Satirising the marketing and branding of commodified food, we created the food brand MesoMeals during a research and development residency utilising a vacant retail unit in Sheffield city centre. We wanted to bring the idea of wild food into an urban arena and devised a series of radical urban interventions, subvertising and performative actions which complemented a sculptural and light installation Spring Uprising.

We launched the brand with fly posters covering existing advertising left around the exterior of vacant units, a supermarket intervention in which we placed fake food packets in the chilled and frozen food sections, and a shop window performance, Wild Weed Kitchen.

MesoMeals references the Mesolithic period when people repopulated Britain after the Ice Age, and focuses on food readily available during the era, parodying the Californian trend of Paleo food, referring to the old Stone Age, where proponents seem to believe that our ancestors were able to jet around the world at will as they incorporate lychees, sweet potato and raspberries into one meal.