For the past month and a half, I’ve photographed every meal I’ve eaten and cataloged them on a blog called What I Ate This Year. I recently hit the 100 post landmark and wanted to share some thoughts about the project.
I can describe WIATY in a few ways. In the simplest way it is a record of every meal that I eat for the entirety of 2010, tagged by content (type of meat, location, whether the meal was from a restaurant or home made). I designed WIATY in this style on purpose: I hope to glean some useful data from looking back at what I’ve eaten throughout the year. If this technology exists, I would love to sync up my Tumblr posts with my Last.fm history or with the weather, to observe if and how my food tastes are mirrored with my music choices or in the changing of the seasons.
I aim to prepare four quarterly reports from my stats, shamelessly inspired by Nicholas Felton and his Annual Reports. In these graphs I can present how frequently I eat fast food (too much, from the looks of things), and where and when I eat my favorite meals.
From the a social media perspective, WIATY is also an exercise in how much information about myself I am willing to share and am willing to analyze. I chose to only photograph and catalog meals – taking a photo of every snack I eat would be tiresome to say the least. I also believe that updating the site 2-3 times every day is much better for subscribers than sending off an update every time I eat an apple. Clearly my goal from WIATY is to analyze data. If my goal was strictly to eat healthier meals or cook more for myself, I would find it necessary to include everything I eat for the year. But the real thrill in this for me will be to pour over my data in the months to come and to see what I can discover.
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That would be interesting, to see how food choices are reflected by external and internal factors like weather and mood. That really would reveal a lot about the mind-body connection. Let me know your revelations.