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.