ABOUT THE PROJECT
My work uses food as subject and material to probe notions of utopia and dystopia. Research into Western diets from WW2 to the present, allows me to evaluate the quest for mastery over bodies and environments - a behavior conceptualized through ideas of progress, beauty, domestication, and profit. Further, the dominance of human over non-humans supported by complex systems like the agricultural and food processing industries have resulted in an environmental and human health crisis. My multifaceted research has led me to develop works that speculate on a different behavioral paradigm – one motivated by interconnections and care, rather than for-profit growth. "Fortune Cookies" is among this constellation of works.

Chinese-American Fortune Cookies contain wisdom soundbites. My "Fortune Chocolates" contain aphorisms - concise expressions promoting presumed truisms about eating habits. My texts are prescriptions for lifestyle changes that reveal tensions in contemporary life, observable in Instagram’s product ads that appeal to "metaphysical" concepts such as "destiny", "dreams," and "better-life". My chocolates are prototypes constructed to complete a fictional story that Instagram followers can view on my newsfeed (@comestiblemealplan). They are not given access to buy and eat the chocolates. Rather, they are invited to imagine themselves inhabiting the narratives promoted in the aphorisms, think through their implications, save the photos, share them, and comment on them. This Instagram project allows me to participate in the construction of possible worlds.