Critical Lessons in Food, Communication, Design, and Art

Excerpt from Food Democracy, Critical Lessons in Food, Communication, Design and Art Edited, curated and written by Oliver Vodeb

 

Hungry for Change + Thirsty for Life: The Socially Responsive Communication, Design and Art Kitchen and its Dishes

 

Oliver Vodeb

http://memefest.org/en/fooddemocracy/

 

Food is directly related to power, which is largely embedded in food systems. The global food system can be seen as the interplay of food production, distribution, consumption and representation. In the era of privatization of everything, fundamental human needs get colonized through corporate strategies and the food system becomes a machine, which excludes people to maximize profit. On an everyday level, we have almost no chance to participate in the production and distribution of food. Besides providing nutrients to our bodies, food plays a profound social, cultural, economic and political role. It can bring people together or set them apart. It is used as a tool for social control or reclaiming autonomy. As our most intimate experience with the natural world, food can truly connect us with nature or it can alienate us from it if this intimacy is broken.

 

The capitalist food system is designed to serve a handful of influential food-producing corporations. As a radical profit strategy, corporations are putting exclusive copy rights on seeds – the very source of life and a public knowledge bank, as seeds were cultivated through centuries in a close relation between human and nature. With the strategic use of sugar, salt and fat, food can be manipulated to have the chemical effect of drugs. Addictive relations to food are designed by advertising as well, in many cases food advertising even promotes behavioural patterns, which resemble illicit drug cultures and food itself is more and more designed to be a drug-delivering device. The food system also serves distributors of food, which work on the principles of economies of scale and globalization, rendering small scale and local food distribution into niche projects. Our consumption and eating habits support a toxic food culture, and the media, together with marketing-based communication practices, institutionalize power relations fundamental to the predatory food system. The food system is reproduced by a culture of appearance driven by advertising, branding and packaging that create a superficially designed world of designed food. It is common practice that more than 30% of fruit and vegetables are thrown away at harvest because what has grown does not match imposed standardized aesthetic visual preferences. Supermarkets react quickly to critique, smell the potential profit and start selling vegetables and fruit labelled as ‘ugly’ for lower prices. Yet, what is still lacking is a connection with nature and a sustainable culture – ‘ugly food’ is just a nice little supermarket brand.

Food production has an immense environmental footprint. An astonishing figure is that –55 calories of fossil fuel in the form of fertilizers, farm equipment, pesticide, processing and transportation are used to produce one calorie of beef meat and on average ten calories of fossil fuel are used to produce one calorie of processed food (Pollan in Khong 2013). Recent research by WWF and the Zoological Society of London found out that tuna and mackerel populations have declined by 74% between 1970 and 2012, outstripping a decline of 49% for 1234 ocean species over the same period. This alarming situation is of course critical to human food security.

New evidence suggests that the common factor between the tragic deaths of refugees in the Mediterranean sea in the last years and the Arab spring are food shortages driven by global warming. Syria’s civil war has caused the first withdrawal of crop seeds from a ‘doomsday’ vault built in an Arctic mountainside of the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago to safeguard global food supplies that stores more than 860,000 samples from around the world. The seeds include samples of rice, barley, wheat and grasses suited to dry regions; they have been requested by researchers in the Middle East to replace a seed collection in the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war. Together with the world’s population numbers rising, food will become the biggest issue of survival and geopolitical dominance very, very soon.

This is the dark picture, but it is far from being the whole picture.

Organic food with attached values that prohibit the use of toxic substances and GMO components and promote more humane treatment of animals is becoming mainstream. The UN urges us to eat dairy free if we want to counter global warming. A company called Impossible Foods is openly battling the meat industry, scientifically developing vegan hamburgers which meat substitute is completely plant based but smells, cooks, bleeds and has the same texture as beef. Urban gardens are growing around the world; food as a topic is getting high attention in design, art and social sciences, with whole new university degrees focusing on ‘food systems’ being launched. Awareness of locally grown, home cooked food is more present than ever. The world’s most influential and very expensive Nordic restaurant Noma plans to reopen in the middle of its own urban farm, right next to Copenhagen’s anarchist autonomous squat Christiania and Guerrilla Grafters – a group who create public interventions through placing fruit-bearing branches onto non-fruit-bearing, ornamental fruit trees in the streets of San Francisco. Street food brings the world’s cuisine at affordable prices to every corner of our cities and food design is becoming its own area of academic investigation. Food has long been the subject matter of artists, and galleries are devoting big exhibitions to it. Farmers around the world are organizing in protest, many times using network-based technologies, while restaurants incorporate a sense of politics, social and environmental responsibility in their business models. Global protests have cut Monsanto’s (the leading producer of genetically engineered seed) profits by 34% in 2015, and radical networks are distributing food coming from food banks and other sources to those in need. Under a law set to crack down on epidemic food waste alongside the context of raising food poverty, France has prohibited supermarkets from throwing away or destroying food and instead they must donate to charities, food banks or for animal feed. Italy has made the stealing of food legal if done out of severe hunger. A growingly evident, visible presence and role of food in our everyday lives makes everyday people experts on the complex importance of our relation to food. Without a doubt, a culture critical of the dominant food system is growing around the world and people want to be involved and to engage with food in political ways.

 

All these examples, either contributing to the problem, or part of the solution, are closely related to communication, design and art.

Neo-liberal society is strictly regulated and heavily over coded. We have trouble to leave our private self and create a distance to social mechanisms that impose this private position in the first place. But this is crucial. In the age of the privatization of everything, occupying a common space and creating an intimacy of relations that form around public matters is key to breaking out of the simulacrum of imposed pleasure: respect-collaboration-imagination-intervention. Food Democracy addresses the problem where people are turned into consumers and vote solely through their buying power and purchase choices. It is at hand that such assumed power has not only big limitations but also reproduces power relations imposed by the neo-liberal market, which don’t create democracy, but colonization.

So what can communication, design and art do in order to contribute to Food Democracy? In realizing that Food Democracy is about a shared fate, shared resources, shared risks and shared solutions, creating publics, nurturing the commons through involved, inclusive and dialogic communication, design and art is at the core of socially responsive strategies and in opposition to the exclusionary delusions of marketing-based communication design and art.

It seems like food, with its potential of bringing people together, its inherent connection with pleasure and nature is the perfect medium to support the aims of socially responsive communication, design and art. How can we respond and gain autonomy through communication design and art today? How can we contribute to Food Democracy and what are the specifics of socially responsive communication, design and art in relation to it? The contradictions of inequitable arrangements of power and the rhetoric of liberal democracies are at hand, but we need to make them visible. Making them visible is more than an image. It is a social relation, which leaves the image behind in an engaged conversation and unfolds in communicative action. Besides making things visible, it is crucial to develop new, different communication, design and art approaches through theory and practice. Any such strategy aiming at creating the future, therefore, needs to include also a change of education and a change in the ways academics, professionals and activists relate to each other in the present.

 

A Transcendental Desert

By Mariano Mussi

 

Do you know what is ‘rice with milk’? Let me tell you: ‘rice with milk’ is a confrontation; it takes place in the very heart of my family, where Spanish descendants and Arab descendants fight to each other in order to claim the honour of being the part of the culture who created this simple and outstanding dessert. Rice with milk is part of my childhood and, I think, it will be part of my son’s gastronomic culture too. I think its magic comes from its simplicity and from specific connections: milk is the first food we taste, rice is so powerful that it has conquered China and sugar is the highest temptation of human tongue. So, if you want to cook this dessert you need to know you will face a powerful interaction of ingredients:

 

Rice (like risotto rice, with a high starch content) 2 cups of tea

Milk, 1 litre

Sugar, 4 to 5 tbsps

Lemon peel

Cinnamon powder

 

Put the rice, milk, sugar and lemon peel in a pot to boil. You have to cook the rice slowly, medium heat, and stirring constantly. When the rice is ready (you have to taste it, there is no another way to know it), turn the heat off and let it cool. We like to eat it very cold, but not frozen. And the big secret: at serving, sprinkle a lot of the brown rain cinnamon powder. The cinnamon smells like babies. And the rice with milk, as you can see, is full of innocence.