21 Days of Food.
I am curious about our culture’s obsession with food, with diet/dieting, and calorie counting (a daily behavior of listing and accounting for everything one has consumed in a day). Many cultures are preoccupied with food, particularly in places where food is either very scarce or in great abundance. In America, with the myriad of restaurants, stores, magazines, websites, television shows, books, and photography devoted to food and food preparation, it is no wonder this aspect of human behavior is subject to disorder and obsession. Dieting and the desire to be thinner, in all its subtleties or extremes, have created a multi-billion dollar a year business. As a woman, I have dealt with this cultural pressure to be thinner in some way or another at different times in my life, even now.
A couple weeks prior to the start of this project, I also spent 3 days fasting from food for spiritual reasons, and that experience powerfully shifted my understanding of the function of food, as well as how much we need food, and how much we don’t need food as much as we think we do. This curiosity led me to begin this exploration of food consumption as daily practice, by documenting my intake of food and drink, or anything with caloric value, for 21 days (which is the average number of days it takes to form a habit). The process of drawing/illustrating is a form of of intentional meditation or re-focused attention, and this careful documentation acted as an induced obsession. This process also imitates calorie counters and mobile phone apps that record daily intake of food in order to help manage dieting. I also wanted to loosely reference still life, and create representations of a real-life subject (the food I actually ate) in an imaginary composition (I never actually get to see all the food I ate together in one place). |