By Britta Barrett | Posted April 12 2010
While the image of a re-heated square of pizza might not make the most artistic still life, it can actually help improve your diet.
This is the belief held by Mrs. Q, a teacher in Illinois who calls attention to the relative health in her school cafeteria by eating the same lunches as her students and photographing them with her mobile phone. Mrs. Q (who remains anonymous to protect her job) is documenting the project on her blog, Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project.
Her pictures are coupled with the daily menu and a short reflection on what she ate. Mrs. Q describes not only the nutritional content of the food, but the state of her own personal health and how the food might impact it.
Each month, she posts a recap breaking down the kind and number of foods she ate, along with a summary of what she learned and an update on her progress and health.
The project has helped raise awareness about nutrition in public schools, as evidenced in Civil Eats, a site dedicated to sustainable food and agriculture. Says Civil Eats, Mrs. Q “has hit on a simple but surefire way to draw attention to the deplorable state of school lunch in her workplace.”
Like Mrs. Q, we believe photographing your meals can be a powerful and enlightening way to look at personal nutrition. It’s the same philosophy behind the recent prominence of food photography blogs like Eat.ly, and even inspired a task in Morsel, our mobile application: “Write down or photograph the next meal you eat.” If you haven’t completed it yet, now is a good time to give it a try.
And if you want to take your own food documentation a step further, follow Mrs. Q’s example and start a photoblog of all the food you eat for a week, month or year. Would it affect the way you think about and consume food?
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