Color palette of food/drink before and during ingestion
For the color palette of my life I chose to photograph everything I ate and drank for about 75 hours. I chose food and drink partially because I was concerned that this would end up being a project about my office environment, but largely because I’m somewhat fascinated with the phenomenon of people photographing food and presenting it on social media. Sometimes I do like looking at people’s food (I have instagram-searched dumplings, for example), but a lot of the time I find it unappetizing. Also, since people are performing on social media, the food they post is selected based on various criteria (deliciousness, trendiness, etc) depending on the person. I wonder what their diet might look like outside of the curated version they present to the world.
I wanted a full data set of everything I ate and drank, but since photographing my food before eating it isn’t part of my eating ritual, I usually remembered this project some (or several) bites in. For the purposes of the assignment, which is actually about color, I also eliminated some ‘duplicates’ (my second cup of coffee/water from the same mug). Creating the composite image made the sad sequence of take-out apparent, but was an interesting color study. In isolating the colors themselves, which are mostly brown-orange, I became a bit nauseated.
I don’t usually eat sour patch kids, but I thought it was interesting that this, the mango, and the tomato on my bagel were really the stand-out, brightest colors. I think this would look different at the beginning of the week, when I have more mental energy to devote to eating vegetables, or in the summer, when produce surrounds me more. I’m not particularly proud of my role as busy-metropolitan consumer in the mess that is American food culture. Perhaps this palette is another visualization of problems related to it.
While adopting the practice of photographing food, I went to see Ukeles’ Maintenance Art exhibit at the Queen’s museum and found these standard colors for glassphalt, the processed pieces of recycled glass that are added to asphalt. Inspired by the process of transformation that they represented, much like the consumption of food, I applied my color palate to an image of glassphalt.
Standard glassphalt colors – I would like to research these more but google wasn’t a helpful start
I focused on a brown of which I think there were varying shades and tints in my diet, with small amounts of the brighter colors I ate.