What does it mean to see the world through the things we love to eat, to make the abstract so tangible that you can almost taste it? When we’re young, food is often the first way we make sense of our surroundings, but for Milan-based graphic artist and storyteller Gaia Stella, it’s also a way of thinking. Her new French board book series, Croc’, turns the everyday and edible into a playful visual language that aims to help young readers comprehend the world around them.
It started in 2021, when Stella began what she describes as an almost encyclopedic project: cataloging food by shape. “I need to see things to understand them,” she says. “And I believe that everyday things are a good starting point for exploring and revealing unexpected connections.” Geometry, with its axioms and theorems, felt too abstract. Seeing, she realized, was more honest. What if the world could be understood through the things that we eat?
Croc’ (from the onomatopoeic French word for “crunch”) unfolds across a series of four board books. Each page draws the reader in with bold illustrations that reduce foods to their most essential forms as Stella creates a world where relationships emerge through juxtaposition, and where a fresh salad is as green and wild as a crocodile. “I wanted to create a language around food,” she explains, “using shapes, colors, patterns, textures, and flavors—like a secret code between friends.”
For Stella, this is an intuitive way to latch onto ideas that might otherwise feel out of reach. “A triangular slice of cake can be soft and fluffy and striped like a tiger”—so deliciously true. She traces this approach to her childhood: “In elementary school, our teacher explained fractions by bringing a cake—I’ve never forgotten that lesson.” In Croc’, Stella uses her art to render the dense, faraway, and abstract as clearly as the tangible and tasty. And that is her gift to young readers: an associative approach that begins at the table.
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Source: www.saveur.com
