What to eat in the Anthropocene?
Project: “Utopia or Oblivion”, an undergraduate project on the end of the world.
Role: Student
Date: August 2019-December 2019
“What to eat in the Anthropocene” was a booklet I created to talk about food. More specifically, the food of the future. How will our changing earth change the food we harvest from it? Climate change is so terrifying and overwhelming to wrap one’s mind around, I figured food was a pretty simple place to start. And I was wrong.
I was shocked and horrified to see stories of water supplies drying up, plants going extinct, or carbon emissions poisoning the air. Species diversity getting thrown out the window, native crops dying out. It is hard to stay hopeful in face of these odds.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Instead of getting overwhelmed with how many things are going wrong, I learned about how many things we can fix with the right tools.
There will be a future. The world will not end. That future may have less cheeseburgers and cappuccinos, but it’ll be a future alright.
Preliminary Sketches
This is a sketch I made for a visual on vertical farming, the practice of growing plants upwards to save space on the ground.
This was a drawing of a cricket I made for the Entomophagy section. Farming bugs is highly sustainable and effective, even if it’s a bit weird to get used to.
Chickens have become somewhat of a mascot for the Anthropocene; they are the most numerous vertebrates on land at a population of 23 billion. Scientists consider the chicken to be a key fossil of the age.
This one didn’t make the final cut, but I liked the grainy earth texture. Feels like something from the past and the future.
Developments
I loved my topic. I spent a lot of time on illustrations, but I quickly realized the book wasn’t cohesive and the narrative was suffering for it.
This next step was refining the type and image for a unified image.
before.
after.
Final Product
