TUCKER SHAW: everything i ate
Flipping through the pages of
Everything I Ate, there’s an
almost endless supply and variety of food. Late-night bowls
of cereal. Take-out pizza. Meals shared with friends. It seems
almost impossible that Tucker Shaw ate all this chow by himself,
especially after you skip ahead to his slender author
photo. His book is a year-long diary of personal food consumption,
and it began life as an unusual side project.
When Shaw started obsessively photographing his snacks
and meals in January 2004, he was working as a teen advice columnist
for Alloy.com. He’d always been enamored with food
and was more likely to take pictures of what he ate on vacation
than what he saw. “Food is a really strong memory trigger
for me,” he says. So in late 2003, he came up with the idea to
take snapshots of everything he ate for an entire calendar year.
“I like to set myself little goals,” he says. “I knew it would take
discipline, but it wouldn’t necessarily be difficult.”
There’s something surprisingly intimate about these tiny
images, which are arranged by date and come with brief notes
on when, where, and what was eaten. “I wanted to create something
that was a straightforward record without too much emotion,”
Shaw says. “I sort of had this little image in my head of
someone digging up the ruins of New York City thousands of
years from now and going, ‘Oh, wow.’” Collectively, the photos
form a rare, in-depth glimpse into someone else’s life and make
the reader stop to think about his or her own eating habits.
After Shaw’s project found its way into The New York Times,
he thought it might have legs and put together a book proposal
that was eventually picked up by Chronicle. He also learned
a lesson that’s helped increase his writing time. “I think creatively
there’s a discipline that’s so important,” he says. “It’s
one thing to be a creative person and have creative ideas. It’s
another to produce.” And in an ending that’s truly poetic, all
this food cataloguing helped land him a new job—dining critic
at the Denver Post.
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