Stephanie Gonot is a Los Angeles based photographer who is a bit obsessed with food. This obsession isn’t necessarily to make food look good or even to make the food look appetizing: it’s about how the things we eat look and the surrounding, often ridiculous culture that has popped up around food. They’re quite hysterical, often beautiful, and have you asking yourself, “I eat that?”

Gonot’s food photos rely heavily on juxtaposition and humor. Many center on basic themes of color and shape, some rely on contrast, and all of them have this sense of, “Yummmmyucky.” The food she photographs isn’t necessarily flattering and are often the very bottom of the barrel in terms of eating. There’s lots of crappy deli items, high fructose corn syrup oddities, and very cringeworthy moments of misfortune like water with Oreos and using a fork to eat peas (both of which are below).

Gonot had quite a roundabout, very LA way to get to photography which–in some ways–explains this food obsession. When she started out, she was working for production companies, apparently as a runner who had to grab and move lots of glamorous equipment from places like Walmart and Kentucky Fried Chicken. In a tiny interview she did with Cult, she explains she spent time working at an ice cream sandwich truck just before getting into photography full time. “It has only been in the last three years that I really started taking photography more seriously and found that I also loved arranging images as much as I loved making them,” she explains in the article, detailing how she has now gotten into everything from curating shows to representing artists.

Stephanie Gonot has an eye beyond food and is obviously good at arranging images as they cause small confrontations within a single photo. Her work is happy, lighthearted, and refreshing–but not in the way that undoubtedly warm Fanta is in the photo above. You can see more of her food work here (in a folder aptly titled “Food?”), on her Flickr, and on her Tumblr. And, for those of you scratching your heads, Gonot may sound familiar as she was the brain behind last Autumn’s Ugly Face Wednesdays.