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Food

Trypophobes Beware These Industrial Grommet-Filled Foodstuffs

These "Frankenfoods" may make your skin crawl.
Images courtesy Paul Lukas

If the toppings on this pizza give you the willies, you might be afflicted with trypophobia: the fear of holes. Journalist Paul Lukas has the opposite of that: he's obsessed with punching these tiny metal grommets into any foodstuff he can get his hands on. The project, entitled GrommIt, combines the strange satisfaction of the hole-puncher with a contemplation of the industrial aesthetic.

The juxtaposition between organic and artificial is something we're facing more and more with the advent of transhumanism, and the public's continued interested in where our heavily-processed meals come from. "The grommeted food evokes terms like factory farming and 'Frankenfoods' and so on, all of which are part of the current cultural debate regarding food policy," explains Lukas to The Creators Project.

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The biggest downside is that GrommIt, Lukas' first visual art endeavor, triggers a phobia in some onlookers. "Several people have told me that the project triggers their trypophobia, which is something I hadn't considered or intended," he says, "Others have said they find the images disturbing because the sight of grommets in, say, a spoonful of Cheerios, instinctively makes them think of chewing the grommeted cereal, which of course is unpleasant."

The two seemingly-opposite reactions might not be so different, though. Perhaps the satisfaction of seeing snacks shot full of holes and embedded with inedible metals is rooted in the same fear of it entering the body. Like Freud's concept of the death drive, that what we fear also drives us forward. The same voice that says, "Jump" when leaning over a cliff says "Bite," when gazing at those Cheerios. And unless you're irrationally afraid of heights—or holes—therein lies the joy of the whole thing.

Or, y'know, maybe they just look cool and refresh our viewing of foods.  Check out more of Paul Lukas' GrommIt series below.

See the complete series on Paul Lukas' dedicated Gromm•It website.

Via Rob Walker

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