Face Food Recipes: Sneak Peak!

30+ charaben recipes, each with how-to illustrations!

Mark Batty Publisher, November 2009.

There are two corporations I refuse to hand my money over to (mostly due to bad business practices). One is Wal-mart, that giant out of the Midwest. The other is McDonald's, which has extended its greasy hands into the big butts of every country on this planet.

In Japan, obesity levels are rising - 2 million people were treated for diabetes in 2006, which is double the numbers from fifteen years ago. Still, only about 25% of the population is overweight. Compare this to the U.S., where 65% of us have eating problems. Simply gross.

Wendy's. KFC. Denny's. Mac-a-don-a-ru. These chains have made their way into more than one Japanese neighborhood and because of this - a few charaben designs. TakuPapa's "TFC" from the first Face Food comes to mind, as does this recent design by Sauth, one of the contributors to Face Food Recipes:

Being a vegetarian, I know how hard it is to get by in Japan, especially with the high price of most imported fruits and vegetables. Given the growing availability of cheap fast food options (typically high in calories and trans fats), what is to come of the world's longest living population?

Yesterday was the birthday of the late Michael Jackson, who would've turned 51. In honor of his legacy, Spike Lee (still awesome, btw: Do The Right Thing) disregarded all that is intelligent and civil when it comes to this sort of thing and threw a MJ Birthday Bash here in Brooklyn. (Why ye 'ole city 'o Breukelen? Maybe it's because the "Bad" video was shot here.) Originally planned for Fort Greene Park, the turnout was expected to be so big the city decided it would be in everyone's best interest to pack it all and move it to the much larger Prospect Park - where it seems to be okay (Parks Dept. - score!) to leave loads and loads of trash everywhere. I'm not directly across from the park or anything, but I can certainly see it out my window. The Post originally reported a turnout of at least 10,000. That number seems a little high to me, but wow - I could totally hear Billie Jean in the distance as I took my late morning shower.

In honor, I sketched what I'm calling my Billie Jean Bento.

With these as inspiration:

I made this:

background: rice dyed with black sesame seeds

shoes/pant legs: nori

fancy socks: white rice

lit square of concrete: any white cheese

road rolling off into the distance: fishcake + nori

This seems to have been swept completely under my proverbial rug: Face Food was named one of the top 10 books of 2008 by ARTMOCO, a fine little blog uploaded out of Quebec (a place I'm still eager to visit). Anyway... Thanks! I'm honored.

Regardless of what you might think of the book, you should really check them out because they led me to this:

A life without precariously balanced CB2 and JCrew catalogs on the lid of my little Simply Human trash can?

Sheer genius!

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