Food - DIY mayonnaise and turkey dressed up as swan - all in the name of art

''Art and Food" was the title of a recent one-off exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the aim of which, visitors were informed, was to "explore the relationship between art and food". To this end, artists had been invited to create food-inspired performances in various locations around the museum. Despite the impressive-sounding title, it was not entirely clear what sort of relationship was being explored. Were we being asked to consider whether cooking can ever be an art form, or whether art has anything interesting to say about food?

The advance publicity had told us to expect "fantastic feasts", so at the very least I anticipated coming away well fed. In the event, the edible component of the exhibition was disappointing. But even judged from a purely artistic standpoint, the overall quality was not high: most of the exhibits failed to provide much in the way of aesthetic nourishment.

The first item I came to was called Sacred Mayonnaise. This consisted of a trio of "artists", dressed in white, guiding spectators through the "ritual" of making a bowl of mayonnaise. When the artists had finished, the audience followed suit. The entire performance took place in silence. Mayonnaise-making undoubtedly has a spiritual element to it: all that patient drip-feeding of olive oil, the gradual achievement of emulsification. But it hardly requires a work of performance art to persuade us of this. Afterwards, I approached the creator of the piece, Miche Fabre Lewin, and asked her to explain her intentions. "I'd love to talk to you, but right now I'm focusing all my energy on our next performance. I'm preparing myself spiritually," she said. A little later, I saw her take a healthy swig from a hip flask secreted in her costume. So much, I thought, for spiritual preparation.

Alcohol also seemed to be an underlying theme of the next exhibit, which was entitled Time of Soup. In the V&A's canteen, the Russian artist Masha Chuykova had cooked up four vats of brightly coloured soup. The green one had been made with sorrel, the purple one with beetroot, and so on. Once again, it was hard to see the point. The soups weren't even particularly tasty, since they had all been laced with copious quantities of vodka.

Next, I headed for the restaurant, where I found myself in the middle of another performance. Entitled Forbidden Foods, this was inspired by the Tudor period, when certain foods were forbidden. True enough - but is this worthy as a premise on which to base a work of art? To the sound of Elizabethan music, performers dressed in period attire tempted visitors with foods that, for the most part, appeared to be of the 21st-century, permitted variety. The one exception was a dish of "swan". While it is undoubtedly the case that eating swan was once a capital offence, the transgressive impact of ingesting this particular fowl was somewhat diminished by one thing - it was actually turkey.

Moving to the lecture hall, I attended a panel discussion, chaired by Marina Warner, on the theme of "Food, performance and feeding". The panellists were Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers of the River Cafe, the therapist Michele Woods, and the performance artist Bobby Baker. Even here, the discussion meandered, never quite settling on one issue. The only moment of clarity came when Gray and Rogers agreed that "cooking has little to do with art". To my mind, this summed up the problem with the entire exhibition: art and food don't have all that much in common, and it would take better artists than these to illuminate what they do.

The one successful exhibit was Baker's Dainty Feeding. This consisted of a "nurse", dressed in a starched white costume, sitting on a chair and inviting viewers to "come and be fed by Mummy". A small group of onlookers watched while I sat on her lap and consumed the fruit puree she proffered on a plastic spoon. "Are you going to be a good boy, and eat up your dinner?" she asked. It was an excruciatingly uncomfortable experience. A simple idea, perhaps, but one that, unlike most of the other works in the exhibition, provoked a strong reaction.

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