Introduction

Food is a topic on which we all have an opinion, it is one of the fundamentals to a living organism, we must eat to stay alive, it is shared activity that every human takes part in. Food is woven into the fabric of our society. We eat not just for sustenance but enjoyment, and food has become a pleasure, even a form of entertainment within people’s lives today. Food has a personal and cultural value, as the French gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin supposed, “Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are2” . However, our food consumption is no longer based on picking berries from the surrounding trees or hunting; it is based on a complex system. The Food System is a web of lines weaving between growing, production, processing, transport and consumption3 . Those lines are further complicated by taste, economics, culture, values and opinions. The food system could be compared to a Rhizome, developed by the postmodern theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari4. There are hidden and visible structures with lots of different parts linking to other parts, it is hard to reduce it down to one beginning or ending or even a direction. We have global food systems, national and local food systems, all working away to bring food to people’s plates. It is dependent on governance, policy, sustainability and even the weather5. Once upon a time, it helped a fast-growing population get fed and develop economically, fostering urban progress, but the innovation we created came at a cost. Today we are arguably reaping the rewards and the costs of a food system built for industrial progress; we have an unwieldy model that most people don’t understand and affects every other aspect of our lives6 . It appears that the modern food system is broken, whether we look at it from the point of food scarcity and the rise of foodbank use7 to the rise in obesity. Food doesn’t work for producers who aren’t paid enough, 8 or consumers as we see the implications of eating a poor diet and the strain on our health systems. Food is at the core of the UN sustainable development goals as evidence mounts of the damage caused to the environment and climate change by industrial agriculture9 . It is easy to believe that this is due to sudden changes, but it is not. As set out by the design agency IDEO, “Our food system is not “broken.” It’s working exactly as designed10” , and this is a food utopia for many. Because of this designed approach, people believe there can be a fix or a solution that can be developed. People believe that the food system can be redesigned. At a recent event organised by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the Big Food Workshop, experts from different fields worldwide came together to speak on and discuss the topic “…the need to radically redesign for circularity and regionalism, to help us heal our broken global food system”11. IDEO recently launched an arm of their design practice to heal the system and a podcast that discusses “radically redesigning it”12 . The V&A Museum in London often has food-related exhibitions and talks, showcasing work from designers like Bombas and Parr. In addition to curating thought-provoking food redesign exhibitions,

2 Cramer, J.M., Greene, C.P. and Walters, L. (2011). Food as communication, communication as food. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang. pg. 54 3 https://www.futureoffood.ox.ac.uk/what-food-system 4 Mambrol, Nasrullah. 2017. “The Philosophical Concept of Rhizome 5 https://www.futureoffood.ox.ac.uk/home#/? 6 Steel, C. (2013). Hungry city: how food shapes our lives. London: Vintage Books. 7 https://www.trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/end-year-stats/ 8 https://www.nfuonline.com/ruthless-price-cuts-decimating-uk-dairy-farms/ 9 United Nations. 2020. “Food,” United Nations 10 https://page.ideo.com/food 11 https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/our-work/activities/food/big-food-workshop 12 https://page.ideo.com/food-podcast-1 6