What a disgusting thing to eat questions our meat-eating habits and moralities towards different animals through the investigation of attitudes towards edible insects from a western standpoint. This was done through illustration in different formats; posters, stickers and a comic to explore the attitudes, morals and our current meat consumption.
As a starting point for this project I wanted to explore what the current attitudes towards edible insects are within university students in Sweden and see if it’s possible to discover some of these attitudes by using illustration as a tool. I researched this by conducting a survey which asked general questions towards edible insects but also questions regarding different illustrations where edible insects were the main topic. With this I wanted to see if showing the participants different illustrations could help to bring out some of the opinions they have towards the topic. I used the answers from the survey to create the 4 posters above to portray some of the different opinions and attitudes discovered in the survey.
With time the project developed to address meat consumption and different moralities we have towards different animals. I wanted to explore these two things by creating a comic which comments on the meat consumption of our current society. The comic is a speculative fiction written from a perspective of a woman who’s life the story loosely follows. She explains how our relationship with insects has evolved throughout her lifetime.
The comic is illustrated in a more graphic style compared to the posters using only 2 colors, green and white. It consists of the big main spreads and smaller inside spreads. I included small spreads to the comic for adding text and later on also decided to illustrate these smaller spreads as well.
Since I wanted to find out if illustration could be a way to discover opinions towards edible insects I felt that it was fitting to use different styles of illustrations in this project to see if that plays a role in how people react to it.
Meat consumption is far from being a simple topic to navigate and when mixing different norms towards what we eat into it, the topic becomes even more complex. This project doesn’t show all aspects of the topic of edible insects and meat consumption but aims to highlight some of the aspects tied to these topics through the use of illustration.
