Photographer Tom Lakeman is using Kickstarter to raise funds for À La Cart, a book based on an unusual photo series. Lakeman makes inedible recipes out of abandoned shopping lists he finds at his local grocery store.
5 A Day Facemask
"I’ve been collecting people's discarded shopping lists for eight-plus years," he tells BuzzFeed. "I’ve always been intrigued by the handwritten notes people would leave behind. Their handwriting, the scribbled reminders and notes, the seemingly random ingredients, and the burning question of ‘What sort of person did this belong to?'
"I never knew what I wanted to do with the shopping lists. I just started to collect them. Then one day I was looking at all the lists, by then I must have had 250-plus, and I thought, These aren’t shopping lists. They are recipes. It’s my job to make them. And so it began." – Tom Lakeman
Volt Burger
Amp Lunch
Chocolate Meatball Salad
Trifling Trifle
Japanese Cotton Noodles
"When I see products like ear buds, I think noodles. Toilet roll suddenly becomes sheets of filo pasty, batteries turn into meat... I'm a massive kid. This was like going back to kindergarten. I loved it." —Tom Lakeman
Kitchen Roll Chicken Pie
Cat Food Cupcake
"The ‘Cat Food Cupcake' was the best to create, as the combined ingredients couldn't have worked better together if I’d written it myself. The cotton wool pads worked as icing, a mix of cucumber, sweetcorn, and cat food make the sponge cake, and to top it off there was a single ‘candle’ written on the list. It was like figuring out the missing riddle. It just made a perfect cupcake." —Tom Lakeman
Poached Tongue with Box Fish
Silk Cut Salad
The Bee Keepers Brunch
