TacoShed: The Biography of a Taco
The Tacoshed research project originated from a seminar entitled, Brave New Ecologies, the premise of the class was to investigate local & global food networks through the lens of a single meal from a local Taco Truck. From there we traced each ingredients’ path of travel from its original source location to our tacos, effectively creating the biography of a taco.
After the course, the Tacoshed research was graphically compiled by Annie Aldrich and myself which we presented at Studio for Urban Project . We summarized the different stories of each ingredients into three relationships which illustrated common conditions of factory farming. The maps also appear in the April issue of Meatpaper Magazine.
The Prima Donna v. The Faceless Masses
The Avocado is the Prima Donna of the taco, each fruit is check by sonar pulse to measure it's interior firmness. The frequency of the resonance corresponds to a ripeness index allowing grocers to specify how ripe they would like their product. All of this to insure a perfectly ripe avocado.
The Pinto Bean on the other hand is just one in a sea of many. It requires very little coddling; the bean pods dry on the stalk, and there is only one harvest per year when they are shucked and bagged. What is sold as 'Pinto Beans' may be any one of four species which are mixed together in the fields, indistinguishable in a sea of beans.
All For One v. One For All
The sour cream and mozzarella cheese in our taco illustrate the 'collective nature' of mass produced foods. The Sour Cream was sold under the label James Farm. It was actually made by Scott Brothers Dairy, which also produces products for the Chino Valley Dairy. The sour cream itself is the same but ends up under many different names around the country to appeal to diverse markets.
The Cheese was produced by Leprino Food group which has ten manufacturing plants across the country. Each plant makes a handful of the products sold by Leprino, often overlapping the production of other plants. The mozzarella in our taco was made in Tracy, whereas a NYC street taco might have cheese from Wisconsin, regardless it is always Leprino.
The Quick Sell v. The Long Haul
Iceberg Lettuce has a shelf life of only two weeks. To achieve maximum expediency the heads are washed and bagged in the fields. Within 24hrs the lettuce has been loaded on a truck to travel to its final destination.
On the other hand Aluminum Foil travels over 17,000 miles. It slowly makes it's way from bauxite mines in Australia to be refined in Spain and processed in Chicago to finally be trucked to a store near you.
The Tacoshed project was a collaboration between David Fletcher (fletcherstudio.com) and Rebar (rebargroup.org), with the students of the Brave New Ecologies Course taught in the Fall of 2009 as part of URBANlab, an innovative curriculum component of The California College of the Arts Architecture Program.
Maps and graphics were created by Rachael Yu and Annie Aldrich, Teresa Aguilera (Rebar), and Fletcher Studio.