They say that we are what we eat.
But are we really?

The 33-year-old Mark Menjivar, a photographer who is based in San Antonio, Texas travelled all across America for almost four years to prove that we truly are what we eat.

Mark Menjivar peeked and photographed the insides of refrigerators of people he met in airplanes, restaurants or strangers who were walking down the street. These people range from the rich to the poor, from vegetarians to republicans, from members of the National Rifle Association to those who were left out and under-appreciated.

The idea started out when Mark was doing a documentary project about hunger and then took a photograph of his fridge on the spur of the moment. Looking at the photograph, somehow he felt like he was shown an aspect of his life he had never known before. He then started taking pictures of people’s insides of refrigerators in 2008 and then photographed them again in 2012 to show us how the contents of our refrigerators also change along our shift of personalities and behaviors. Take his picture of a  bartender’s refrigerator for example. In 2008, the refrigerator was stuffed with styrofoam take-out boxes yet four years later, as the bartender already changed his eating habit, we could not find any of those anymore.

Mark’s own refrigerator, too, has changed over the span of four years as he has already become a father to two young boys. Now, his refrigerator is filled with his sons’ lunch boxes and favorite snacks.

When asked about the things he had found in people’s refrigerators, Mark stated that he had found hair, towels, batteries, bugs, placentas, snakes (Why would anyone put snakes in their refrigerators?), film etc.

Now, “You are what you eat” has been exhibited in solo exhibitions for 10 times after its first exhibition in 2008 at Austin, Texas and has been exposed by various medias all over the globe such as The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, O Globo (Brazil), Opcions (Spain), Yeosung Joongang (Korea) and various others.

You are what you eat implicates the idea that we, as a whole, are determined by what we eat. It is perhaps considered as a cliche, but I personally agree to it although, to make it more precise, we are actually something of a greater extent: we are what we do. And looking at it from the bigger picture, what we eat is just one of the influencing factors that make us us.

Text by Siti Hartinah Putri