Five hundred and twenty days- that’s one thousand, five hundred and sixty meals, excluding snacks, what a vast amount of food to pack for a journey! But what kind of food should we pack? In the words of Henry David Theroux’s Walden:

“It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life… or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries.”

Seeing that the Astronauts will be inter-planetary representatives of their nation, if not their species, should they not eat the same food that their fellow men and women (who have funded their mission) consume? According to a 2007 Nielson poll, the top ten consumer package goods in the USA were are follows: No.1 Carbonated drinks, No.2 Milk, No.3 Cigarettes, No.4 Cereal, No.5 Bread, No.6 Video products, #No.7 Bottled water, No.8 Toilet tissue, No.9 Light beer, No.10 Cookies.

Our installation at the Corcoran has utilised these statistics to physically illustrate what it is that an Astronaut would pack if they were to go to Mars, consuming the food of the Everyman: the most popularly consumed packaged goods in the USA would be brought together to nourish an Astronaut for five hundred and twenty days.

Bringing together these products that can notionally sustain an individual on a mission to Mars will illustrate the tension between our aspirations and our reality