Eat What You Want
Background
Eat What You Want is a speculative transmedia project by Jessy Zhang, Grace Yuan, and Candide Uyanze. It serves as a virtual restaurant and online food archive. It has a fictional, speculative context where in the future, people will eat canned, lab-generated food for daily nutrition rather than raw food. The State promotes this diet because it can significantly alleviate the food shortage and meet physiological needs.
The project's premise is as follows:
“Eat What You Want” is an initiative founded by [redacted], later developed into an uprising organization and catalyst for change in 2090.
We advocate for bringing back natural food and fighting against The State regulations.
Welcome to the secret dark web where we archive all types of food from the past.
Transmedia Explorations
🎧Audio Backstory 🎧
The project's first exploration dives into the backstory through layered audio storytelling.
Listen with headphones
Transcript
The year is 2090. A number of space stations have been built to allow space travel between Earth and other planets.
As a consequence of increasing energy and resource consumption, global warming, and rising sea levels necessary to maintain the space stations, organic food supply has become the biggest living challenge. Fertile soil for cultivation has been depleted, and most food is produced artificially using a proprietary blockchain technology named SimulFood. These lab-grown, food-like substances are costly to produce, and the finest quality is reserved for those with the most processing power and wealth.
The majority of inhabitants eat flavorless canned food, which consumes less processing power to run the Blockchain. They provide basic nutrients, vitamins, and calories. The State claims that there are no health concerns tied to the canned substances, as each can is customized to each inhabitant’s needs.
Due to the high cost of generating simulated fruits, vegetables, and meat with SimulFood, The State has strict regulations on supply. To avoid reproducing previous food panics and crises, The State is the sole manager of archives on the history of food and the last remaining seeds on the planet. Distributing documents, videos, or organic matter related to natural food and its history from this secret vault is illegal and subject to punishment. Through this State-sanctioned suppression, inhabitants have grown accustomed to lab food, and the society’s collective memories of food have slowly faded.
ENTER DR GRAINE
Dr. Graine is an expert on lab food. She’s been fascinated and curious about its production for as long as she could remember, and dedicated her life to perfecting the SimulFood Blockchain as a public servant of The State. One day, she was sorting through her grandfather's files, and found a website called ‘Eat What You Want’…
👁 THE UPRISING: AR Menu 👁
The second exploration utilises both augmented visualisation and audio narratives through synthetic speech to bring a more immersive experience. Audience members are invited to scan the menu's AR targets to see and hear stories on the foods that once were.
Video Essay
Created By
Xin Zhang | Original concept, Menu design, Backstory writing
Grace Yuan | Graphic design, Web development, Augmented Reality (AR)
Candide Uyanze | Audio + Video editing, Sound sourcing, Revision