What's in our food?

July 22, 2011 4:03 AM

My Life with Science, Art and Food: "Using scientific laboratory photo equipment, I journey over the surfaces of both organic and processed foods: my own favorites and America’s over-indulgences. The closer the lens got, the more I saw food and consumers of food (all of us!) as part of a larger eco-system than mere sustenance."

Artist statement.

posted by bwg (4 comments total)

This reminds me of my SEM course. We were shown how to use it, and how to prepare the samples, and then basically left to our own devices with an assignment to produce 50 micrographs at the end of the semester. After taking pics of ants, microchips and knife blades, I wish I was creative enough to stick my lunch into the chamber...
posted by c13 at 5:00 AM on July 22, 2011

This is awesome.
posted by thirteenkiller at 7:28 AM on July 22, 2011 [2 favorites]

Many of the pictures are lovely, but overall they are very familiar to anyone who's ever played around with a microscope (which may be a small percentage of people, to be fair). The artist's statement "This particular combination of science, photography and food has never been explored before" is silly since plenty of high school students have stuck bits of vegetables under a microscope, and the project overall doesn't really make the connection between micrographs of food and the "larger ecosystem".

The only connection I could see were a few pictures that looked like aerial landscapes, but that's the fractal nature of Nature for you. The artist's statement has the slightly embarrassing autodidact's enthusiasm for this OMG great new thing they just discovered that others have known about since, like, 1906 or something. Still, pretty pictures are pretty.
posted by Quietgal at 8:28 AM on July 22, 2011

Quietgal makes a really good point : in art and in science especially, one must be very humble and hesitant with the words "I just (made/found) the first ___!"

That said, I was distinctly hoping something today would make me unselfconsciously cry, "what--? Oh! It's an Oreo! Ha ha!" so I'm happy.
posted by herbplarfegan at 12:15 PM on July 22, 2011