The Culinary Cosmos: A Tasty Rendering of the Universe Using Things We Eat

Creator Navid Baraty is a freelance photographer in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. In his spare time, this certified space geek loves to arrange common Kitchen condiments into strikingly accurate renditions of the cosmos.

“I’m a really big space geek. I’ll look at NASA images or Hubble images to see how things were placed in the sky, and I try to make things as realistic as possible.” – Navid Baraty.

The Culinary Cosmos: A Tasty Rendering of the Universe Using Things We Eat — Earth-like planet – bottom of a glass containing bourbon, coconut milk, water, soy sauce, food coloring
Stars – salt, flour, cinnamon, curry powder
By Navid Baraty

This quirky experimentation came about when Baraty started using a flat-bed scanner with high res and then plopped ingredients onto the scanner. Condiments and spices like cumin and salt look like hazy galaxies and exploding nebula when glimpsed for the first time.

Lately, he’s been filling glasses and large beakers with water or coconut milk and streaks of food coloring to make planets of different sizes. He composes a space scene on a plate of glass, sets it on top of a scanner, and voila! He has an image worthy of Hubble.

To create these hyper-realistic images of constellations, Navid uses his condiments and lovingly, patiently arranges them on the scanner. He has even created his own whimsical space probe called WANDER for this culinary mission. Afterwards, he uses Photoshop to retouch the images and add shading and extra black patches to planets and galaxies.