This was a quick design assignment for my current project studio, CIVIC MEDIA, FOOD SYSTEMS, & INTERACTION DESIGN. The task was to “create a map that documents where you need to go to acquire the items to make your favorite dish.”
I found a terrific Atlanta map from the 1870s that highlighted important Civil War locations. I marked my shopping locations on the map, based on the time and energy it would have taken for Sherman’s troops to march around the city. At a pace of roughly 5 miles per day and a food allowance of a pound of hard tack biscuits and some salted meat, I estimated the distance from my house to Your Dekalb Farmers Market as taking around 14 hard tack biscuits. The journey to Grant Park would have taken roughly half a day and eight horrible hard tack biscuits.
I wanted to juxtapose the horrors of history with the relative availability and frivolity of food in modern times. Civil War markers are all around Atlanta, but it’s extremely difficult to envision what the city looked and felt like 150 years ago. This map forces a kind of perspective shift and a tension between the Atlanta of the old map and the more familiar Google map view.