Questions of how we prepare and eat our food are central to MOLD’s ethos. From the Liver King’s raw meat evangelism to doomsday preppers and the drive for preservation, this year our contributors delved into the diet, examining how our manifold ways of eating reflect our cultural pressures and evolutions.
RAW LIVING WITH LIVER KING – Jack Bachmann
The Liver King is a TikTok influencer who promotes a raw meat diet as a step towards a primal lifestyle where masculinity is celebrated for its aggression and physical prowess. Jack Bachmann dissects the diet’s rise in popularity through its colonial origin and the feminine and masculine traits we assign to food, unearthing the ways in which we convolute the modern diet with contemporary society.
CONSUMERISM, CLASS AND COMPETITIVE EATING – Holly Eliza Temple
Competitive eating has been drawing crowds since the 19th century. Holly Eliza Temple examines its historic reverence and the ways in which our attitude towards weight has shifted since the early 20th century. Today, competitive eating is an internationally sponsored phenomenon, yet in a world full of food insecurity, we are left wondering, what value is there in watching a human body pushed to its consuming limits?
COOKING FOR THE END OF THE WORLD – Adriana Gallo
The preservation of food is an act of world building, Adriana Gallo describes. From doomsday preppers to fermentation, Adriana considers how preservation allows us to begin to build a relationship with rot, decay and death.
EATING IN THE NIGHT SEASON – John P. Kazior
John P. Kazior examines the food systems designed by the arctic indigenous Sámi, who inhabit the northernmost regions of Sweden, Finland, Norway and Russia. Their multi-species awareness creates a locally attuned ecosystem which is able to survive under the most extreme climate conditions. This approach to food production design challenges the brittle supply chains that currently uphold our food systems and explores how designing for a multi-species future is essential to our survival with the onslaught of climate change.
METHODS AND PROVISIONS: DESIGNING DREAMSCAPES WITH SUEA – Isabel Ling
Artist suea opens up about the personal inspirations that motivate her unique food design in a conversation with Isabel Ling. Pulling from her Korean-American upbringing, career in fashion and editorial design as well as personal interest in interior design, suea explores the many possibilities within food as objects of satisfaction, whether eaten or observed through ritual.
