn that in Tibet at each new year, monks roll yak butter and barley flour into tiny, brightly colored beads, which they assemble into precise models of temples. And you can learn that Babe Ruth could eat 10 to 20 hot dogs between double headers, always with mustard, onions and sauerkraut.

Copia passes on this information through both museum-like, don't-touch-me displays and kid-friendly interactive exhibits, such as an aroma tester that emits puffs of kitchen scents and asks you to identify them. Art displays, video programs, seminars, garden tours and gourmet meals are all part of the educational mix.

"Return Engagement," the latest art exhibit, brought together 28 artists' works, all made of recycled food containers. A giant urn made of 65,000 bottle caps, a decorative screen made of 25,000 swizzle sticks, a sea horse sculpture made of old metal cheese graters -- "It makes you think about what you throw away," Derven says during a walk-through.

BETTY SHIMABUKURO / BETTY@STARBULLETIN.COM Michael Banicki's 244-piece collection, "Bottle Cap Figures," consists of ashtrays and candy dishes with arms and legs made of bottle tops.

"Return Engagement" will be replaced Jan. 31 with "Sweet Tooth," a 90-piece exhibit exploring our love/hate relationship with sweets and desserts (imagine miniature beds made of spun sugar, a reflection on insomnia). Past exhibits included "The Last Supper," a collection of china plates depicting final meals of Death Row inmates.

All this goes to show the many paths by which Copia considers the influence of food.

Derven says the Copia concept was developed seven years ago by winemaker Robert Mondavi. The $55 million center opened in November 2001.

A three-week Hawaii program last June was one of Copia's first large-scale presentations, coupling cooking demonstrations by Hawaii chefs with traditional dance and song. "It was exactly what we are," Derven says. "It was culture with wine and food as part of it."

To wrap all this up, a piece of trivia picked up in a stroll through Copia's galleries:

In the 1920s, the Frisbie Pie Co. of Connecticut sold its pies in tins stamped with the company name. Employees would toss the tins for fun and students at Yale University eventually took up the game. In 1958, Wham-O came up with a toy called the Pluto Platter. But the toy became an icon under its new name -- Frisbee -- in honor of those pie tins.

This is a place, after all, that celebrates America's contribution to the world's food stew, a serious matter, perhaps, but one that should never be confounded in seriousness.

Copia The American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts Find it: 900 First St., Napa Valley, Calif. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday Admission: $12.50; $10 students and seniors; $7.50 children Information: Call toll-free, 888-51-COPIA, or visit www.copia.org Upcoming events Food as Power: A symposium on the economic, political, social and artistic aspects of controlling the world's food supply, Feb. 6-8 Sweet Tooth: Art exhibition featuring 40 artists' reflections on sugar and its byproducts, Jan. 31 to May 12

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