The Nature of Eating

This body of work explores man's complex relationship with food.

This body of work explores man's complex relationship with food. Less scientific and much more personally driven, this project comes out of my own intimate history with food. Having battled binge eating and bouts of anorexia throughout high school I have since spent many years constructing a stronger, healthier concept of diet. In doing so I have come to realize that ones outlook regarding food and eating is as much a factor in a healthy diet as what one actually ingests. This idea of a "food mentality", combined with my personal history with food, current involvement with the movement to return to small scale farming, and my perspective as a woman, manifests as inspiration for the photographs in this body of work.

I began this project thinking very critically about American cultural attitudes toward food. Heavily influenced by contemporary thinkers, researchers and authors like Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food", I started questioning the Westernized way of producing and eating food and their possible results on both mental and physical health. It became evident to me that the American food culture was suffering a deep disconnect. A disconnection to where our food is coming from thanks to agribusiness; a disconnection from meal-time being time spent with others due to our busy schedules and heavy workloads; a disconnection to the immense pleasure food can bring because of guilt-ridden imagery being fed to us by the media.

These ideas are very influential in my work; keeping them in mind I carefully construct images that meditate on my own relationship with food. I consciously pare down visible details that may work to particularize the photograph to a given time or place. Though the timeliness of my work is important to consider, with an ever climbing incidence of diabetes and heart disease in our nation, I hope that the universality and personal nature of the photographs welcome a wide ranging audience and inspires a re-examination of one's personal relationship with food.