Etiquette at the Table

A cross-disciplinary semester project by Qianwen Zhu

Since mankind has mastered the subtleties of cooking, acceptable dining etiquette has followed - from having appropriate table manners, to how we arrange our cutlery and properly use them. Considering that we place a great deal of importance on our behavior with respect to the food that enters our digestive system, one may ask if the planet we live on has, in fact, a digestive system?

What is the process by which rivers, oceans, land and air digest the products of human industrial waste? What role do humans play in shaping universal dining rituals?

By combining a montage of visual representations and cartographic representations, this project addresses the challenging issue of the global waste trade.