Graduate’s Snappy Diet

12 March 2002
BBC Nottingham

Ellie Harrison has spent the past year of her life taking photographs of absolutely everything she’s eaten.

It all started as a project while she was a student at Nottingham Trent University.

The project, named ‘Eat 22‘, a reference to the year of her life she spent on a daily diet of foodie photos, began on her 22nd birthday.

In total she has a collection of 1640 images.

Ellie says the one thing the year has done is change her eating habits.

She’s stopped snacking between meals because it was too much hassle to take the picture.

This month she turned 23 and the project has come to an end, but she’s published the pictures for all to see on the internet.

Read our interview with Ellie as she explains her reasons for taking on the project:

Hi Ellie. Why?

I’ve always been quite obsessed with food and made quite a lot of artwork to do with food.

It just seemed like a good idea to set myself a challenge of trying to document everything I ate for a year.

Was there an academic reason?

Well, I did get a degree that says well done.

Was it tied in to that?

Yes. I started on 11th March 2001, which was my 22nd birthday so by the time of the degree show in May I showed a kind of animation of the first eight weeks of the project.

So that went towards my degree.

Does this mean that for a year you’ve carried a camera absolutely everywhere?

Yeah. That’s exactly what it means. The camera’s not too big. It’s a digital camera so I didn’t have to have any processing costs. It’s not that big but I couldn’t leave my house without it.

What was the most difficult bit?

Just remembering. But it wasn’t that hard it just became such a part of my life that I never really forgot.

I was so obsessed with the fact that I wanted to do it for a year that it wasn’t that hard at all.
Is there a picture we really wouldn’t want to see?

There’s probably quite a few actually – early morning shots when I wish I was still in bed.

Any more crazy ideas planned?

I don’t know. But, since the finish of the project I’ve kind of gone a bit wild with the eating because I’ve got so much freedom and I am so carefree when I eat.

I can actually open the fridge and eat whatever I like without having to take a picture of it first.