A polio doctor in Pakistan, on a break from work, sits at a small green wooden table with colleagues and picks up a knife and fork. From nowhere we hear the swift, overly hurried and deferential whoosh of a pair of automatic glass doors to a supermarket opening. Early in the morning somewhere a stray cat purrs at a baker’s feet. We hear the slow slide of a peeling, laminated menu across the surface of a dirty linoleum-topped table. The ping of a push bell as a cook, having plated up, is ready for service. By a small stream, someone under a tree is using a clear, hollow, plastic, sharpened toothpick, picking at their teeth in regular high-pitched clicks and ticks. In between, the sound of 328 English Aga lids closing in the gaps. A buttering of overly stiff brown toast at a roadside café is simplified to a few quick sweeps of the knife in a triplet figure. On the last scrape, a frozen leg of mutton falls on the floor of a speeding van with a bang. It is answered by the ritualistic sucking-out of flesh from a cherimoya fruit by a series of angry Republicans. Different brands of ketchup squirt from unbranded plastic bottles at the same time. Someone unwittingly stands on a ripe plum on the floor of a warehouse. A maid drops a duck egg from a cotton-lined woven basket on the dark-
timbered floor of a holiday cabin near Phuket. As if in answer, we hear a unison dong as different people in different places try to break an egg on the rim of a medium-sized Pyrex bowl, though their contact on the side of the bowl is not hard enough and none of their eggs break. Consequently we just hear the ringing dong sound as their eggs strike different bowls in many kitchens in several different countries exactly at once. Each one is placed in a different position in the stereo image to create a kind of cocoon-like reverberant bell sound. This sound drenched in a long metallic plate reverb.
An elderly butler drops a heavy coloured-crystal wine glass on the polished teak deck of a boat. It is answered by 65,000 traditional Portuguese corks being pulled out of vintage French red-wine bottles at the same time. A full jar of hot marmalade is dropped on a traditional quarry-tiled floor by a sugar-beet farmer in Norfolk, followed immediately by fizzy drinks from a SodaStream in Israel being rapidly siphoned into different-sized bottles. This siphoning moves over the space of five seconds. From the fizz emerges the sound of Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference bacon in a hot frying pan recorded with great care and attention by Peter Cobbin, senior engineer at Abbey Road, using up to twenty-two microphones. We enjoy all the minute variations and detail of its sizzle. As the fat spits with increasing urgency, we become aware of another spitting sound fading underneath – a new batch of bratwurst sausages on the grill at Meister Bock at Cologne Station, but recorded on a phone. Someone has tried to engrave a recording of a pig being killed onto a tortilla and is playing it on a record player. A member of the Cargill family is quietly tearing off a piece of Domino’s pepperoni pizza, a lawyer is eating steamed bread in prison, but we can’t quite hear either. Instead we hear a single, loud, curt gesture: the crushing of garlic under a thick knife in the kitchen of a small motorhome as punctuation. Then scissors snipping the end off a smallish plastic-sealed tube of liver pâté on a beach and a repeated regular stabbing with a fork of the plastic cover to a ready meal by a nurse on a night shift. On the last of the punctures, and exactly in time, a mechanic slips and accidentally bangs a wrench against a large empty copper vat at the Heineken factory in Amsterdam. It makes a big, echoey, metallic clang which we hear dying away beneath the road noise.
An aeroplane is overhead. An alcoholic kitchen porter at a private function on Kellogg Drive, VA sharpens chef’s knives in quick succession; we hear just a tiny excerpt of each but played at speed. A sugar lump drops on a small metal tray. This sound is heard again, but played out of speakers at high volume into a shipping container. Its echo can be heard in an anonymous cavernous space nearby. An empty can of malt drink is crushed by a Caterpillar-branded boot, sharply cutting off the reverb tail of the previous sound. A near-empty tea urn at a village fête far away is gurgling, ticking underneath. A cherry spat into a chipped white enamel dish with blue edges overlaid. A hand rests on another smaller hand, stirring a pot on a stove with a crude wooden spoon. A huge metal colander is dropped in a stainless-steel sink at the development kitchen of a well-known restaurant. A laptop, its screen opened on a recipe, is dragged across an expensive antique table. A close-up of a not-yet-ripe Palestinian lemon’s skin and pith being peeled with a hand-held zester tool; not a big sound, but it’s still there, only noticeable when it stops, a presence afraid of an absence. Grind, grind: a salt mill. A grandmother is crushing golden rice in Dehradun in an iron pestle and mortar that was given as a wedding gift. It crossfades into the sound of an almond-grading machine near Modesto in California. We hear the almonds bounce and trickle quickly through the slatted metal grille. Now we hear the vibrating sound at the end of a conveyor belt inside a giant flour mill, recorded from above. A pause.
A breakdown: every pot on every stove in the world making popcorn right now, and the kernels are popping. Not dedicated popcorn-making machines and their whirring, clumsy mechanics; just pots on stoves, lids on. The recordings with the noisiest backgrounds are mixed the most quietly so the sound of the pots and popcorn is foregrounded. Consequently there is an accumulation of temporary stillness as people around these pots wait for the kernels to pop. There will be a few recordings with excited chatter from children nearby, but again we want to feel anticipation rather than be distracted by language, so any recordings with audible words on have been turned down in volume until they’re unrecognisable or the talking edited out. Assuming we are listening in on just pots and stoves whose oil is about to reach the right temperature (and eliminating those that have already started popping), this beginning lasts 10,144 milliseconds from no pops to all done. There should be a natural crescendo as we listen to every pot and stove until every corn has popped. Each of the recordings or live microphones stops at the precise moment the last corn has popped on the individual pan it is recording. Because some will be cooked before others, the effect is to feel a natural thinning-out from a dense barrage of popping to infrequent single pops and bursts until we are left with just one kernel to pop inside just one pot.
We begin again. The crack of 40 per cent of the total stock of Lidl bananas having their necks broken, ready to be peeled, the sounds piled up on top of each other. To help blur it into the next sound, a little tape delay added. The feedback knob on the tape delay is set at around 70 per cent, so the sound keeps moving on and on. It begins to fade out as we hear the slow breaking, opening of a too-ripe Australian avocado skin with a single curve of the knife. A sheep stands while it has a number twenty-one sprayed on its back. A trainee chef picks herbs in a forest. A boxcutter skilfully punctures the plastic seal round a barrel of brominated vegetable oil in a long slicing motion. Then in various kitchens across Europe, finely chopped shallots hit the bottom of hot pans roughly at the same time. Some cookery books are piled on a fire. There’s a rapid stacking of dirty dishes. A windscreen on a food truck in San Francisco shatters. An olive plops into a martini. Now the slow peeling-back of a small Spanish tin of anchovies down the middle of the stereo image is automated so it gets louder and louder as the stereo image turns inward to mono, a diminuendo. A brushing of hair behind an ear near a fire; a sharp knife lingers through an octopus; another olive in another martini. Then back in again in haste with everything colliding on top of itself. A half-empty barrel of balsamic vinegar sloshes around on the shoulder of a woman in Perugia. A washing of fresh, damp parsley from a garden in Provence. Laid over the top, a sifting of genetically modified cornflour, a flicked pan of peanuts, gluey fingers sticking to a packet of crisps, the trembling opening of a couscous packet, the pouring of Karol, sixty-seven people trying to eat mussels in silence. A shaken packet of hot sugared doughnuts at a fairground. A slam of frozen chips into a fryer in a van parked outside Berghain nightclub in Berlin. A Spanish peach stone spat into an empty rainwater barrel. A partner of a miner drops a plate of pap and vleis. An empty blender joins in, but it’s not actually a blender, it’s a dentist’s drill recorded in Guadalajara slowed down to resemble a food mixer. It slows down further, the whole track now sucked in behind it. A stream of vomit from a lead singer in detox. Someone else quickly eats two packets of chocolate biscuits in a bedroom in double time. Then off again. A crate of empty Coke bottles slammed down outside the back of a small café beneath a hydroelectric dam, answered by someone choking on a piece of steak. The sound is cut short by the crack of a dry organic oatcake being snapped by an embarrassed painter-decorator. The angry crackle of fat on a bit of industrial bacon on a campfire. A faulty extractor fan in a mountain lodge above a smoking, sticking fondue. A large bottle of thousand-island dressing falls off a table in Texas but doesn’t smash. The suck of separate teats from a milking machine on cows’ udders in a huge shed. The tumble of empty Roundup barrels in a pickup truck in Ha Giang. The dumb suck of an early-seventies chest-freezer lid opening, breaking its seal, itself interrupted by sixteen packets of crisps being stamped on in quick succession – each one a different flavour. Teetering boxes of wedding cakes cascade off the edge of a loading bay. A ripe tomato hits a politician on the back of their neck. A man slurps a prawn. Now the small squeak of human teeth against a too-thick, out-of-date slice of lightly grilled halloumi recorded in a studio in front of a live audience. Then immediately spat in a bin. The dull mini thuddish crack as you bite into a sour cherry expecting it to be sweet and also thinking that the stone has gone but finding too late that it isn’t and biting too hard on it. It’s a sound that comes again and again in what follows. A lemon tree uprooted. A child bites through a solid R White’s Lemonade ice lolly but doesn’t swallow. A quail’s egg dropped suddenly on a Delaware marble floor put through a reverb mapped from a huge indoor Polish pig shed just after all the pigs have been loaded onto a lorry. The slow long scrape of a Star Wars-themed ice-cube tray against the side of the freezer compartment of a fridge as the tray is removed. The sound slows down in time, but the pitch remains the same. It is as if the world goes into slow motion. This stretching of scraping ice eventually comes to a pause, a kind of hover. Gallons of blood pour onto the floor. A tanker in a traffic accident is spilling its cargo of milk. An industrial orange juicer is churning in Brazil. A thundering of taps filling washing-up bowls across the world. A series of underwater microphones record the rip of commercial dredging along the seabed. A Krispy Kreme executive is pissing in the shower. A mic inside the radiators of all the engines of all the Waitrose lorries on the M25 right now, even if they are stationary. The blood is still pouring. An unnoticed phone is vibrating on a messy kitchen table. A forklift idling in an apple cold store at Scripps Farm in Kent. A single gas-burner ring on full with nothing on the stove. The doctor stabs a pakora with her fork. This echoes within an unlit hollow, wooden space.
All the kitchens cooking school dinners start to roar about this time, arranged according to the price per head, starting with the most expensive first. They pile in on top of each other quickly. By the end, it is cacophonous. It finishes with a huge tray of cheap frozen sausage rolls sliding into a giant open oven. Exactly at the end of this sound, the first Russian vodka bottle in an empty but huge recycling bin in Tbilisi strikes a hollow metallic ring.
Now the beating-out of air from a pig’s lungs by an alcoholic butcher at four o’clock in the morning comes in hard, a new tempo. Twelve cows, one after another, having numbers clipped to their ears. A beer-bottle top in Nigeria is pulled off by a singer’s teeth. Now teeth being pulled out of piglets’ jaws. A waiter in Monrovia slams down a tray full of burgers, fries, coleslaw – answered by 21,100 diabetics in America either pulling a ring-pull or twisting the lid off a pressurised bottle one after another in furious succession. Even at considerable speed, this will take time to play out, the horror in the repetition. At its end, it trips into more lungs being beaten, lungs, lungs. A slit throat. A furious mixing of icing, by hand, in a bowl. Three tight chops through a neck of celery on a chopping board. Blocks of hydrogenated vegetable oil drop in the boot of a salesman’s car with a thud. A salad spinner spins freely as, with the tiniest of plops, nail clippings drop into a bowl of soup someone is about to eat. Now a rolling boil inside a hospital kitchen in Aleppo at night – interrupted by blanched potatoes hitting hot duck fat in a pan on a TV cookery show 4,252 miles away. A cork from a bottle of single-malt whisky on a British Airways flight. The jingly hop and splosh of a supermarket trolley into a canal is squeezed shorter, putting it all on a single beat. It punches the piece up, down. A stop. Two snappings of fresh Yorkshire carrots brings it back in. A lemon squeezed, pigs burned, bitter cherries bitten, teeth pulled, syringes thrown into a metal bowl with a ringing sound. A finger broken, snapped off, snaps in. The cruel grind of an arm through a machine – but gone again. A dry cracker eaten, an energy drink opened, a boat capsizes as an indeterminable hum beneath; celery snapped. A stop. A tractor reversing over a body crossfades into the fall of rain on king-prawn ponds in Vietnam at night. We luxuriate in this sound for a while. But then a toaster pops up, ready. There’s nothing in it. A food mixer twirls boringly on a film set. Inside, dough for chocolate brownies with the wrong combination of ingredients. An insistent, anxious door buzzer to a food bank in Newport recorded from the inside. Men stuff hot dogs in their mouths at an eating competition. An empty Cornish-pasty packet skates over the surface of a footpath at a stately home and it’s mic’d up by someone following and running alongside it, keeping up and pausing when necessary. Many bellies rumble, unheard by each other. The chicken you haven’t eaten yet, but will appear on a menu you will be offered in the next few weeks, is just hatching alongside 24,999 other chickens right now in a commercial hatchery. There are hums of industrial heaters and a multiplicity of tiny identical cheeps, creating an almost singular tone. Over the top of this sound comes something that almost sounds like a bonfire crackling, but is in fact Chinese takeaway staff gently filling a paper bag with just-hot prawn crackers. Crossfade into a child unwrapping the plastic of a seaweed-and-rice triangle from a Lawson store in Osaka. The tentative unwrapping of a squashed cheese-and-pickle sandwich wrapped in foil on top of a small mountain. A blowtorch on an amateur brûlée is quietly at the back of the mix. An unopened bagged salad is tossed in a cardboard box. Someone unknown forcibly breaks an olive-oil breadstick backstage in the green room at a Beethoven concert. A blueberry Innocent smoothie squirts onto a crisp white shirt. A glug of blood from a neck. Any Italians in any restaurant at the moment, snapping grissini at the same time. A single anonymous wrist snaps beneath the weight of a tower of stacked wooden crates, followed by the lids of 1 million rice cookers closing. We hear dim-sum steaming baskets placed softly but jerkily on a table; beneath it the hubbub in a canteen at a Red Bull factory, laid over someone trying to spread soft cheese on a cracker while lying in a hospital bed, laid over someone quietly sifting icing sugar, laid over a smallholder hoeing their vegetable patch, laid over the draining of spaghetti in a retirement home, laid over a distant vicious crumpling of the plastic tray from a Jaffa Cakes packet heard from the room next door, laid over a slow stirring of mint tea, laid over the laying-out of crisps, laid over the slow peeling-back of foil on a large, own-brand coleslaw tub, laid over a tray sliding across a stone floor, laid over a minibar door-shudder, laid over a child fishing for pickles from a jar – the sounds each having their moment before settling back into the general landscape of sounds.
Softly now: the bubbling of fish tanks; inside, drowsy turtles piled on top of each other. A vast vat of oil coming to temperature in a factory recorded with a hydrophone inside. Still quietly, a huge container ship slowly turns up its engines, ready to leave. A kettle backstage at a crematorium boils and can’t turn itself off. Inside every dishwasher working at this moment we hear sloshing and churning recorded from the inside. A hook and float is cast into a still pond. A continuous pouring of wine. Someone has dug up all the lids of takeaway cups of coffee or tea buried in the ground in the nineties from a landfill site near you. Barbecues are being lit, barbecues are being thrown away. A colossal clatter of pans from restaurants in Sri Lanka; many people are furiously flipping and shuffling a hot wok right now on a stove. Someone’s hand slips on a cheese grater and grates through the skin on their knuckles instead. A barrel of beer from a lorry to a cellar. Workers are running through an orchard. Bones dropped on a tray. A hedgehog bites through dry cat food left outside. A pig bites on a peach stone. Chickens peck at grain in a metal feeder in the same rhythm as the banging-out of used coffee grinds in Brooklyn coffee shops. A man scrapes an unfinished bowl of organic porridge, honey and flax seed onto a compost heap. Trucks everywhere reversing up to landfill sites, emptying their guts into holes. And the dragging of chairs and tables across floors and carpets, and the tearing of napkins, and spilt water, and the crumpling of plastic cups, and the folding of paper plates. The clasping of hands for grace. A bolt through the head of a male calf. A single onion falls out of a shopping bag in a car park with a bonk.
Someone on their own is snapping a large bar of chocolate in the dark. A home-delivery lorry out bringing food to a neighbour slams its door. A pizza delivery helmet lands on a warm pizza box. A cook slices through a finger. A strawberry picker is struggling to breathe by the side of a road. Over the top is layered the sound of a person who doesn’t know they are seriously ill yet, peeling back the blue plastic lid of a lunchbox. A milk bottle smashes on rough concrete. A machine for slicing ham switches on and comes to speed quite quickly. We hear the blade mechanism slide towards where the ham is clamped in place. It’s a short sound, but it’s enough for us to anticipate the sound that is coming – the metallic whizz of the circular blade losing its shine as it slices through breaded, salted flesh. Frozen mice are defrosting ready to be fed to a pet snake.
In the distance we hear a short rung bell calling children in from the fields to eat and then a version of silence: an empty suburban supermarket on the edge of a typically sized Ukrainian town with its lights off. Except we realise there is a significant humming. The fridges and freezers are still on. It is unrecognisable yet familiar, a place in limbo, in mourning, in waiting – a magic place where every shelf produces every conceivable food you could want, regardless of the season, the country of origin or the distance travelled to get there. We need the whole place to hum for us to know it was once alive itself, to feel we can survive, and we listen to its unpleasant, discordant drone for some time. Something is changing, though; slowly we feel like we’re moving towards the fridges – maybe the one in the cold meats aisle – but in fact it is a fading-up of a fridge in another supermarket somewhere close by. Then, one by one, a single fridge from each supermarket within a ten-mile radius is added to the sound, sonically stacked on top of each other, placed in a location binaurally or simulated to represent its position on a map, one after another. The hum now is pretty loud, but we’ve only just got started. The radius is widened and every three seconds, using the criteria of distance – closest to the location of the original fridge, another fridge is added from another supermarket, and another, and another until every fridge in every supermarket that is on right now is heard on top of each other in a giant, violent, thuggish, bellicose chorus. We hear that sound at high volume for fifty seconds. Suddenly it stops. The sound of a lamb you may choose to eat or not to eat is currently grazing; we hear its teeth pulling and tearing the grass. Quietly it is augmented by the pulling-off of a lid of a yoghurt pot, black-cherry-flavoured, by a nun. An empty Snickers drink rolls to the right-hand side of a bus on the top floor. The sped-up rattling of shopping trolleys, separated in haste. The catch of a Kilner biscuit-jar lid being popped. A diabetic child with her ear near a bowl of Ricicles. The spit of cheap chicken on a long grill. A murderer’s last meal served in a plastic dish. A hurried can opener on a tin of own-brand chicken-flavoured cat food. A microwave ping, answered by however many microwaves are pinging right now in unison, mixed with tape delays and reverb. A brisk stirring of low-calorie sweetener in a cup of tea at the Foreign Office. A plate set firmly and unkindly on the floor. The hiss of the skin of an arm burned on an oven shelf. The fridges again, maxed out over the rattling of trolleys, a sub rumble throughout. The flip of a single pair of slippers; it is 3a.m. Flip, flip, flip. This is our metronome. All else is measured by this flip, flip, flip. The click of the snap of a photographer’s bag on his way back from a South American farm. The grinding of the teeth of a farm worker made to stand there and grin for a packaging image. The whack of a coconut on a head. Flip. The careful washing of chickpeas in a filthy stream. Flip. The potato-picking machine breaks down with a bang. Flip. A tiny excerpt of the laying of plates at a buffet for a driving instructors’ conference. Flip. The tank behind a greenhouse mixing a blend of water, chemicals and nutrients for the violently green basil plants next door. Flip. The pulling of weeds by a road in Yemen. Flip, thud. The noise of a truck driver sitting down on a toilet by a motorway. Flush. The miserable semi-din of orange lights inside Thanet Earth. Flip. A phone rings from Monsanto to fulfill a re-order. Flip, peel, pop, the stickering by hand of the specials stickers at the end of the day in a corner of a shop in Bergen. Flip. Running water into a duck pond. Bang: a dairy farmer throws files in a removals box. Bang: a gunshot over a field. Hush: the slaves on Thai fishing boats are sitting quietly, nearly silent, so we just hear the churn of the boat’s engine as it heads out to sea again. Two hundred chickens are stunned with electrodes, a new kind of noise they’ve not made before. The fearful flapping of 2,000 fish in a net resting on the bottom of a boat. Two hundred thousand pigs in gas chambers. The bodies of animals tumbling into bins. A van full of labourers chugs out fumes next to the café while they wait for the driver to finish his coffee. A metal spatula scrapes mince too vigorously off a Teflon pan. A lawyer is typing a lawsuit. Eggs being collected from metal-grilled trays for the mayonnaise in the tuna sandwich at the petrol station on the road to school. The rattle of tins of mints in handbags. The crates being loaded. The lorries arriving, the ships turning, the planes landing, water gushing through pipes. A bee is stuck inside the plastic sheeting of a polytunnel. At the same time a makeup artist for Gordon Ramsay gets a text message from her boyfriend during the taking of pictures for an advertising shoot. The squeak of the gate as it’s opened to let the cows pass on their last day in Herefordshire. The squeak is slowed down a lot and looped underneath the tiny sound of the pinning of hairnets in a factory.
The sound of dripping water nearby but not inside the crude hut of the worker who is currently picking the fruit you’ll see in the shop next week. The sliding-back of a resealable top on a bag full of grated Red Leicester cheese by a nine-year-old boy. A timer goes off by a KFC frying station. A manager bites a crumbly wafer over his dessert on a date with the wine buyer. Plastic corks bobble en masse into landfill. An out-of-date packet of chapatis hits the bottom of a plastic bin. All the zips of all the packed lunch bags as their contents are about to be eaten. A Chorleywood bread-factory fire alarm goes off. The lumpen shudder of a hidden toy in a shaken cereal box. The sound of six beers in a cardboard sleeve hitting the bottom of the trolley. A lobster split in two down the middle with a sharp knife. The hidden jangle of a small, cheap, whisky bottle against loose change in someone’s pocket. A mic inside the crates and crates of bourbon in the back of a lorry on a ferry, pulling in, rattling furiously in time with the engine. The coffee-stall grinder, the coffee farmer coughing. The shuffle of a cashier’s feet under the table. The packing up of a local grocer for good. The simple dull thwack of frozen croissants on baking tins. The synthetic apricot-scented freshener squirting automatically in the toilet of a museum’s cafe. The purr of dialysis. The scanner of an in-store shopper, buying something for the online shopper, bleeps once. The felling of a rare tree, sped up. A passing of blood-red urine. A paper mill at full pelt mixed beneath. A bleep from the dialysis machine. Ink-making and printing. A half-full plastic water bottle forcefully kicked. A sewing-up of bruised flesh alongside the rapid breathing of a hidden migrant. The rows of hung haddock as they get dipped in dye and liquid smoke. The dinner lady trips over the chemo trolley. The ice-cream van reversing into a docking bay and hitting the side of a caravan by mistake. The throwing and unloading of frozen turkeys at dawn. The abattoir worker blowing on a hot chocolate on a break during the night shift. The out-of-breath shopper bending down to pick up a tin of meatballs in tomato sauce. The plastic tablecloth wiped free of crumbs. The gloop of caramel in a bowl over a pan of boiling water for the second time. But now everyone puking up alcohol. Millions of children at a birthday party about to eat sausage rolls at the same time. An insulin injection in the toilet at a diet-industry conference. The squeak of two polystyrene boxes rubbing against each other at Billingsgate. A cute pig squeal. A failed harvest of corn, cracking slightly in the heat. The spitting of burning butter in pans. A manufacturer has set out rows of tasting pots and we hear the sound of the sales agent washing their hands next door. An amputation. The daughter of an asparagus farmer in Peru is at the back of a small classroom flicking her teeth with a branded plastic pen. A wild pony bites on a discarded Pink Lady apple core on the side of a steep hill. A fisherman drops a large red string bag of whelks on the harbour wall, but it splits and spills its contents on the tarmac. Another tree felled for paper which will later be used for the menu of the nearest Indian restaurant, sped up at least double speed. As it hits the ground, a huge spray of pig shit from a waste lagoon onto fields. A huge bong again, this time from inside an empty oil tanker at a dock in Colombo as it’s about to refill and the pipe is connected. From this expanse of sound comes another: in Dubai, leftover noodles from the breakfast buffet at the Sofitel is scraped into a large black bin liner, the knife making a squeal against the porcelain as it does so. This screech is given a long reverb, mapped from an impulse response of an empty parliament building, and in it we can distantly hear chains along a dock, a carcass dragged along the floor, a bag of genetically modified potatoes pulled through a chip-shop kitchen, a buffalo hide through long grass, a shaking of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes into bowls, a vivid mechanical whisking of egg whites for a birthday pavlova in Vienna, a pulverising of gristle, a constant avalanche of brightly coloured wrapped sweets down a roller ramp towards a huge, wheeled crate, a sliding-off of plastic from several long baguettes at once, a continuous suction of blood, fluid and fat in a liposuction operation, a loud pouring of water like a sieve from the nets on the back of a fishing boat as it hauls in an illegal catch, a fan whirring, keeping lights cool above a table on which sits a perfect plastic curry, an apple-
polishing machine in South Africa churning furiously, the continuous but gentle grinding of spices by hand in prison, two soon-to-be-peeled buckets of shrimp pulled along the floor by a child in a dust mask in Phuket, a giant combine harvester spilling commercially trademarked grain into a giant truck, rain on a tin roof on a shack on a farm, a continuous slice down the chest of a cow, any cow, the spraying of Calypso insecticide, a vacuum cleaner sucking up pistachio shells from underneath a table in Las Vegas, a suicide bomb exploding in a food market.
A chef washes sinew off her hands. Air-sealed blocks of kebab meat in bags, punctured, releasing the air from inside with a sigh. Cans of soup falling from the top of a building and splitting open in sharp succession on the pavement. Bottle tops pinging off the top of imported beers and hitting the metal ducting above. Bakery tins crashing onto the empty metal sheets lower down. A bottle of Lucozade hurled through the window of a hospital. Aerosols of cheap cream are squirting in short, short stabs upwards. Frozen turkeys are melting in the heat from a supermarket fire, the plastic of their packaging moulding to the skins. Shelves collapse, crushing bags of organic dried fruit in small green pouches. Yoghurt starting to ferment, normalised, made loud. Pastry cracking open. Mould growing. A farmer slamming the phone down on a buyer. Many packets of dried grains trembling on a shelf in an earthquake, recorded from inside each packet. The angry pop of a lid off a glass jar of curdled vanilla cream. Lettuce washed and dragged through chlorine. All the batteries are leaking, burning. The splosh and thud of wellies through a field as a farmer’s daughter looks at a ruined crop of beetroot. Thousands of green potatoes bouncing unevenly down several flights of graffitied stairs. One or two empty hangers bumping into each other inside a makeshift wardrobe as a train goes overhead while a pot-washer cleans his teeth for work. A rogue bottle of Dr Pepper rolling sideways during a shootout with police. Salad bags popping with force. All the tills in American food shops are bleeping at once now, you can hear them here, you know what it is. It’s happening right now. DVDs of all unwatched food programmes in anti-cancer charity shops are stacked vertically in their cases and cracking under the weight. Vitamin pills and protein supplements are rattling in small plastic tubs in a trade box in the back of an estate car. The pouring of sweeteners and protein powders like a waterfall over a pyramid of neatly stacked quinoa packets. Sewage can be heard running from a pipe, but at some distance across a field. The thump of an unripe Somali mango along an uneven wooden floor knocks a black poison box by the back door. The slow slip of oil down the back of a shelf. The airy wind of custard powder, mustard powder tipping graciously off shelves joins the dusty cascade. All the rolls of foil unravelling, unravelling across miles and miles out of the doors of all the shops. On the back of a moped, pieces rattling inside packets inside wrapped presents for the child of a waiter at a hotel where you will visit. A venomous spider in a crate of bananas travelling at high speed out of sight in the dark. The hungry peeling-back of mouldy sandwiches in one violent gesture. A volcano of broken biscuits that failed the quality testing at the factories. The snap of a trap on a rat as it goes for bait on the floor of a kitchen you ate in. The rattle of single-use cutlery by teenagers on a date. Someone pouring milk powder on a fire to make a fireball; a puncture in the bottom of a can of Stella causing a tiny but fierce fountain over the shoes of a commuter. Sparkling flavoured water all over the floor, fizzing desperately. Frozen peas in their billions melting slowly in the packets, recorded from the inside. Plastic, plastic, plastic, plastic, plastic, plastic, plastic. Every cheap kettle boiling at once next to cups ready with teabags. A coffee bean explodes politely on a small pan by a tent. A showering-down of broken glass from corporate headquarters. The firm peeling-back of skin from a rabbit caught in a homemade trap next to an open fire in woodland. Toilet rolls going up quickly with a woomph; the sprinklers are supposed to be on but we can only hear one working. The heat is making the jars of pickle and sauces explode with a muted crack. An anorexic dancer on the set for an ad about exercise breaks her leg with a bitter, heavy snap. A sister shakes a box of grape nuts. A fly keeps landing on the same bit of abandoned meat at the counter. The crumbling of Rennies, Gaviscon. All the bottled waters thrown off shops’ shelves at once. San Pellegrino. Vittel. Highland Spring. Evian. Volvic. GLACÉAU Smartwater. Aqua Pura. Nestlé Pure Life. Badoit. Brecon Carreg. Dasani. Mount Franklin. Morning Fresh. Oro. Buxton. Poland Spring. Perrier. Radenska. Spa. Souroti. Trump Ice. Aqua Safe. Some bottles smash, some bobble awkwardly, some do nothing. There’s something in this shop that gives you cancer and it makes a noise here. Everything in the freezer sounds like it is coming alive. In fact, it is recordings of the life cycle of every animal or bit of an animal now frozen inside the freezer condensed into a one-minute chunk and played out of speakers hidden at the bottom.
A basket held by a young boy bangs the corner of an aisle. We hear the sound of the popcorn again. A maize-farm worker in Kenya is being sprayed with pesticide by a tractor as it passes between the trees. An airline meal is plonked down in front of you. A young person is retching quietly, hunched over a school toilet. Bleep: your bananas through the scanner. Someone nervously fiddling with coins in a queue, trying to work out if they have enough money to buy the thing they need to eat. A dog with a bone, a cat with a bird in its mouth. A thin child chewing on dried pasta. Someone about your age, similar height, not far from where you grew up, walks into a restaurant. A crashing of overstuffed waste bins. Just as her colleagues break out in laughter at her story, the doctor raises her fork and opens her mouth.