Weekend Reading: Iconic Food Photography, Recipes for Cicadas, and More

What we’re reading, cooking, and clicking this week

I love The Little People Project, the street art series that places tiny figurines in unexpected set-ups in public spaces. Photographer Christopher Boffoli has taken a similar idea and combined it with food: his photographs, featured on Colossal, of figurines scaling rock candy and harvesting salt from the tops of salted caramels [pictured] is a delightful play on scale. —Laura Sant

There's Instagram, and then there's this: First We Feast has compiled iconic food photography from across the ages. There's Henri Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, Fidel Castro eating Chinese food…and a few Instagrams, too. —Sophie Brickman

The UN Food and Agriculture Office recently issued a report recommending that people eat more insects. Where to start? New Scientist interviews the maker of cricket-based high energy bars; Chopsticks and Marrow talks to Andy Ricker about eating silk worms and ant eggs; and The Atlantic offers thoughts on feasting on this year's cicada swarm. (And if you do decide to eat cicadas, there's a cookbook just for you, here.) —Karen Shimizu

Artist William Lamson has installed a minimalist solarium at New York's gorgeous Storm King sculpture park that looks like it's made from dozens of panes of amber-hued glass. Wrong! It's all made from caramelized sugar, and it's amazing. —Helen Rosner

Last week, Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork processor, announced its upcoming takeover by Shuanghui International, China's biggest meat producer. In this comprehensive—and a little frightening—article on Slate, writer Christopher Leonard traces the rise of factory-farmed pork, which displaced small, local pig farmers beginning in the mid-90s, and explains how this monumental buyout might further reduce transparency in an already-opaque American factory farming system. —Lauren Rothman

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Call it nosiness or merely an extension of my passion for all things food, but I've always been fascinated by what other people eat. This explains my obsession with Rafael Rozendaal's Twitter quest: "Everything I eat I tweet," he writes on his profile page. Rozendaal, a New York-based artist, eats everything from "raw marinated octopus w wasabi, grilled squid, grilled peppers, whitefish, onigiri w salmon," to chicken soup to peanut M&Ms. His words-only tweets (no photos!) provide real-time insight into the contemporary diet. —Riddley Schirm

It seems prominent people have been thinking a lot about happy chickens lately. Bill Gates thinks it would be more sustainable for us to eat plant-based egg substitutes, which is why he is investing in them. And author Jonathan Safran Foer is promoting a free app called Buying Poultry, a guide that tells you how the chickens are treated at each and every poultry producer in the country. —Betsy Andrews