Bon Appétit
Our idea is to speak up for the marine animals. Each year, thousands of marine animals died because they accidentally eat plastic garbage in the ocean. Why? because they thought these were food. So, we decided to make the kind of food that humans eat, but made of plastic garbage. When humans sit in front of the table, looking at the “delicious” plastic food, hopefully, they would feel how these marine animals felt.
We collected a bunch of plastic garbage, which includes bottles, cups, bags, and rings. Then we started brainstorming: what kind of food can we make out of those materials? they should be ubiquitous and easy to recognize. Eventually, we ended up making eggs, fries, pasta, and burger. The manufacturing part wasn’t too hard, we actually spent more time on coming up with an interesting theme.
During the exhibition, we borrowed a desk from the cafeteria and organized the food on the desk. Everything we did was to let people feel how is it like eating plastic foods.
Our ultimate goal has always been to let people put their shoes in the marine animals’ shoes. To let them imagine how is it like eating plastics.
We feel like that we were pretty successful in the way that creating foods that are highly similar to real food, at this point people would start thinking that these can be the kind of food that they eat daily. However, we thought that if we would have invited our audience to really come to sit on the chair and begin the process like they are really having dinner, it would definitely give them a better experience, and create a stronger impact.
The biggest difficulty was finding the perfect materials. For example, we had a higher expectation on the appearance of the burger bread, but due to the limitation of resources, we couldn’t make it to reach our expectations.
The takeaway would be to do a pre-exhibition before the real exhibition so that we can make reflects on where we could have improved. Like said, we wish that we could invite our audience to come and sit in front of the table, and really begin the process like they are going to have dinner. There’s not much that I would change, besides if we could, we would find a better material for the burger bread and do more interactions with our audience. Because the goal is to let people feel how is it like to eat plastic, so that it may raise a sense of empathy.
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