All the heirloom apple trees on Beech Hill Farm in Mount Desert are leafy and thriving – except for one. Wrapped in discarded food packages from the streets of New Orleans, this apple tree is bearing the brunt of bad food habits and bad food practices. While its body is covered in a brightly colored quilt made from potato chip bags and candy wrappers, its top-most barky branches and remaining leaves appear to gasp for clean air and light.

Ah, the fate of apple trees. They always seem to carry a message about good and evil. This one, called “Slow Death” by New Orleans artist Mimi Moncier, comments on the nutrition-free diets of the “super size” generation and the equally mismanaged infrastructure of the artist’s post-disaster city.

“When it comes to food production, manufacturing is polluting the environment. Then when we eat the food, we pollute our bodies. Then with our trash, we pollute the environment again,” said Moncier, who, with her husband Alan Lewis, was working Sunday to put the last stitches on the plastic-backed quilt they transported from Louisiana late last week. They found the debilitated apple tree in a friend’s yard on Mount Desert Island.

Moncier is one of more than a dozen professional artists featured in “Art Fare,” a two-week outdoor art show that opened Sunday and runs through Aug. 12 on the 73-acre organic farm, which is owned and operated by College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. The exhibition, which includes artists from Maine and other states, is part of LandEscapes 2006, an annual weeklong interdisciplinary arts and science symposium in various locations on the island.

The theme this year is food, and, in addition to the free art show, offerings include workshops in expressive drawing, painting dinnerware, food writing and poetry, as well as panel discussions and a cooking demonstration. Some events are free; others involve fees. Sunday’s opening events also included a cakewalk during which children hopscotched along decorative tiles to live fiddle music.

But for all its country fair-like spirit, the food-themed art is not a blueberry pie contest or giant vegetable competition. It’s more about the destruction of fisheries (“Rest in Peace” features a mock graveyard of wooden headstones engraved with the names of endangered fish), genetic engineering (“Killer Tomatoes” is a stalk of cast bronze tomatoes with wickedly grinning teeth) and sustainable food practices (thus the setting of Beech Hill Farm).

Even as visitors wandered the site, farm managers Lara Judson and Diane Lokocz picked flowers, pulled weeds and ran the farm stand. On Sunday, many of the artists, who worked closely with the farm managers to do no damage to the acreage, were onsite finishing their pieces or interacting with patrons.

“This show reflects something right now not only about the art world but about the political and social sensibility,” said Nancy Manter, artistic director and founder of LandEscapes, which began in 2001. “Yes, it’s food for thought. But it’s also how we’re moving into a whole new set of environmental politics about the way we eat and how even the migration of birds may reflect aspects of food.”

Manter asked curators from Maine and New York City, where she lives most of the year, to commission works for the exhibition, which will remain outdoors exposed to the elements for the show’s duration. “Offering,” a series of six bowls made from cow dung, will surely begin to decompose with rain, and crows are likely to peck away at “Baggage for Birds,” in which birdseed was molded into suitcase shapes.

The fate of the pieces is part of the story about what Manter sees as a trend toward ephemeral art. It could be that artists are commenting on the temporality of contemporary life. Or that they feel fatalistic about the future. Or simply that art no longer needs to last for centuries, that indeed it decomposes or can be recycled.

Whether whimsical or cynical, the works sent small crowds of families, vacationers and locals strolling about the farm in a treasure hunt of sorts. The art works are all marked with tags, but there is no map. Some of Sunday’s participants found themselves staring at a compost pile or an outdoor assemblage of chairs and tables in hopes of finding an explanatory note. Often they didn’t. But it got them thinking about – if not blurring – the differences between art and the farm workers’ eating area.

Marcy MacKinnon, an island resident, chuckled as she stood before Blue Hill artist Avy Claire’s “Special Sale; 5/63 cents,” a collection of posts topped with cans of corn and tied with straw stalks.

“Most of the artists are saying we’re really making a mess of this planet,” MacKinnon said. “We can make it look amusing, but at the base, it’s not humorous at all, especially for people with children.”

“Actually, this is my kind of garden. You don’t have to do anything,” said another onlooker, joking but also underscoring the more serious side of MacKinnon’s point and Claire’s art.

In fact, the greatest effect of Claire’s work, situated in one of the many fields on the 5-acre expanse, was to move the eye back to the real growth in progress on the farm.

“The theme of food highlights the benefit of having an organic farm on the island and what it means for a community,” said Casey Mallinckrodt, a trustee at COA and advisory board member of LandEscapes. “To have this event here highlights the multidisciplinary mission of COA and the farm but also brings people here for a fun and engaging – and in this case food-themed – thoughtful consideration. The more people who can see this farm and see the beauty and the hard work it takes to make it successful, the better for the farm, the college, the island and the community.”

In the meantime, Beacon, N.Y.-based artist Jill Reynolds was clearing a path in an old orchard. She had found a tiny mushroom, covered it with a cup and was blazing a trail for visitors to walk on for her “Untitled” work of found art in nature. The mushroom was her first discovery.

“Food is such a complex system that we take for granted especially now that we are cut off from sources of food,” she said. “For this piece, the farm is a given. I’m going a step before that – to the fungi, the slugs, the earthworms.”

When Reynolds is done, observers will be led past apple trees rich in leafy branches, with views of mountains, big skies and other fields. That is, after all, the other side of the story, and the one these artists and organizers hope patrons will remember long after the mushroom has melted back into the earth.

LandEscapes “Art Fare” is open to the public through Aug. 12 during regular farm stand hours of 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at Beech Hill Farm. For information about other LandEscapes 2006 events, visit www.mdi-landescapes.com or call 244-3475. For more information about and directions to Beech Hill Farm, visit http://home.coa.edu/beechhill/ or call 244-5204.