The single portions of food at the supermarket are a strange business entity. The skimpy, perfect packaging directly links with the little windows of the huge buildings of one-room flats that are filling up all the big cities. The quantity of food inside them is always slightly more than necessary, so they seem to represent the triumph of convenience but in reality function as a symbolic defiance of the loneliness of those who use them. The Secret Cooks Club of Singapore conspires against this reality. Through the project FoodMatch, exhibited at Enter 5 biennial in Prague, the group calls people to share their leftovers with other lonely metropolitan inhabitants. Thanks to this facebook app, you can share information and upload pictures that describe the ingredients in the fridge. It's then possible to fix a place and a date for a real dinner. Anyone can join and add foods that will be used to make delicious recipes (obtained automatically through Google API) and eaten in the company of real diners. Besides being a delicious initiative against waste and overproduction of food (as the artists show in a video on their website the world produces almost 700 million tonnes of food annually but every year 80 million tonnes end up in landfills), the project promotes a positive use of social networks. In this case it is no longer a means of socialization consumed in solitude for entertainment and distraction, but a virtual tool for sharing and meeting real people.
Chiara Ciociola