Foodtopia
Foodtopia is a biig project our team has been doing about food. It spans across our humanities, chemistry, and art classes and lasts for about two months. We study the chemistry and history of food and display the knowledge we have gained through art. Each of us chose a topic out of six options that we were interested in and then we were put into groups that we were to stick with throughout the project. All of our study was kind of directed towards our topics. The six topics were Food and image, Food and war, Food and illness, Food and industrialization/Farming, Food and socioeconomic status, and Food and culture.
Foodzines
"What is a zine? "you might ask. Well, a zine is basically a small magazine published on a small scale. It is usually written and designed by non-professionals who want to get their opinion, voice, or knowledge out about something. So, our job was to create informational foodzines based off of topics we've been studying. Our requirements were to produce one zine per group that included art, creative writings, information, and scientific evidence/knowledge.
Food and Socieconomic Status
I was very interested in the topic of food and socioeconomic status. I was put in a group with three others who also chose to study the topic (or didn't) to work with for the whole project. Socieconomic status is basically the "class" of a person or people (in our society, high, middle, and low) based on the income, education, and occupation of that person or people. When we studied food and socioeconomic status, we were essentially studying the effects that having a high, middle, or low socioeconomic status can have on how/what you eat. This led us mainly to the topic of food deserts which we studied. Food deserts are areas where many people of low (an sometimes middle) socioeconomic status (education/income) live. In these areas, accessibility to good, affordable food is scarce and fast/junk food is abundant. Food deserts make up a big part of the U.S, and they are a big problem. We focused on them and how to eliminate them throughout the project.
Building the Foodzine
First, let me start off by explaining our situation in this project. As I've already explained, we were in groups of four to create a zine of our topic, in our case, food and socioeconomic status.
We started by brainstorming ideas and creating a mini booklet that basically mapped out what was going to be in our foodzine. Believe it or not, but this took a lot of time. A lot more than it should have but we didn't realize it then. We had many ideas and big plans and it was a little difficult to put it all together into a book. Below is a picture of the prototype:
We started by brainstorming ideas and creating a mini booklet that basically mapped out what was going to be in our foodzine. Believe it or not, but this took a lot of time. A lot more than it should have but we didn't realize it then. We had many ideas and big plans and it was a little difficult to put it all together into a book. Below is a picture of the prototype:
This part was fairly easy and fun. Basically, a pretty good start to the project.
The next step after prototyping was building the actual pages. This is where we had the most trouble. We realized in the beginning that we had designed a 23 page book versus the 5-10 page ones most people were making but, us being our crazy selves, were like "Cool! Bring it on!" even though we had half the amount of functional group members and more than double the amount of pages to make. We didn't realize how difficult making the actual pages was. So, we started to work. It was definitely really really slow in the beginning, It would take about two to three days to just make one page and it was really hard. We were also having small disagreements occasionally (though we got over them quickly) which was not good. But, then, as we started to get more into the work and better at things like Photoshop that were very necessary, we started to work faster. But, not fast enough. As the due date grew closer and closer, our stress grew more and more. Though we were better with our tools, each page still took a lot of time to get it perfect and to our standards which are very high. We almost, subconsciously split up the work between us two. I ended up creating most to all the things that needed to be done on Photoshop (like posters) and she was doing most to all of the drawings and writing out of the pages with words. Though we did swap these roles occasionally, it was basically that. Below are a few of the pages I created. Click on any picture/page to learn more about it!
These are not all the pages I created but it is most of them and the ones I am most proud of. Below are some of the pages that my partner made so you can get a better idea of how the whole book looked. Each page is skillfully drawn by her hand.
We are proud of each and every one of the pages we created for the zine but we are not sure whether it was worth all the stress they put us under. It was very bad because we'd be working very late on our project (until two in the morning sometimes) and not getting enough sleep. We still ended up having to ask for extensions and turning the final zine in a week or two past the due date. Though we were turning in advanced, beautiful work, we are not sure whether it was worth it. Below is one of the documents we spent much of our time working on.