Wasted Potential
Renée Crowley
View Project
“Wasted Potential” is a visualization of food insecurity as seen through the wasted food found in our compost and trash bins. Weaving yarn dyed with food scraps to create a "fiber bar chart", each woven panel represents the quarterly total number of meals served at soup kitchens in NYC during the last year (every inch of weaving equal to 10,000 meals). This piece illuminates the untapped potential of our food waste. Not only can these “wasted” materials be used to craft together colorful woven textiles, but how can edible food be rescued from our waste stream and feed those in need. To create some of the pigments in this work, Renée sifted through the compost waste stream to find reusable resources for dyeing. This process driven action of utilizing recovered food waste to dye yarn, grounds the project in what NYC’s food waste tonnage data actually looks, smells and feels like up close and recognizing that not all of it should be composted (yet!).
The City’s food waste tonnage data exhibits growth in the amount of materials that are being brought to a compost facility. “Wasted Potential” questions how we can celebrate the annual growth of a compost program, while recognizing that edible food contributes to those growth rates. Simultaneously, NYC faces growing rates of residents facing food insecurity that has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic crisis. How can our data collection efforts address this disconnection between these data sets that document our food waste and food insecurity rates across NYC?
DATASETS
Emergency Food Assistance (Quarterly Report)
DSNY Other Organics Collection Tonnages
DSNY Monthly Tonnage Data