Digesting truths

Digesting Truths is a companion project to Self-Evident (self-evident-art.org). It is an ongoing artwork by the Sandhills Institute.

What happens when we take the words of the Declaration of Independence out of a historical document and put them into our hands—and then into our mouths? Digesting Truths recreates the Declaration of Independence, one letter at a time, in sugar cookies. The cookies are baked, shared, and eaten.  This project will be passed from one community to another across the United States.

There are 6,634 letters in the version of the Declaration used for this project. The artwork will not be complete until every one of them has been eaten. The Declaration is made of words that have traveled through generations. They carry hopes and promises but also contradictions, struggles, and unfinished dreams. For Digesting Truths, words become something unexpectedly intimate—food.

A letter is baked. A word is assembled. A sentence is shared. And then it disappears.

To eat the Declaration is to participate in it. We take its words into our bodies. We consume them, digest them, and perhaps make them our own. The act is playful, communal, and a little provocative, but it also asks a serious question:

What does it mean to live with the truths we have inherited?

Perhaps truth is not something fixed on a page, finished once and for all. Perhaps it is something we must continually take in, consider, question, and remake. And perhaps democracy works the same way. Digesting Truths is designed to move from community to community. Any community, school, organization, gathering, or group can participate. The Sandhills Institute provides a box of alphabet cookie cutters and the starting point. We encourage the baking itself to be a communal act—people gathering around a table, making something together, and then sharing it with themselves and others.

Each group begins exactly where the previous group stopped. At the project’s first gathering, which took place during the Rushville Chamber's Fun Day Festival, 76 people participated, consuming the Declaration until reaching the letter U in the words “human events.” A participant from Houston then claimed the next 29 letters, carrying the project forward to the word “necessary.”

The next community will begin with letter 106.

And so, the Declaration travels—not as a monument, but as a shared, unfinished entity.

One letter. One cookie. One community at a time.

Digesting Truths will continue until all 6,634 letters have been baked, shared, and eaten.

To participate by hosting a baking and eating event, or for more information, contact Mel Ziegler at mel@melzieglerart.com.