Jonathan Blaustein: The Value of a Dollar

Jonathan Blaustein's photographic project The Value of a Dollar, in which he documents numerous food items bought for a dollar, is no stranger to the blogosphere. However, I'd never seen it until a day or two ago and so I thought I'd show it here...

The burger at the top of the post is a rather sad looking one dollar's worth of Double Cheeseburger from McDonalds. Reminds me of the double whammy with cheese scene from Falling Down.

And this is what Blaustein bought for a dollar on a visit to Burger King - a side salad with ranch dressing

Above is one dollar's worth of Beef shank from Supersave

And this is a dollar's worth of a salty sea-dog's beard. Just kidding, it's pork floss. Pork floss? What the heck is that? A reasonable question – I hadn't heard of this stuff myself until I saw this photo and read the caption on Blaustein's site a few days ago. I looked it up and now I know that pork floss is also known as rousong in Mandarin and it's basically dried, sweetened roast pork pulled to separate the fibres and then spun until it has the texture of crispy candy floss. It's sweet, salty, porky and melts in your mouth – so I'm told. Sounds totally amazing to me. Which leads me to wonder if all the above ingredients could somehow be combined to make a kind of pork floss burger? Don't worry, I'm not really thinking about including that BK salad.

Blaustein's The Value Of A Dollar project really is food for thought. See more images from the project at www.jblau.com

And now I'll leave you with a song for a dollar. Nothing to do with Blaustein's project – I just happen to know and love this Bobby Darin record. I hope he got more than a dollar for it!