CLIENT
Personal work. This is the result of my "individual exploratory design project" from the course EAT - Food Culture, Materiality and Design at HDK, Göteborg Sweden.

MISSION
The assignment was to come up with a "conversation piece" within the concept of food culture. (A conversation piece does not aim to solve an issue, rather stimulate conversation around a certain topic.)

I wanted this project to address the ongoing debate around what foods to eat.

DESIGN PROCESS
We were asked to pick a subject of interest and run with it, without having any thought out goal for the project.

I decided to use trash from food packaging as a starting point, and build something new out of it. There is something about using what other people throw away that intrigues me.

I started out by digging through the trash generated by food packaging, collecting anything that caught my interest. For instance, I liked the looks of the color test strips underneath cartons. Also letters, symbols and other graphic elements that had been deformed in various ways. At first, I looked through my own trash, then the neighbors in the recycling room, then ... any and everywhere. I used an image scanner to transfer the trash graphics to my computer and started organizing the material by appearance. I thought I would come up with some nerdy patterns or something along those lines, but I felt like that would be lacking as a conversation piece.

I noticed the “characters” of the designs that depict humans or animals, and I somehow had the idea of turning them into gods. It ties into my belief that many of us identify with what we choose to eat or not to eat to such a degree that it almost qualifies as a religion.

Once I knew what I wanted to do I then gathered a lot more material. I took pictures of food packages with my phone in supermarkets, at friend’s house .... anywhere I would find an interesting food character. For reference, I looked to images of various religious icons, goddesses, saints, and holy men. I clustered images together crudely and sketched out gods for every type of food I could think of.

OUTCOME
I eventually completed eight gods ... and a symbol for the religion ... and then a zine. I would like viewers to examine themselves and to question why they eat what the do. Then to have conversations around food and identity.

I am convinced that this project can be improved to further guide viewers into a conversation and I might keep working on it ... in time.