Asians are all about best value and that’s why they bring their own food to Disney World. When my family and cousins went to EPCOT and the Magic Kingdom each summer, my mom would bring a bag full of her delicious, homemade zongzi - sticky rice and meat wrapped up in bamboo leaves. One time while we took our lunch break and munched away at our Chinese snacks, a couple walked up to us and said, “That looks delicious! Did you pick that from the tree?” Oh you silly white people haha.

If I weren’t Asian I probably would have asked the same thing. It looks leafy enough and I have no idea where most of my food comes from. The most shocking thing I saw at Hearst’s billion-dollar castle in San Simeon was an orange tree (they’re so small and they hold so many!) and I couldn’t tell you the origins of my bologna sandwich (is this a dangerous road?…). I’m still learning about the larger networks that form my “food systems,” and one of my favorite lessons comes in the form of cute, educational fruit wrappers.

Art collective Free Soil (including Futurefarmers founder Amy Franceschini) created F.R.U.I.T., custom wrappers that wax poetic on the resources and transportation needed to supply the pieces of fruit they lovingly envelop. It’s the behind-the-scenes story of your food so you can better understand all the miles it’s traveled and all the energy it’s taken and all the people who have groped it before it’s landed in your hands. So let this be a reminder of what a jet-setting life your fruit has had and how much you should really wash that apple before you put it in your mouth ha…

Photo above from the F.R.U.I.T. site.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 8:36 am and is filed under Design, Public Art, Urban Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.