This thesis analyses, documents, and explores the possibilities of food perception through our senses. Hereby the project should open up for alternative systems regarding the edibility of food. The project focuses on date labels and the way they affect consumption and food waste. The components of my thesis project include an interactive workshop, a survey as a baseline and an installation to further understand sensory cues in relation to safe consumption of food. The workshop is designed to enable visitors to investigate their perception of food in various processing stages. (raw, processed, leftover, etc.) This interaction explores multiple factors influencing our perspective of food, being labelled as waste, as surplus, or as consumable, in connection with the installation which observes the current behaviour of food edibility as an interaction between date labels and sensory cues. Following through by using and connecting the knowledge of our senses to confirm the safe consumption of food, with this, questioning the necessity as well as the connotations of best-before-labels or similar formulations.

This study evaluates the public market system in New Orleans, Louisiana by focusing on the history of New Orleans public markets, the privatization of food, and the "greening" of the city with the creation of the Crescent City Farmers Market and other grass roots food activist efforts. Using qualitative methods, ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation and interviewing, issues of food access, food security, food production, food locality, quality, and affordability in New Orleans are explored. The history of public markets in New Orleans and the patterns of market proliferation, regulation, and privatization are significant in the landscape of cultural self-identification, community cohesion, neighborhood networks and economic and ecological development and sustainability. The city's various food shopping arenas and their locations become markers of history, status, rebellion, and of the "other," and become centers for issues of health, economy, politics, and food.