Southern Miss student turns fruit, vegetables into art

From hattiesburgamerican.com:

Photo: Sylvie, the fruit carver, turns an apple into a swan. Courtesy of hattiesburgamerican.com.

The things you can do with fruits and vegetables. Sylvie Benae turns apples into swans, cucumbers into sharks and even radishes into mice.

All it takes are a few garnishing knives purchased at a local retail store — combined with hours of practice.

Oh, and a few soothing words help as well.

“Sometimes I started talking to the fruit, ‘Don’t worry, I know I’m going to cut you up, but it’s just a plastic surgery. You’ll be prettier,’” says Benae.

Benae, 24, is from Cameroon, but don’t think for a moment that she’s engaging in some age-old cultural tradition when she takes a knife to a honeydew melon.

Fruit carving is more of an East Asian art form than West African, as demonstrated by the astonished reaction of folks back home.

“People were like ‘wow,’” said Benae of the spread she did for her aunt’s wedding in Cameroon in 2011. “They hadn’t seen it before.”

Benae, who speaks five languages, started fruit carving in 2009 when she was attending college in Tunisia, thanks to a friend’s challenge.

She’s been practicing hard at it ever since — mostly for fun, even while studying hotel, restaurant and tourism management at the University of Southern Mississippi. She lives with her aunt and uncle, Barbara and Jean Louis Benae.

“A lot of times when we have parties here at home, she’ll make them for us,” said Jean Louis Benae, a Hattiesburg neurosurgeon who has lived in the United States for more than 20 years. “It’s very beautiful. She’s quite talented with this stuff. She’s given us a chance to enjoy her little artwork there.”

Her dream is to manage her own hotel, just like her father, Elie Benae, who owns a hotel on the beach in the Cameroon coastal town of Kribi.

“I like to see the smiles on people’s faces, you know,” she said of her desire to serve others. “When you make somebody happy, you’re happy — even if you don’t realize it, you’re happy.”

Along the way, she also hopes to clear up a misconception about her food art — decried once as wasteful by an acquaintance.

She protests that this is not the case. “I can’t throw (away) food,” she explains. “You know because some people go hungry. It’s like a sin to throw food.”

Read the rest of the story here.