Potato Archive
Book design / Web design
“You are what you eat.”
The phrase encourages people to eat good food in order to stay healthy and fit. As a person who suffered from health anxiety and orthorexia for years, healthy eating to me is a symptom of my unhealthiness. So what does food really talk about us? Are we really what we eat?
This trivial thought led me to think about food being unlikely symbols of ideas and people. In this project, I chose the potato as a symbol of my rather bitter personal experience being a transient being. I tried to map out the various places I have lived, along with mapping the long history of how the humble potato have traveled around the world, from the Andes to Ireland. Each page represent these ideas in abstracted collages.
The phrase encourages people to eat good food in order to stay healthy and fit. As a person who suffered from health anxiety and orthorexia for years, healthy eating to me is a symptom of my unhealthiness. So what does food really talk about us? Are we really what we eat?
This trivial thought led me to think about food being unlikely symbols of ideas and people. In this project, I chose the potato as a symbol of my rather bitter personal experience being a transient being. I tried to map out the various places I have lived, along with mapping the long history of how the humble potato have traveled around the world, from the Andes to Ireland. Each page represent these ideas in abstracted collages.
The second component of this project was a web archive. For the [past], I designed an animated poster with the brief history of potatoes. In [me], I added diary entries on my memories of potatoes and immigration.