Dietribes

Remember when I did that food color photography project last August (here are the photos from it)? Well, my friend Jason (whom I met through Noah) thought it was neat and wrote about it on Mental Floss shortly afterwards. Thanks to him, I got 700 hits in one day!

A few moths later, Jason approached me with an idea he had for Mental Floss: a weekly trivia /fun facts post all about food called Dietribes. And he asked if I would consider taking the photos for it. Boy oh boy can you imagine my excitement at this.


I like taking pictures of all sorts of things, but the frenzy started with food in 2004 when I read about Tucker Shaw and his plan to release a book containing photos of every single thing he ate for a year. I loved the idea so much, and as I read the book I could pick out patterns, learn about his tendencies, watch the seasons change, etc. What people eat gives such a neat peek into their lives. Anyway, here is my Flickr set of food photos if you're so inclined, but that is not the point here.


Dietribes runs every Wednesday. As you can guess, the food theme is different each week. Today is peanut butter. I get to learn the coolest stuff by being involved in this, like "96% of people put the peanut butter on first" when they make a PBJ sandwich. wow! This is one of my favorite parts of the whole thing, besides having an excuse to eat very specific things each week and play with my camera.


How it works: I get my assignment towards the middle of the week, and have to send photos by the following Tuesday. I usually plan my weekend around eating that particular food and going photo crazy. Something I love is that through doing this, I have gotten to see how a big blog like Mental Floss works. It's so organized!

1. I get an e-mail from Meg containing the food-of-the-week and attached facts /fun trivia.
2. Allison crafts a post putting it all together in a lovely way.
3. My photo gets added.
4. Jason does some editing and makes sure it's ready to go.
5. It goes on the web site.

Like I said, another perk for me is that I love all foods, so the assignment serves as a mini surprise in my Inbox each week, like "What will I get to eat this weekend?" ... helps me keep things interesting (sometimes I can fall into a habit of eating the same 3 things every day for a month).


There you have it, guys. My little side hustle. Pay Dietribes a visit some time. So far I have shot for: peanut butter, cherries, sushi, salt, wine, cupcakes, ramen, tea, watermelon, cookies, eggs, sweet potatoes, coffee, McIntosh apples, macaroni & cheese and strawberries. See how delicious my life has gotten? :9

week color food

It's Monday and my week of monochromatic eating is over.

General feelings? IT SUCKED.

Okay, now that I got that out of the way, it didn't really suck. I am suffering from the recency effect, because the final three days were terrible. There are very few things you can eat that are blue, indigo and violet. I got zero protein and way too much sugar. I kept a pretty good journal throughout the whole thing and will probably make a new section on my web site to go into more detail. Here are some photos though, followed by some general thoughts.








Monday (red): harder than I thought it would be. Three quarters of the way through, I was really concerned about getting too much sugar (I was eating mainly fruit). Things were tough because of weirdly scheduled meetings and not enough access to a store that had a lot of variety.

Tuesday (orange): easy. I attribute this to the sesame chicken I had for lunch, and the fact that a lot of cheeses are orange. I love cheese. It's my favorite food. Doritos helped too. I got a tummy ache though because I am not used to having things like chips.

Wednesday (yellow): the easiest! I got protein for breakfast and lunch (omelette and macaroni & cheese, respectively), and didn't go hungry at all this day. I also happen to like bananas.

Thursday (green): pretty easy as well. Spinach tortellini for lunch was delicious, and I got to have green tea with boba in the evening.

Friday (blue): the absolute worst. I had blueberries all day. and Gatorade. Dinner was this gross blue ice cream I saw at Baskin Robbins. This was so, so gross. Most people tell me they started to worry because they were feeling sick just looking at the photos. Blueberries aside, there is nothing blue that isn't synthetic. And don't try to argue with me here. There are 30 people that each said "Let me think, I know I can think of something blue for you to eat" and I would respond with "No. Really. You can't." Don't say blue potatoes or blue corn chips. This was a photography project, and they do not photograph blue. I hated blue day.

Saturday (indigo): eh. I had an entire bag of blue corn chips, and made a dark purple Naked-based smoothie. This is when I started to get really bored, even though I was happy to have salt again.

Sunday (violet): eh again. I was so, so, so bored by this point. So bored. I had another smoothie, some blue corn cereal I managed to find (yes, violet, lightish purple), boysenberry yogurt, etc. I don't want to look at another fruit again. I am sick of sugar.

By end of Sunday I started to feel terrible. I hadn't had protein in the previous three days, my body was starting to freak out, etc. The beating sun in the desert of McCarren Pool didn't help either. So at sundown I did this:


oops.

Am I glad I did it? I'm not sure. I like the photos that came out of it.

Would I recommend it to other people? Yes if you don't mind eating a lot of the same things all day, or if you want to screw with your glycemic index.

Would I do it again? No, no, no no no.

Would I do another food /photography based project? Perhaps. I would definitely think a lot more beforehand though.

EDIT | 10 March 2009 : My answers are surely different by now, right? Right. I am drinking a latte and just had a pumpkin muffin. Yes, I'm glad I did the project. Cascading serendipity got me a small freelance gig out of it, taking food photos for a weekly Mental_Floss feature called Dietribes (that archive isn't exhaustive, but you get the idea). I still don't give photography projects much thought, and sometimes they are inconvenient, but I always love what comes out of them. A little bit of "punishing" ends up more rewarding in the end, anyway ^_^