Coming off of Ben's recent hat tip to the paper published at PLoS ("The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact"), I was reminded of some great artwork by Marc Trujillo.
I first heard of this artist by reading a nice profile of his work at a newish online literary journal called "/ONE/" (link).
Marc Trujillo is an urban landscape painter who depicts the big box retail stores, self-service gas stations, and fast-food chains that make up a large portion of the urban environment. Free of political or moral overtones, these works function both as modern North American genre scenes (much like the 17th-century Dutch genre scenes of marketplaces, courtyards, and flower stalls) and as painterly meditations on color, light, and form.
According to art historian Andrew Forge, in Trujillo's paintings "time is rescued, transformed from loss to duration [and] absence is given presence."1 All of the places Trujillo depicts contribute to the increasingly fast-paced world in which we live, where attention spans have diminished beyond the point of no return. Trujillo, however, subverts this freneticism by capturing it in an objective, but highly aesthetic manner, that allows the viewer to experience an alternative reality present in such quotidian locales.
Basically the piece suggests that his pictures represent those moments where we are most disconnected from the world around us, and particularly the things that we need or desire to keep us going.
This includes the concept of food: here, the pictures that Marc creates around that piece are quite haunting really.
Anyway, his blog, where many of his pictures are presented, is well worth a look. But for your convenience, I've put a couple of his works below.
It's a bit sad really, but I suspect that when we asked our children the question, "where does our food come from?" the images below might represent some of the first things that come to their minds.
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From my own experience I know that food that is not sold is placed in the garbage. Foodstuff company policy does not allow for the donation of food to the poor people or charitable organization. It is a shame that some people are starving and some other people throw food into the garbage. This shows how much our civilization has to change.