Eating a bag of chips? Delicious right! Great snack. But what you’re really eating are all these weird powders and difficult to pronounce additives and manufactured colours and sticky glue goop. This photo series for the book Ingredients by Dwight Eschliman and Steve Ettlinger reveals what’s inside your favourite foods and displays them each in a chilly visual breakdown.
Ingredients: A Visual Exploration of 75 Additives & 25 Food Products is a book that covers exactly what it promises: additives used in food and then popular food products deconstructed to what they’re made out of: Alginate, Annato, Anthocyanins, Ascorbic acid, different versionss of corn, Diacetyl, Disodium inosinate, Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, Ferrous sulfate… and you get the point.
Of course, these additives in our food aren’t a secret. Not at all. They’re smacked right onto the packaging but it’s completely different to see a list of words versus seeing them splayed out like this.
Above is Doritos
This would be Orowheat
Campbell’s Soup
The white powder is… caffeine
Red 40 and Yellow 5. Food colouring!
All the images are from Dwight Eschliman, from Ingredients: A Visual Exploration of 75 Additives & 25 Food Products (Regan Arts, September 2015). The cover of the book is below and you can buy it here.