Eventually The Apple Will Be A Core!

The recent trend of taking pictures of food before you eat it is a rather strange one. The only reason one should ever take pictures of food before it is eaten is if you are a chef making a pictorial menu / portfolio. Now of course some circumstances might arise in which it will be acceptable to take pictures of food, such as if a green pepper strangely resembles a face, or a chicken tender looks like a phallus. But needless to say, it doesn't matter how pretty the food may look before it is grounded, salivated, and digested it will always come out looking and smelling the same : as fecal matter.

In spite of this trend I still like to do thought processes, or experiments, if you will, with the same principles intact. In doing this I find that it doesn't work the same way with other things. Example : building a house. Since we would rather take pictures of it looked like before it became feces, why don't we take pictures of what the site looked like before the house was built? Typically either two environments will have been built on : one is a pleasant and peaceful natural scenery that turned into suburban hell, or it was a toxic landscape (maybe even a cemetery). The former induces guilt, while the latter makes you wish you never knew what was there before. This maybe why the Genzyme HQ (recently bought out by Sanofi-aventis Pharmaceuticals) in Cambridge doesn't have pictures of what was in place of the office before it was built : it was a toxic waste dump for factories in the Massachusetts Bay area. The building requires a separate air-handling system to collect and filter the toxins that leak through the substructure. So maybe the before and after are not the same as it is with food. With buildings we like the after more than the before..

But take it further with the case of food. What was it before it was a meal? That beautiful sirloin was a mother cow with four calves. You killed a mother of four! That loaf of bread was made from a gorgeous field of wheat (one a photographer might have photographed and uploaded on Flickr), where mice and gofers dwelled and played. That is, until a large mechanical tracker came along and killed hundreds of families of rodents, while displacing bees and butterflies! Take a picture of that event and slip it in your coffee table scrapbook.

I suppose there is no point to this post. Not all postings have to have a point. No one is going to stop taking pictures of food until older generations find it trendy and start doing it as well. It makes people feel like artists, or more appropriately DIY artists. Click a button and you're a misunderstood creative individual (whatever that is suppose to mean). Hem a pair of jeans and you're a fashion designer. Take a flight to LA and write about it on your Facebook status and you're a travel writer. The DIY era : something to appropriate our self-worth, something to boost our self-esteem when we have nothing to be confident about. And we certainly don't let silly little things like consistency stop us from being creative! (Whatever that means).

"I don't stop doing something because what happens at the end :
'Mitch, would you like an apple?'
'No! Eventually it will be a core!'"