What people expect from food, and how it is presented and coloured, is based on pre-conceived human preferences. We see lots of colourful food nowadays: shiny and vibrant colours of fruits fill supermarket shelves. Strawberries are made to be a clear, shiny red to encourage customers. However, the taste of strawberries has nothing to do with it’s colour or shape. The high sugar content in strawberries that are left on the shelf too long, will encourage the growth of grey and fluffy mold. Strawberries are often treated with huge amounts of fungicides to prevent the grey mold, which can damage both the agricultural environment and surrounding ecology, and the people who ingest the fungicides through the strawberries.

The aesthetics of food today is entirely built on human preference. However, if we look at the microscopic view of these supposedly sanitised strawberries, we will find a more-than-human landscape. There are unseen worlds, hidden amongst the food industry's flat colours. Despite the perfected and engineered image of a bright red strawberry, the fungi, mold, and small insects on the strawberry’s surface, reveal the many worlds living upon the skin. The surface appears shiny and oozing: both beautiful and disgusting at once.

Microscopes are extensions of human sight. Microscopy is often recognised as essential to research in medicine, the life sciences, chemistry, and physics. The limitations of optic or light microscopes have given way to the power of electron microscopes, which enable us to see things thousands of times smaller than a wavelength of light. The image from microscopes is seen as objective and factual: a passive object that could be dispassionately evaluated as a scientific reality.