An Artist Sculpted Everything He Ate in a Year

The Israeli artist Itamar Gilboa tracked how much he and and drank, then cast all of it in plaster.

Itamar Gilboa used to drink a lot of wine. Forty-three gallons a year, to be exact. That's 215 bottles. He knows this because he kept track---not just of how much wine he consumed, but how much of everything he consumed. Over the course of a year, the artist ate 133 cucumbers, 567 slices of bread, 155 lemons, 32 gallons of Diet Coke, 490 tomatoes, and three figs. And that’s just a fraction of his intake.

In total, Gilboa ate or drank 8,000 items, and he has proof of it. In the Food Chain Project, the artist made a pristine white replica of all the food and drink he consumed in that year. It's like a quantified-self dataset brought to life.

The project began when Gilboa moved from Tel Aviv to Amsterdam to study art. In Tel Aviv, he subsisted on a mostly mediterranean diet---hummus, vegetables, olives. But once he arrived in the Netherlands, his eating habits began to skew toward the cold-weather fare Amsterdam is known for---things like cheese, meats, stroopwafels. Gilboa felt and saw the effects, and grew interested in tracking his habits to glean a better understanding of his choices and their impact.

The quantified-self movement---the concerted collection of personal data---might be the backbone of fitness trackers such as the Jawbone Up and the Fitbit, but Gilboa went old school. For an entire year, he carried a notebook and pen, diligently jotting down everything he swallowed. He had one rule: No looking back until the year was over. “I didn’t want to change my habits in the middle of it,” he says.

Gilboa ended up with a massive dataset. It was now a matter of figuring out how to visualize it. “I wondered what it would look like to have 365 days of food in one space,” he says. He began making molds of food, casting shapes in plaster and whittling away to get nearly exact replicas.

For drinks like wine and water, he’d calculate how many gallons he drank and determine how many bottles or cans that amounted to. He cut the leaves off cauliflower to produce a more compact shape, glued individual grapes together to build a perfect bunch, and even made rubber vegetables for his hamburgers since the vegetables were too flimsy to mold. For a pineapple, he used cactus to replace the fruit’s leaves. “It looks exactly like a pineapple,” he says. “Even nicer, I think.”

Gilboa recently arranged all 6,000 sculptures in a room set up like a supermarket, creating a stunning sea of white objects for visitors to gawk at. Each sculpture is for sale, with 70 percent of the money earned going to food-related organizations like Fair Food International and Youth Food Movement. It's a little on the nose but nonetheless a striking image to confront, because it really is hard for people to imagine what they consume each day. Food, like so many other ephemeral things, tends to slip our minds once eaten. In that way, Gilboa’s created a clever visual reminder of just how much we put into our bodies, and how little thought we give it.

For his part, Gilboa says the project did change his behavior. He cut back on meat, added more vegetables and took stock of how much wine he consumed. “Before, I used to open a bottle of wine every day in my studio,” he says. “That changed immediately.”