12 March 2026
Bristol University Press (p.1-4) ISBN 978-1529248852
In 2001, the British artist Ellie Harrison decided to engage in a new conceptual food art project. At the time, it seemed a radical and extraordinary idea: For a year, Harrison would take pictures of all her meals without exception. She began March 11, 2001, the day she turned 22. The first image displays a small birthday cake with candles. The project was named Eat 22 and ended the subsequent year as Harrison turned 23 on March 11, 2002. During this period, Harrison uploaded the photos she had taken the previous week. All the photos use the same perspective: the viewer faces Harrison eating from a sitting position, making room for her head and torso in a way that Harrison’s mouth becomes central to the images. Hence, the photos are not photos of the food (as seen from the point of view of the eater), they exhibit the act of eating. The in1ages are very mundane in the sense that they do not romanticize or glamorize food or eating. They show Harrison eating food that would be common for her generation of younger Brits around the turn of the century. The food that is convenient and relatively cheap: fast food, sandwiches, ice cream, bananas… So, not a particularly healthy or spectacular diet, nor one that would impress present-day foodies. Nothing spectacular about Harrison’s outfits either, she is dressed as a student in T-shirts and hoodies. The pictures have various backgrounds, a lot are taken at the dining table in her kitchen, others in (fast food) restaurants, on the train, outside in parks… Always just Harrison and her food in the image. The project ended up with 1,640 images of Harrison’s meals during that year. As a part of the project, these photos were united in a three-minute long video montage where they are displayed chronologically at a very fast pace, bearing witness to the many meals a person consumes in the timespan of a year.
In 2017, we saw this montage. It was exposed at the food art exhibition Eat Me at the museum of contemporary art and design Trapholt in Kolding, Denmark (Gron 2017). We have since returned to Eat 22 when discussing the present book as this artwork articulates several themes that are central to this book on food aesthetics in the digital age and more particular the concept of food porn.
One of the first points that Eat 22 made us reflect on was how fast our relationship to food aesthetics has altered in this twenty-first century. Taking pictures of your meals and sharing them with everyone was considered as a provocative and transgressive food project just twenty years ago. If young artists today would suggest a similar conceptual project, they would be laughed at and considered highly unoriginal because taking and sharing photos of your food is presently a mundane practice. Revisiting Eat 22 today reminds us that what was an experimental artwork twenty years ago is now a relatively widespread everyday practice. This change is of course driven by technological developments, not least the development of the smartphone with advanced photo technology and the emergence of social media platforms that make sharing photos accessible to billions of people. In 2001, Harrison had to carry a camera around to realize her project and weekly connect her camera to a computer, upload the photos to the computer, organize them in folders, buy a website, upload the pictures (which back then could take a while!) and post them on the website. This laborious process demanded quite a lot of dedication and determination. Today, the process could be realized in a matter of seconds with a few clicks on the smartphone and with a better photo quality than Harrison’s photos. This also means that many people’s lnstagram profiles today resemble a glitterier version of Eat 22. What we find particularly fascinating is that the new technological possibilities also push the social norms concerning food aethetics, including who gets to do food aethetics, when it is acceptable to do it and so on.
A second dimension that relates Eat 22 to this book is the way that the work reminds us that food aesthetic in not just about making food look pretty. Food aesthetics are simultaneously intimate, social, and political. Being faced with Harrison eating 1,640 times is almost intimidating, particularly as the photos make no attempt to please the viewer of idealize the eating woman, who often with a wide-open month unapologetically devours fries or bananas. We get almost too close to her as witnesses to her everyday eating. These unpolished images challenge norms of good taste, gender, and aesthetic composition. In this regard, they differ from dominant ideals in contemporary food aesthetics; for instance, on Instagram, food aesthetics are often relatively polished and curated in accordance with norms of good taste, gender norms, and aesthetical composition. The unconventional images of food and femininity in Eat 22 remind us that food aesthetics are not ‘innocent’, they always reflect and/or negotiate the social norms and power structures on its cultural context.