Osborne drew the scene from Winston’s perspective, less than a foot off the ground. From that perch, we see the legs of the tables, the bottom of the door as it swings open, and the shoes on the waitress, Kirby, with whom James falls in love. There are few scenes that show the face of any person, the houses in the neighborhood, the clothes on the characters, or anything else that could lead us to feel like this was someone else’s story. It could be our story. And the brilliance of Osborne’s work is that, very quickly, we want it to be our story.
And how he does it is through food. For most of the piece, we watch Winston eat. It starts just as kibble, when James adopts Winston. The culinary experience of these “home-cooked” meals far exceeds that of the street scraps he’d been scavenging. But it’s Winston’s reaction to his first taste of bacon that breaks down the barriers separating our species. Yes, Winston, that is what heaven tastes like. I agree. And there’s no going back to dried dog food after that. Spaghetti and meatballs. Gooey peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich midnight snacks. A rare burger at the bar. Easter ham. Chips and dip with the big game.
All that feasting, though, changes when James meets Kirby. Now it’s peas with vegetable puree and parsley garnish while dining over linen. Celery sticks and spinach. Just as their caloric intake declines, so too does Winston’s morale, until the night when James goes on a junk-food bender. Strawberry ice cream. Freezer waffles. Sugar donuts. Microwaveable mac and cheese. Though the grounds for the menu change may seem obvious to us, it takes Winston much longer to realize that James and Kirby have broken up.
It is the parsley, though, that eventually brings Winston great wisdom. Kirby would top off each meal with a fresh sprig. Even as she scaled back Winston’s allotment of fried eggs and cheese curds, she continued to add the herb on top of each bowl of kibble. So now, when a plate of pasta comes Winston’s way topped with parsley that moves James to tears, Winston puts it all together. He snatches the greenery from James’s forlorn fingers, hops out the window, and hightails it to Kirby’s restaurant. James in his robe and boxers, looking the worse for wear, rekindles his connection with his lost love. Cut to the next scene: Winston in a tuxedo bow awaiting his fair share of the wedding cake. A new house and shiny new bowl filled with kibble without the trimmings. It brings a smile to Winston’s face as he falls to sleep. He awakes to find a meatball rolling his way. Sopping with tomato sauce. Dripping with deliciousness. He looks up to see a baby in a high chair, who in slow motion takes another plump and dripping morsel and drops it straight down into Winston’s agape mouth. And that, people, is love at first sight.
Osborne set out to tell a story through food. It’s a classic tale of love and loss and love again, told from the ground up, with meals marking the passage of time and the monumental moments. “There’s the single-guy dinner, the trying-to-impress-someone-on-the-first-date dinner, simple everyday stuff, the breakup meal, the romantic meal. You can see so much about someone’s life by watching it unfold through food,” Osborne told me.
Osborne went on to explain that the premise for Feast came from a one-second moment in time. I wish any one of my many seconds at work were half as valuable.
“I was beta testing this app that makes one-second videos and strings them together to make a movie. I thought that if I turned the camera around, I might learn something about myself. So, I snapped a clip of one of the meals I ate that day. Every day. For a year. And when I watched that six-minute production of my life in food, I couldn’t believe it. I ate like shit.”
Pause here. Osborne is a healthy guy. Fit. In shape, from what I could tell. He told me he’d sent away for a profile of his DNA. He found out he is genetically predisposed for sprint racing but defies his genetic composition by running an eight-mile loop through the Hollywood Hills, metaphorically high-fiving the iconic sign along the way, as part of his normal routine. He didn’t look like the kind of person who’d lick the saffron aioli off his fingers or the plate like I was doing at that moment. So, when Osborne told me he didn’t indulge in the light-fare menu, I questioned his self-assessment.
“I joke that documenting every dinner for nearly a year led me mostly to a better understanding of why I’d been steadily gaining a few pounds a year since college. In reality it gives me a pretty wonderful appreciation of my quality of life. Not just because I’m grateful to be eating well, but also the kaleidoscope of locations, environments, and people that surround those meals. They represented a full life and it made me feel grateful to watch. When you take a step back, and see something like your choices from a wider perspective, the patterns are so much clearer.”
Wide Brackets Improve Our Memory and Decision Quality
The app that inspired Osborne to see the patterns in his life is called 1 Second Everyday and was created by a Japanese-American artist born in Peru named Cesar Kuriyama. 1 Second Everyday selects a moment from each day’s video. From one week to the next, the collection of clips grows, reflecting the diversity of your experiences. It strings them together to make a moving montage of memories. When you hit PLAY, you can watch your life unfold before your eyes.
Kuriyama, in turn, was inspired to create this technology on the day he turned thirty. “I hate that I can’t remember what I’ve done with my life,” Kuriyama told me over dinner one night. “I knew I was going to quit my job. I saved up enough money to get by for a year and I was going to travel, but I didn’t want to forget that adventure, like I had most of my twenties. I tried writing journals in the past. That didn’t work. I couldn’t stick with it. So I had to design my own way to remember.”
And he did. Kuriyama started with no knowledge of computer programming or design. Literally none. He studied film and graphic art in college. To get his project started, he asked the Internet to teach him how to make an app. Kuriyama knew that he needed some seed money to get the project off his laptop and into the world. He thought $20,000 would do it. Within only one week, a Kickstarter campaign gave him that financial injection. And over the next three weeks that the project was posted on the crowdfunding site, he received another $40,000 from more than eleven thousand people who saw its potential. Within a year, Kuriyama had created a platform that Osborne and I and two million others around the world have downloaded and found inspiration in.
As of this writing, Kuriyama is into his eighth year of capturing one second every day. I asked him how he chooses what snippet gets added to his montage and he said, “Everything and anything. People are really good at selecting the best aspects of their lives and sharing them. But we don’t record our bad days. Our moments of disappointment, sadness, anger, or guilt. When we’ve embarrassed ourselves. When we let ourselves down. Those are important parts of our life too, though. These are our everyday. That’s why the name of the app is ‘Everyday.’ So we can remember every day.”