Hard Palate
Food and consumption has been a recurring subject for several of my projects. Bottled comics was an exploration of binging, where I documented my over consumption of food. For a couple of months in 2008 I photographed everything I ate and posted on a blog.
Every Christmas growing up, we had an orange and apple in our stocking. When I asked my grandfather why, he told me that getting fruit and nuts in the winter was used to be special because they were hard to find and expensive. The tradition he kept even though now times have changed and they are readily and cheaply available year round.
Inspired by The Hungry Planet, a book that documents the amount of food and money spend by families all over the world. In light of today’s economy woes, like most others I am readjusting my budget and grocery and dining are the big expenditures. Here in the US and most developed countries, we have access to largest variety of food all year long. This excess leads us to this lead me to begin exploring the cost of out of season eating. The combination of technology and wealth has provided the market and expectation of the available of seasonal fruit or vegetables all year long. There are some countries that benefit from exporting food all year round. The unsavory side is the labor practices of harvesting and environmental impact of the transportation.
For Hard Palate I am gathering recipes from friends, family, and colleagues and beyond. I will use the ingredients in this recipes and geotag them and track their origin for in and out of season here in the US. There will be types of two data visuals presentations, one will be an installation and the other will be an online updatable mapping display.
The installation will be a selection of 5 recipes. The ingredients for each recipe will be geotagged for where originates in season and out of season. The dual paths for each ingredient will be mapped to illustrated the economical and environ cost of year round availability.
The online presence will start out as a mapping visualization. The visitor chooses a recipe and gets a data visualization of the path and economic cost of ingredient. They will get a recommendation of the best time of year to make the dish.
Eventually, visitors will be able to submit their own recipes and create their own geotagging and tracking for their recipe.
