Some images and text from a book, entitled Consumables, that I am currently working on.

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If electronic devices were edible, we could save on petrochemicals and solve the global food crisis in one simple move. In place of e-waste, there would now be e-food. There would be no more photo essay exposés of towns in China piled with PCB’s, dusted in plastic and beset with birth defects. There would be no more African famines. As the developing world grew fat on the cast-offs, ‘starving child’ advertisements would go viral retro cool on YouTube and the guilt market would be forced to redouble its efforts in carbon offset schemes. Instead of upgrading your phone once a year, you could buy a new one once a week and know that you were contributing something to the world simply by wasting more.

There would be phones in different flavours – lime, orange, lemon, strawberry, vanilla, blueberry, bubblegum, butterscotch, marshmallow fudge, pecan mocha deluxe, wildberry banana delight, apple carrot and beetroot with ginger (50 cents extra).

There would be country women’s associations dedicated to collecting old phones for Africa and the school fair would be host to multiple stalls selling phone jam – ‘proceeds to a good cause’. Some enterprising publisher would release a series of How to Feed a Family on Less phone cookery books with a special edition for refugees and people living on phone handouts. Chapter headings might include: How to Combine Unlikely Flavours, Cooking with Phones in a Solar Oven, How to Make your Phone go Further.

There would be phone cooking competitions and celebrity phone chefs, each one sponsored by a different phone company. There would be a reality TV series following one of the celebrity chefs as he toured the world teaching the poor and disadvantaged how to cook healthier meals with their secondhand phones. Ad breaks would feature a special edition coffee table book available for purchase online or from your local Borders megastore and the website would have recipes for download straight to your phone - crumb it, batter it, fry it, bake it, boil it, toast it, grill it, roast it. But most people would just use the nearest Dial-A-Phone, where you could trade in last week’s handset for a discount on any gourmet model freshly oven fired.