Food for Thought
I was just reading the Salon.com Books review of Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, and several pieces of the review stood out for me:
The dominant sentiment evoked by “Hungry Planet,” however, is not one of shame but one of anxiety. Out of the 30 family portraits emerges a larger picture of a global civilization rushing headlong toward an economy in which food is a thing produced remotely by machine labor and a handful of experts and then sold (or given away) by multinational organizations—an economy in which we identify a piece of food by its logo rather than by its biology. This is an economy already familiar to many of us in what is called the developed world, and it is growing grab by grab on the international market. (_My emphasis_)
Shades of branding again. What about considering a future that’s the inverse of what’s suggested here, where people are more concerned about where something comes from and whether it is GM or organic than if it has a certain company name on the packaging? Branding can still exist, of course, just as Italy is fighting to retain the “brand” of Parmigiano Reggiano, but the focus will be on more substantive qualities: location, process, ingredients.
Homegrown is just too much work when you can have store-bought. Or so the choice is frequently presented. We can lead sedentary lives and grow comfortably fat on uniformly bland food or we can go back to laboring dawn to dusk at the edges of hunger.
This “choice” struck a chord with me because it’s the basic premise of Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I first read this book a while ago during a time when I was struggling to figure out what to do next in my life. I was very aware that the choices I perceived myself as having were in fact illusory, and that the difficult part of figuring out what to do is knowing what there is to do—I knew there were other things I could be doing, but I had no idea what they could be.
I don’t believe this was solely a lack of imagination on my part; rather, I found myself questioning some of the fundamental assumptions I held about how the world worked, my relationship with that world, and whether I could discover something different. It was, in a sense, a reassessment and reprogramming of my world-view…fancy words to say that I mustered the courage to apply to a relatively new design program (IDII) in a foreign country (Italy) to pursue an emerging discipline (interaction design). And if it’s hard to see the connection, don’t worry: it basically boils down to “thinking outside of the box.” Although this may seem a silly phrase associated with “design thinking” or something, it’s equally relevant to issues of sustainability and realizing that there are alternatives to the ways we live our lives right now.
So it would seem that I’m returning to food as a setting for my thesis topic. I was somewhat uncomfortable with this at first because it seemed like shades of the service project I worked on earlier in the year. But what I now realize (or more to the point, what this book review reminded me of) is that food is such a fundamental part of our existence: we all need to eat. If I’m interested in sustainability, and I’m interested in services, then food makes perfect sense as a high-traffic subject which touches everyone in some way. And, as readers of Ishmael will be quick to grasp, the role of food in society is much greater than many comprehend or acknowledge.