Latest Source Update

I have fine-tuned my source. My new source is mass produced American food. I still think the common thread between my original sources is "improvement," but I want to be more specific. It is a Western concept of improvement – low cost and high volume. It is the idea that bigger is better. More is better. Faster is better. Cheaper is better. Newer is better. Easier is better. In terms of food that means, tastier meals (foods high in fat, sugar, and salt), bigger meals (enough food to take extras home for lunch tomorrow), cheaper meals (a drink, fries, and a cheeseburger for 5 bucks), and quicker meals (your way, right away). It means food that will satisfy you immediately. I am interested in the quick fix, in instant gratification. Americans want more for less. If you don’t have time to exercise, take some pills. Feeling tired? Drink this energy drink. We want our health and nutrition to come in a bottle of pills or an energy shake rather than fruits, vegetables and exercise. Americans want their food readily available, wherever they are, and they want it to taste the same, wherever they are. Food is so unsuited for mass production that we have to chemically re-engineer our plants and livestock to make them more readily harvested and processed. In doing so, they have to amended with preservatives, flavorings and other additives. Mother Nature just isn’t good enough anymore. Our farms are being treated like factories and our food is being treated like a commercial good.

My video begins with a gas stove being lit. All machines need fuel. And then a cheeseburger is prepared. The cheeseburger is the end product of agribusiness. Corn is grown to feed the livestock which is eventually slaughtered to make ground beef. The cheeseburger is the all-American backyard meal. The video proceeds with me making a “health” shake, to me hand-planting additives and vitamins into a banana, to stacking a junk food tower, and then finishes with me building the Great Pyramid of Twinkies. The Twinkies are supposed to resemble gold bricks or the building blocks of the mass produced food system. The pyramid reaches higher and higher till it is almost out of the frame. In making my two minute video, I found it difficult at first, to fit all five videos into one single movie. It didn’t seem like enough time get across what I wanted to say. So I sped everything up. A lot. The increased speed gives the video a sense of urgency, as if there is an actual clock timing the production of food. It makes any movement in the video look mechanical, like part of an assembly line.

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