Food is important to me. I associate food with culture, memory, friends and family, harvest and joy, all the time. Food in the US is so different from food from home, even just an apple. I complained to my friends about how apples sold in supermarkets here look weirdly “perfect”, while back home my dad would bring me to the farmers market and tell me to pick apples that “look ugly” because they “taste better”. They told me to go pick apples at actual farms as a part “ritual for fall”. On the other hand, it seems like people here have more knowledge about pharmaceutical nutritional supplements than the nutrition value of an actual apple.
The way we consume food is changing. No matter how wonderful agricultural farming is, when it comes to the future of food, it seems impossible to compete with lab designed food, which cost significantly less land, labor and energy. And they have the potential to reach “perfection” every time.
But just like the perfectly shiny round apples sold at supermarkets always taste less exciting, I think there should be something about apples that is just irreplaceable by the artificial ones. At the end of day, we are what we eat.
I also wanted to be sarcastic about the way we tend to precisely “control” or products under the name of “a better future”. I used photography and film to develop this fictional scenario in which natural food is extinct, all we can consume is artificially designed apples.