Sometimes, I feel disgust when I watch people eating food; other times, I feel envy. I’d like to be able to try and taste everything, to understand all human experience through food. But, I’d also like to think that I would eat in a way that wasn’t engaging in or causing any mistreatment of either animals or other humans. From the videos I’ve seen, though, that’s harder than it looks; there always seems to be something that suffers or dies as a result of any form of food consumption, and once all suffering is whittled out of a human’s diet, they can’t survive themselves. I would love, though, to be able to forage—to pick the rosemary that grows near my mum’s house, the dandelion flowers and their leaves that I’ve seen on the little patch of grass outside the studios—and to be able to eat the foods the artists in this building are growing, the mushrooms, tomatoes, herbs . . . I’d love, also, to be able just to go to a normal shop and buy my food, to peel back an aluminum and plastic lid on a polystyrene box and tuck into my dinner in the way a human can with instant ramen. I close YouTube.

I roll onto my back and look at the ceiling. I’m not needed at the gallery today; although, I felt like I essentially wasn’t needed at the gallery when I was told that I was needed there yesterday. I had expected I’d be going in at a set time and maybe shadowing a different member of the curatorial team each day. But it turns out we get told every few days when we are required; all of us interns work at different times, and no one really seems to actually be learning anything, just acting like part-time gallery assistants, but unpaid.