Eating Together: Explorations in an Antisocial Food System

EATING TOGETHER

New York, New York | 2017

This is an unedited test copy

CONTENTS 3

LANGUAGE

10

INTRODUCTION

15

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

29

FIRST STUDIES: NARROWING THE SYSTEM

66

DIGITAL SERVICES AND SOCIAL IMPACT

77

SOCIAL EATING AS PRACTICE

89

A DYSTOPIAN FOOD WORLD

100

FROM FUTURING TO LOOKING FORWARD

112

EPILOGUE

117

FULL VOCABULARY

119

ENDNOTES

120

BIBLIOGRAPHY

122

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

3

LANGUAGE

Language in Use

While there are a number of uncommon terms present in Eating Together, some of which may be unique to this work, there are a handful that stand out as most important and represent concepts carried throughout the book. First, mentioned a number of times will be the phrase food system(s).

Food system – n. – any network of interacting organizations, entities, people or objects to do with food In Eating Together there are a number of food systems. Each is diferent from the other, but they have the same basic deinition. Often, food systems can be viewed hierarchically.

There is the familiar hierarchy of international, national, regional, and local. But within each of those there are always lateral sub-systems. In Eating Together, a key sub-system is digital food services and their users and stakeholders.

This is a subsystem that functions between international and local levels diferently. Some stakeholders are national and international, while others are speciic to particular communities or cities.

Also woven into the foundation of much of this work is the concept of “food behavior.”

Food behavior – n. – the behavior of an individual or group with regard to their interactions with food itself, systems, tools, or each other in the act of acquiring or eating food If what motivates us is food, food behaviors are the way we get there. In many sections I argue that our food behaviors are social or antisocial, isolating or inclusive. They can be many other things as well, but I will focus on them as they are related to interactions with other people. This work is not about health and nutrition. And though eating behaviors may come up as a subcategory of food behaviors, it will be with regard to these relationships with other people.

An example of food sub-system that is dependent on food behavior is a food community. Food communities are smaller systems that are hyper-local and more speciic. Where food systems are anything to do with food, food communities are built on shared food behaviors. Examples include local farmers’ markets, neighbors or acquaintances who bring each other food in times of need, or Monday team lunches at work. The relationships in these communities may share 4

other factors, but interacting over food is part of what makes them possible, palatable, or stronger.

Food community – n. – a subset of food systems, any network of people or groups of people whose interactions are facilitated by food-related activities Several other terms follow the deinition structures above, such as food tool or food space.

Also worth noting, is my use of the terms food experience and eating experience. In conversation, many people have interpreted food experience as describing something of a niche quality, either art and design experiences or something more of a show. But, I use the term more loosely. food experience – n. – any physical interaction with food in any form

Eating experience is more clear and diferent from food experience in that it is more speciic.

Eating experience – n. – any interaction in which food is consumed by one or more persons

These are the four major terms that shape the book’s language around food and my exploration of the social nature of food systems. Other terms should be easy to interpret in the context of these deinitions. However, they have been included in the vocabulary section of the appendices.

Controlled Vocabulary collaborate - v. - the act making an intentional efort to eat with others commensality - n. - eating or drinking together in a common physical or social setting consumer - n. - a person who purchases, or eats food - food preparation only applies to the consumer when they are also eating the food they prepare digital behavior - n. - Distinct from other behaviors that may pertain to physical interactions with an object, system, or other person, digital behaviors are any that occur within screen based applications or platforms.

5

digital food experience - n. - distinct from food experience, a screen-based interaction that focuses on the acquisition of food, preparation of food, consumption of food, or food as subject matter digital food service - n. - any service dependent on a screenbased interface that aids in the acquisition or preparation of food eating experience - n. - any interaction in which food is consumed by a person or persons food behavior - n. - the actions of an individual or group with regard to their interactions with food, food systems, food tools, or each other in acquiring or eating food food community - n. - a subset of food systems, any network of people or groups of people whose interactions are facilitated by food-related activities food culture - n. - traditions, habits, behaviors, or characteristics that can be associated with a particular group of people with regard to food food experience - n. - any physical interaction with food in any form food behavior - n. - the actions of an individual or group with regard to their interactions with food, food systems, food tools, or each other in acquiring or eating food food community - n. - a subset of food systems, any network of people or groups of people whose interactions food culture - n. - traditions, habits, behaviors, or characteristics that can be associated with a particular group of people with regard to food food experience - n. - any physical interaction with food in any form food identity - n. - a person’s preferences or personal associations with regard to the way in which they acquire food, prepare and eat food, to what food they eat food object - n. - a subcategory of food tools, physical objects that have some direct relationship with food food ritual - n. - similar to habits, food rituals are any repeated food behavior that is regularly observed as if necessary to complete the behavior

6

food space - n. - an immediate environment in which food is sold, prepared, consumed, displayed, or otherwise the focus of the environment food-speciic behavior - n. - actions particular to the consumption or acquisition of a food or type of food food system - n. - In Eating Together there are a number of food systems. Each is diferent from the other, but they have the same basic deinition. A food system is any interacting network of organizations, entities, people or objects to do with food. food tool - n. – anything that can be used to aid in the production, acquisition, preparation, or eating of food isolating food behavior - n. - any food behavior that is causally linked to an individual acquiring, preparing, or eating food with reduced or no contact with other individuals or groups local identity - n. - the shared characteristics of a group or groups of people in the form of products, services, and skills from a particular town, city, or county within a state or region object experience - n. - any interaction with a physical object and the time before and after interaction when one is consciously or subconsciously aware of the object physical behavior - n. - any behavior that is not a digital behavior - physical behavior is termed or labeled as a way to maintain the distinction of digital behavior regional identity - n. - the shared characteristics of a group or groups of people in the form of products, services, and skills from a particular region or state in the country social food behavior - n. - any food behavior that is causally linked to an individual acquiring, preparing, or eating food in a way that demands their interaction with others, either as a product of their own intention or the nature of the behavior terroir - n. - appropriated from language used to describe wine, the complete natural environment from which a particular product (especially food) originated as interpreted by the senses, not the inherent facts of the product

7

INTRODUCTION “discovering and defining the kinds of value required for progress and prosperity” Allan Chochinov

Products of Design

In the chapters that follow, I will be guiding you through a number of explorations and projects. As a whole, they represent my journey as a MFA Candidate at School of Visual Arts in the Products of Design (PoD) program. The PoD department has many goals and objectives; they are as diverse as the students who enter the program. These varied goals are woven together by a drive to produce interdisciplinary designers who have a certain thoughtfulness and awareness, with consequence being the design focus destined to replace object and artifact. Many of the processes are made quite prescriptive to achieve this complex mission, covering the “combination of design thinking, design making, and design doing” that the department holds to be so important in “discovering and deining the kinds of value required for progress and prosperity”.1 One such process is the thesis exploration. And much of what readers will ind in Eating Together was constructed on a clearly set arc.

However, I did my best to draw tangents from that arc and weave my own narrative of work.

At a high level, the department’s process is fairly simple and linear. It begins with physical exploration and a hard push into interviews with subject matter experts. After that initial push, students are expected to process the research through collaborative workshops aimed at certain hypotheses.

Upon synthesizing a number of indings between that and secondary research, preliminary project work begins with the goal of illing several buckets. These buckets are illed twice, irst as one-week project sprints. Second, they are illed in earnest with complete project execution. Not all served my work, especially in the sprints. But, what readers will ind in these pages is experience design, digital product/service design, object/artifact, and behavior exploration. I did my best to take these out on tangents that served my own goals and objectives, and this should be the last discussion of the PoD methodology and process.

Urban, Social Food

The particular focus of my thesis work is urban, social food systems. I developed an obsession with the culture around products like Seamless GrubHub (Seamless), the most 8

notable representative from a group of digital food services in NYC that forms its own contemporary food system.

And while I will focus on NYC, this kind of system exists in cities across the country. Most, if not all of the products in this system provide some kind of food delivery service.

Many of them enable the user to avoid as much human contact as possible. And some, like Seamless, take pride in that. The result is communities driven by convenience and eiciency. And many urbanites succumb to the isolating and antisocial food behaviors fostered by these services. I propose Eating Together as an exploration of opportunities for the resurgence of more social eating experiences. Through provocations, products, and other work I aim to expose the impact of food experiences on our social behaviors, and the potential for physical products and interactions to intervene.

Seamless ad campaign on the corner of Lafayette and Bleaker Street, Manhattan, NY

Seamless, an online food service targeting New Yorkers, enables users to order delivery food from a computer or smartphone without ever talking to another human being.

My irst encounter with the service was in 2015. It was my irst week in New York, and I was on my way to the grocery store in Brooklyn when I came across a larger-than-life ad that read, “avoid cooking like you avoid Times Square.� I laughed out loud at the thought that people were being encouraged to resist doing the one activity they need to do to, literally, keep themselves alive.2 And I walked on by, trying to imagine the niche group that puts so much efort into avoiding what I hold up as a good habit. But I was entirely wrong in assuming that the avoidance mentality touted

by Seamless belonged to a niche market. In fact, there are many more services that enable this avoidance behavior.

Not all encourage a rejection of cooking. Some focus on the grocery experience. Others streamline the restaurant experience. Some may be unintentionally contributing, with the goal of solving a diferent problem. And some, like Seamless, help you avoid it all.

To me, the concept of avoiding not only cooking, but people as well is baling. So when I made the decision to take on an exploration of food systems as my area of inquiry, I had to return to that ad I’d seen when I irst moved to the city. It was in direct conlict with my own life experience.

2

This is that first Seamless ad I saw when I moved to the city. It was proportioned like this, but 8 feet high on a city wall. Found in Brooklyn.

The location, and whether or not it still exists is unknown.

I grew up in the south, in a community where cooking and sharing food were an important part of building networks, connections, friends, and family. To an extent, I took it for granted that people learned to cook at some point in their lives. In my family, holiday meals prepared by my grandparents were a force that brought people together over great distances. In my community, shared dinners were a sign of fellowship. And in my life, cooking for others was a necessary skill of hospitality. I learned the value of hard work in kitchens, as most of my jobs from early high school through college were in restaurants or cafeterias. At the 9

heart of all that is work done in the service of people, caring for daily nourishment. It’s not hard to see how the desire to eliminate all the touchpoints between the kitchen counter and the eater’s fork is diicult for me to accept. I’ve seen all my life how much power food has to bring people together over a daily need.

At Penland School of Crafts, where I received most of my education in ine craft and making, I worked for two years in the dining hall and kitchen as I completed my fellowship there. There, I saw how the people who prepare and serve food can have a profound efect on the experience of an entire place. Penland serves three meals a day to a crowd of anywhere from 70 to 250 people at any given point in the open season. Over and over it is apparent how important these meals are to students in their daily routine. Not only are they being nourished and replenished with energy, but they are being provided a time and speciic place for decompression. That dining hall, called the Pines, is a place where people can trust that they will be taken care of without worry. But there is something more happening at the heart of it all. The Pines is not just facilitating eating and decompression. It is facilitating social gathering, new conversations, new friendships, and ever growing networks of students. By eliminating students concerns about nourishment and their responsibility for feeding themselves, Penland is fostering connections and creating an opportunity for people to pay more attention to each other.

This is among the handful of good reasons to relieve someone of the responsibility of preparing food. Fostering avoidance behavior is not one of those. And eliminating communication with those responsible for your food is not one of those either. In The Pines at Penland School, a huge part of those three daily meals is the transparency of the kitchen and a recognition of the people responsible for your food. Half of the dining hall is run by work-study students who clean dishes, prep food for the day, and even help in service. A great deal of energy is put into acknowledging what it takes to run such a successful experience. This helps instill a trust in those who eat there, giving them the knowledge that they are in the hands of good people who care about their well-being. The more you avoid or ignore the people between your food in the ground and your food in your mouth, the less you can trust that they really care about your experience or the quality of the food itself.

Top: The Pines Dining Hall and dormitories exterior. Bottom: The Pines sun porch and dining tables.

10

All of my experiences come rushing back to me in my assessment of the Seamless ads I’ve seen that promote avoidance of some element of food experiences. I have found myself, not defending quality food, but the people responsible for it. Somewhere down the line, it became apparent that avoiding the people responsible for your meal leads to avoiding people altogether. Another Seamless

ad claims that, “nothing ruins a good meal like other New Yorkers.” It’s hard for me to believe that these are valued mantras, yet I see them regularly plastered on walls throughout the city.

With Eating Together, I take a stand. I refuse to let the importance of people and social interactions in food systems deteriorate at the hands of convenience and eiciency.

And there are certainly other contributors to this problem.

Work places encourage shorter lunch breaks to increase productivity. Things like startup culture foster intense and eiciency-driven environments. But in the experience of food, itself is where I see an immediate problem. And that is where I choose to plant my stake in the ground.

Products of Design

Throughout the book, I will be taking readers through my irst responses to this growing problem. Having started with something altogether diferent, I’ll deconstruct the beginnings of my thesis exploration before I recognized the importance of that Seamless ad. I will explore the landscape of food systems in the U.S. as I have come to understand them. And I will discuss a number of products developed with the goal of reintroducing social behavior into food experiences.

With these products, I’ll target three main things. These are physical tools, digital tools, and human interactions.

Ultimately, I’ll explore how they might work together to help build up social food systems. Human interaction will not be categorized as a product in and of itself, but will weave in and out of my exploration of physical and digital food tools.

It is my hope that people equipped with these tools can engage others and help improve the way we approach food experiences as a means of social interaction.

11

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

As a student, I have a set of goals and objectives that exist regardless of the content and function of my thesis work. I am working to develop a more diverse and applicable skill set through education, experience, and connections. More speciically, I aim to use these new skills toward making social impacts on the world through physical products. I believe that changes are more fully realized through interactions with physical things. Before entering the program, I was already educated in ine craft and sculpture. Inventing, designing, and making things was already heavily integrated in my skillset. With this particular approach to product design, my skills are broadened. And I would like to be able to use a more nuanced understanding of product design to develop physical things that can change the way people see the world.

Eating Together is steeped in those same goals as a student.

The work moves between digital and physical tools that foster real interactions with people, places, and things. And generally, I aim to facilitate a change in the way people look at food systems as they relate to the tools within those systems. Our individual behavior is ampliied in an age of connected tools. And many of these products either do not project their potential social impact, or blatantly disregard the potential negative social impact.

In this work I have created a set of tools that can be used to connect people in new and unique ways. These are physical objects that require people to work together, digital products that connect people in the real world and then get out of the way so they can focus on each other, and provocations that ask people to consider their relationship to the tools they eat with. It is my hope that these explorations will push people to reconsider what kind of community they can build from food experience and to what extent food experiences can guide our social lives.

Finally, my goals for the book itself are simple. This is a data dump. It is an account of all of the work I have done for this thesis pursuit. With it, I document this experience, pool my indings, and share my understanding of the value, importance, and argument of the work.

12

13

ESTABLISHING A LANDSCAPE

Physical Objects and Food Tools

In the beginning, I did not focus on social food behavior. I was instead concerned with the way objects and human behaviors relate to one another. This exploration came from a brief dive into phenomenological studies and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. My initial explorations were inspired by investigations into Heidegger’s concept of Dasein. The literal translation of the word “Dasein” from German (according to Google Translate) is “to be there,” with alternate noun translations, “existence” and “being.”

Heidegger assigns a meaning to the term that is much more complex. While there are several interpretations of the way he understands Dasein, I focused most on the summary and explanation provided by Thomas Wendt in his book Design for Dasein.??? (page 15) Wendt deines Dasein as “situated Being,” where Being is characterized by our “everyday experience of the world” rather than simply our thoughts and actions.???(page 16) I cannot do the topic justice in so few pages. But the one-line summary of the concept that struck me as most valuable in inspiring the irst of my work states that, “we formulate what we know about the world by interacting with objects.” And so our state of situated Being is deined by the ways in which we interact with the environment around us. With that, too, objects are not deined by their physical properties, but the way in which users act on or with those objects.??? (page 24) And so I began to look for an everyday situation in which the character of our experience is heavily deined by the tools of that experience. Food experiences came to mind, notable for the diversity of tools in both eating and preparing as well as the variety within speciic tool categories. Narrowing in on the eating experience, speciically, I found myself returning to an example Wendt used to describe the way our behaviors and actions might deine the function of an object.

“We could eat cereal with a baseball bat, and that would give it meaning as a cereal-eating device (though likely not a very good one). A phenomenological understanding of interaction notes a diference between acting on and acting through… Acting upon an object takes the object itself as the focal point of the interaction, whereas acting through it takes the user’s end goal as the focal point.”

14

Acting through the object is what redeines the baseball bat as a cereal eating device when the user goes about trying to eat cereal with it. From this example, I raised my own questions. Speciically, how might the act of using a baseball bat as a cereal eating device change the experience of the cereal?

This sparked the irst of two food tool explorations, Rawlings for Wheaties. I took Wendt’s example of the baseball bat and pushed it one step further. Rather than just trying to eat with a bat, I converted one into a genuine cereal eating device.

The relationship between Wheaties and baseball is almost a century old, so it seemed most appropriate for the cereal eaten with the Rawlings spoon to be Wheaties lakes. The point is to take the sensation of championship that Wheaties has claimed to bring to the ield for so many decades and bring it to the breakfast table. The moment in baseball when we feel the most strength and power is the moment we’re holding that bat in our hands. And so that same moment can be felt at breakfast, when your spoon is as long as your arm, made of solid ash. And there’s not much more to it than that and the metrics for success are fairly simple.

Can I actually use it to eat cereal? Yes. Does it change the way I feel when eating breakfast? Yes. Does it change the experience? Yes. It may not make It a better experience, and the bat may still be the incorrect choice of device (with regard to ease of use and eiciency) for eating cereal. But, it makes it a totally diferent experience, nonetheless. I marked it a success and was pleased enough with the results to pursue transforming another object.

In the second case, I looked to a regularly used tool for a more thoughtful and intentional transformation. Looking back, this was subconsciously my irst exploration into social food experiments. The subject was the dinner table. This time the objective was to create a food tool that explores the ability of an object to foster interactions between people. To put it in the context of Wendt and Heidegger, I wanted to see if an object could be leveraged to force an overlap in the situated Being of multiple individuals. Dasein, as Heidegger sees it, is Being with regard to an individual’s place in the world, the relationship between self and environment. In altering the dinner table, I argue in a way that people (other selves) are part of an individual’s environment.

The Potbelly Table takes the shared eating surface of the dining table and presents it as a shared food container.

Inspired by crawish broils and clam bakes, the intention of the tool is that eaters draw from a shared resource at the center of the surface and are thereby forced to interact with each other whether they choose to coordinate around 15

for your wheaties

18

19

the table’s bowl or not. Again, this unintentionally became a provocation on the topic of eating socially and what it means to work with others to eat a meal. My assumption (untested as of the publishing of this book) is that users would ind themselves having to adjust their table behaviors to accommodate others at the common resource. And if users were to eat without plates altogether, the lack of borders and clear boundaries might change their behaviors as well, depending on the setting of the meal.

Gluing up the table model.

With the construction of the Potbelly Table, I began to see how well food experiences are poised as a context for studying the impact of tools and objects on our everyday behaviors. The territory comes with diverse classes of objects, varied experience typologies, and involves interactions most people have at least 3 times a day. But I knew very little about food as a whole system. Before I could go any further with the work I had done, it was necessary that I establish a landscape in which to frame my work.

Understanding Food in America

It is diicult to know where to start in attempting to deine or understand the American food system. It is a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. One might ask which came irst, the food or the hungry people? For example, I could’ve started with farmers, growers, producers, and the restaurant industry. It would have been enlightening to open up the food production systems of the United States and explore how food actually gets to our tables. I could have just as easily started with grocery shoppers and eaters learning what makes people eat the way they do, and everything between hunger and satiation.

Shaping the dish in the table

However, my assumption at the start was that everything in between these two extremes of food production and consumption was interconnected. I initially imagined no more than two distinct factions of the American food system. In my mind, one strove for eiciency, high volume, a strong centralized industry, monopoly, and money. The other fought for independent rights to food and land, focusing on quality, resilience, and a healthy eater’s lifestyle.

Continuing to assume that it was all directly interconnected, I took a shotgun approach and reached out to diferent facets of this system I imagined. I hoped that somewhere I would ind a point of convergence, a common cause. I spoke with farmers, nutritionists, innovative food services, cooks, speciic product users, food future innovators, and food designers. And I found that I was wrong about the way the system looked. It wasn’t anything like this dichotomous

20

thing I imaged. Everything wasn’t tied together. There was no consistent understanding of who was at odds with each other. And everyone had diferent goals and objectives that were speciic to their circumstances and concerns.

This became clear to me in a conversation I had with Holly Herzfeld Dixon, a nutritionist working with diabetes patients. It felt obvious at irst. “Food is a very personal subject. It has diferent meaning and context for everyone,” she said. But, it stuck with me. And I later realized it was one of the most signiicant truths I found. Food is personal.

It is diferent for everyone. And that is exactly why I couldn’t ind this great point of convergence or competition in my imaginary dichotomous system. Certainly, there are many people and groups who share the same ideals. But they are not always uniting or even interacting with each other.

Herzfeld Dixon’s basic insight is the foundation of existing food systems. People take their personal values around food, unite with others who share those values, then they go of and build something particular to their values, needs, and the community in which they build it, unless these people happen to be building a major corporate machine.

Shaping the bottom before sanding.

Big Agriculture is the exception. Many of the entities we associate with national food systems (Monsanto, Wal-Mart, the leaders of the dairy industry, Tyson chicken, etc.) do function as forces that reach throughout the nation. But that’s only half of the picture. This disconnected system is the half that I imagined rising up to meet Big Agriculture in a uniied front. And I while I was wrong, I discovered that what I did ind is as it should be.

In Philip Ackerman-Leist’s Rebuilding the Foodshed, he refers to an ideal food world that functions well as something not too diferent from the disconnected system I concluded to exist. Building on a model developed by communications strategist Duane Hallock, Ackerman-Leist envisions Local Food Systems (LFS) 1.0 and 2.0. “LFS 1.0 is directed to a public audience,” from a single perspective, “whereas LFS 2.0 is an interactive and decentralized community conversation – not a marketing pitch.” [xxxi]

Shaping the dish in the table

Ackerman-Leist puts a great deal of emphasis on this decentralized conversation, arguing that the proper way to tackle the local food system challenge is locally.

This corresponds directly with what I was seeing in my conversations with experts and professionals. Nutritionists Herzfeld Dixon and Jenny Westerkamp both deal with their own localized system. Herzfeld Dixon deals with southern Diabetes patients and their families, while Westerkamp works in Chicago with men who don’t yet know how to lead healthy eating lifestyles with their exercise regimen and professional athletes. While the foundation of their beliefs and values are similar, the groups they work with and the speciic results CHAPTER TITLE

55

21

Potbelly Tables

22

23

24

25

they strive for are entirely diferent. But in the end, they are both working toward a more conscious eater.

Similarly, a number of local food producers in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx all have the same broad strokes of goals in growing food within the greater NYC area. But Sheryll Durrant has diferent concerns about the Bronx than Molly Culver does about her educational community in Brooklyn, even though they are both founded in the same ideas about food sovereignty, security, and access. The argument made by Ackerman-Leist is echoed throughout communities like Durrant’s and Culver’s. Durrant’s garden, Kelly Street Green in the Bronx has diferent needs based on the challenges in that community. It would not be able to meet those challenges if she and Culver had to agree upon a centralized methodology that suited them both equally, and the same is true for Culver and The Youth Farm.

But I was looking back and forth between the work the two women are doing and trying to draw a clear line that connected them to the same objective. It seemed possible.

After all, I networked with them through the same event in Brooklyn. It was the Farming and Food Justice Career Panel. It seemed clear that everyone there shared the same values with regard to food. But they were all working in diferent spaces, serving diferent communities. Nonetheless, I thought that I could ind my uniied front through this community of farmers and local food educators that Durrant and Culver are a part of. And so for a short time, I spent a great deal of energy exploring their worlds of food justice, security, and sovereignty with the thought that I should be trying to create an impact on communities’ rights and access to quality food.

I was in communication with Sherryl Durrant and her partner Bruce Zeines for some time, trying to ind a way in which I could help them increase their impact on the Kelly Street community. I visited the garden to get an understanding of the current state of things, and continued to talk with them about opportunities afterward. But from my experience with them I found there were some challenges in connecting their work to the kind of design intervention and provocation I sought in food systems.

Kelly Street Green is situated in the same position that many urban community gardens are. And their problem is not unique. In fact, it is unfortunately quite common. They are a well-constructed garden space behind an apartment complex in the Bronx. They grow food to share with the community every week, and harvest throughout the summer and early fall. But the problem they are tackling requires a very speciic knowledge of their community. Speciically, many of their neighbors are ignorant or uneducated with regard to quality foods. They sufer from a lack of exposure 26

to quality foods that has been maintained by what food providers tend to exist in food deserts. These are the bodegas and corner stores of America. When people are limited to basic food providers, or even to simpliied urban versions of national grocery chains, their exposure to variety and diversity in categories like produce is heavily reduced. “We have to give the food away,” says Durrant. And even when they go door-to-door with fresh fruits and vegetables, community members are skeptical. They question the purple carrot under the assumption that something bad has been done to it to turn it that color. They don’t know if things like kale or arugula can be cooked or even taste okay.

This is the problem Kelly Street faces. They have to educate their community in order to provide for them. And this is no simple task, which is why I thought design could help.

But I found designing new ways of doing things and new approaches to their community might actually make things more diicult at the stage they are in. For starters, they needed basic design help before they could ever be ready to apply new interventions to this community.

Sheryll Durrant - Kelly Street Garden

Their webpage had not been accessible for update in months. And every mode of communication with their neighbors was analog. They really weren’t leveraging social media or their website in a way that reached out to and engaged with their own community. The website was mostly for communicating with contributors and people interested in supporting the community. And social media was not being clearly leveraged. Participation in social communication with the garden was inconsistent and in some cases not an accurate representation of their relationships to garden users.

The list of minor improvements they could make is long. But it’s not disheartening. And the fact that these challenges leave no room for the brand of design I was looking to apply is actually a good thing. I see it this way because Kelly Street Green is actually making a signiicant impact on its community. And that impact is growing. Though the minor improvements they need to make got in the way of my design goals and opportunities for my thesis work, the amount of growth Kelly Street could see from an improved and more accessible website or a more methodical approach to communicating with schools and programming is amazing.

But they simply were not in a place to beneit from the kind of work I was building. New digital products and services do not help them reconstruct and improve the ones that are already in need of repair. And speculative products for sustainability and behavior change don’t help if they can’t immediately be scaled at an afordable cost. This is a community garden that is giving away its food for free.

27

28

29

They need design to help streamline operations and build community growth more than they need design to help innovate within the process. Once they catch up to the stateof-the art, then they might see more room for innovation and experimentation within their community. But I was not in a position to better their situation and pursue my broader thesis work.

This is why I chose not to continue working with Kelly Street.

It was not beneicial to either party. In my student bubble world, I was not capable of helping work toward real time impact. Their programming does not evolve quickly enough to work with my deadlines as a student, and I could not dedicate the time for their regular updates.

At about the same time I was looking into more of the history of our relationship with food. And in Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork, a connection is drawn between the origins of ceramic tools and our ability to cook and prepare food for ourselves. By association, I drew a connection between these ceramic tools and our ability to evolve to the beings we are today. It is a leading thought that one of the reasons we are capable of so much cognitively, one of the reasons we evolved so rapidly compared to all other living species, is our ability to cook and efectively pre-process foods before we eat them. According to Philipp Khaitovich and evolutionary psychologists, cooking allowed our bodies to dedicate more energy toward thought and cognitive processes.

Yes, it may be a stretch to take that association and credit functional ceramics with our evolution into the people we are today. But this did get me thinking about this historic relationship between ceramics and food. And I started to draw on my own previously unconsidered experience as a potter and functional ceramicist. I realized that even in my own practices there was a deep connection between ceramics and food.

Before my expedition into the wilderness that is the design world, I studied sculpture and ine craft. For much of my studies, I was a Core Fellow at Penland School of Crafts in a small community in Western North Carolina just outside of the town of Spruce Pine. As a student, I studied with ceramicists of many diferent types. And a number of them made functional wares. Throughout my studies, it was common for potters to consider food when making plates, bowls, cups, and the like. So, naturally I developed my own consideration for the things we eat as I was making the things we eat with. My concerns were mostly about the way in which we eat, making objects that can be held close to our bodies for more comfortable, casual experiences.

But in my time there I also met a number of people that were highly focused on what we eat. And in the surrounding communities there was a strong connection between potters 30

and local farmers. In a class with Elisa Difeo of Two|One Ceramics, I was exposed to this more deeply. She connected us to world of potters and chefs that focused on bringing together handmade eating and serving tools with locally grown foods.

Spruce Pine restaurant, Knife and Fork, run by chef Nate Allen is a perfect example of this relationship. Allen runs an establishment dedicated to local micro seasons and relecting the surrounding community in the food he serves. His focus is on running a restaurant that can “support an agricultural and artistic community in a symbiotic relationship.” He sets the bar for a community of craftspeople (farmers and growers included) that can support each other. And many strive for that same bar and more.

A little further out from Spruce Pine in the city of Asheville is a burgeoning community of craftspeople, growers, producers, and chefs working together to build a local identity of food and craft. In an episode of Tales of a Red Clay Rambler, host and potter Ben Carter has a conversation in Asheville, NC with Lindsay Rogers, Josh Copus, and Alex Matisse about the connection between ceramics and the farm-to-table movement.

In this conversation, Rogers talks about the power of ceramics to elevate food to a higher status. Discussing traditional food display she notes that, “the convention was to serve only on a white plate.” For her this convention stood as a challenge to do more than display food, but elevate a speciic kind of food. The power of handmade ceramics became a way for her to elevate locally grown, organic, and ethically produced foods that might seem less common to a place that is more visceral. Now in her practice she seeks to elevate things like kale and local vegetables “speciically in a culture that doesn’t value vegetables” where they’re considered as a side dish and not a main dish.

Matisse then carries the conversation over to production for a restaurant and how to make handmade wares for public use, moving the content from private home to public exposure. In many ways this becomes a conversation on how to multiply the efect of elevation that Rogers is talking about, both literally in this conversation and in the long term conversation around her work. At one point, Carter also turns the discussion over to Copus who digs deeper into the idea of elevating speciic foods. He talks about an increasingly common practice of designing plate ware for very speciic foods and the power that has to draw stronger connections between the plate and the food it is supporting. For all three, this is very much about the way the plate can become more than a platform for food. It’s an integrated tool.

31

With this work in mind, I returned to Ackerman-Leist’s decentralized conversation. In talking with DiFeo and reexamining my experience in communities like Asheville and Spruce Pine I realized that the ceramics community was a living model of his argument. Ceramicists are very good about building their own communities with their own practices and solutions, coming together at a summit from time to time to share them with each other, then returning to their own communities to execute the elements of what they’ve learned that work best for their work. There is also a very strong history of ceramicists traveling frequently to share and learn from each other, teaching workshops, participating in each other’s irings, and building a national network that values regional diferentiation. This is paired with a collector mentality present in the market that promotes and recognizes the nuances of each diferent approach to the ield.

Elisa Difeo - Two | One Home

I wanted to leverage this relationship somehow in my early explorations. I also wanted to test the possibilities of a universal product for multiple parts of a decentralized market/ield. To do this I turned to sustainability in physical product design. I developed a product called the Common Cup. The Common Cup is, as its name gives away, a cup. But this cup is not the primary product. The primary is the plastic mold used to make the cup. Each mold is purchased by a potter or ceramicist as a tool for making multiple cups. Every mold is the same. So every cup produced by any maker has the same form. The form is the brand of the Common Cup. A potter can take that cup and give it their own surface treatment and afectations, even sign the cup as their own product. The only restriction, agreed upon in their purchase of the mold, is that they maintain the form and Common Cup branding.

In doing this, the Common Cup can be identiied with the makers in the region of its origin. And collected together, they make up a Common Cup identity for diferent regions and communities throughout the country. Asheville, for example would have its own representations of the Common Cup. Now, to what end? The general goal is to unite diferent parts of a decentralized network in the use of a single product over a shared objective. In this case that is a focus on sustainability.

Ceramics production is responsible for a portion of the world’s nonrenewable resource mining (reined metals, feldspars, minerals, etc.). Independent potters and ceramicists make up about .1% of the market for these resources. Today, contemporary mining companies are held to certain environmental standards and are responsible for recovering and remediating the lands on which they

32

work when they are done. This helps protect those regions from damage to the point of leaving behind permanently inhabitable blemishes on the face of the earth.

However, there are thousands of acres of mine lands that have been abandoned. And every year, the government allocates $85m to the remediation of those lands. To test the ability of disconnected regions to band together over a shared cause, the Common Cup targets these remediation eforts. The speciic goal is to see if the common cup could recover more than its producer’s share in the damages caused through mining.

If the independent potters market needs to take up more than %0.1 of an $85m remediation plan, the Common Cup would need to pull $85,000 a year in donated proits. So, let’s look at it this way. If we take 10% of the sale of every $30 cup, and 10,000 producers make and sell 30 cups a year, that $85,000 gets crushed with a whopping $900,000 annual contribution from the ceramics community.

Now, this is full of all kinds of holes. One, the product itself is plastic, with a diferent set of environmental ramiications from the cups or any ceramics. And even if it were 100% recycled PET, the metrics for success don’t accommodate all the other environmental impacts of small scale potters, like high energy consumption rates compared to the volume of production.

But, again, my concern was with the ability of the product to unite decentralized parts of a system for a common goal.

And I’m not sure this is actually a wicked problem that needs tackling. Looking back at Greylock Works, regional solutions seem to be much more appropriate. Greylock is tailored to its community and can be a much more efective facility because of that.

As a result of this experiment, I began to think about food and decentralized communities in a diferent way. Rather than looking at how local communities can afect their food systems, I wanted to ind out how food experiences might work to mitigate situations like that of the Common Cup. But, I focused on more local situations and challenges.

To do this, I hosted a workshop called Food Fight. Food Fight was a team-based exercise in which participants built solutions for particular community challenges. And all they were allowed to use was food. I split people into groups and each team was prompted with a particular social conlict in need of mitigation.

I wanted to ind out whether or not food could be used as a tool, itself. One team was prompted with a tornado that ripped through a small Midwestern town. This was team one.

33

34

35

36

37

They were asked to mitigate conlict in a town where half were lucky with their homes still intact, and half were not so lucky with their homes destroyed entirely.

Team two was tasked with mitigating the socio-professional challenges involved with layofs at a small tech company.

They were dealing speciically with the employer-employee relationship. Their response was to prepare a meal that walked people through the stages of grieving that are expected after an encounter like a layof. They aimed to hold people’s hands through that grieving process by preparing dishes that evoke each stage.

On the other team, they took the food available and ignored its use as food. Dealing with an entire community, they decided their mitigation and problem solving needs demanded something much larger than they could construct in the workshop. So they used the food as building materials to mock up a small scale map of the experience they imagined. Pointing out that many families in this scenario would likely have lost livestock or crops, they proposed a “stone soup” type intervention. The goal was to bring two communities together over a bonire and roast that could follow up after a community cleanup project. They focused on the way many people could come together over something that had shared ownership.

FOOD FIGHT A Food Design Experiment

The process and results of the workshop helped me ind a focus on the community impact of food experiences. The tornado team exposed a detail that the other team had not considered. For a food experience to have an impact on a person, very little of that experience has to focus on the taste and type of food. And what is more valuable is the power of food of any kind to bring people together.

This brought me back to that irst Seamless ad I saw. And I became concerned, again, about the avoidance behaviors that many food services are fostering. And it became apparent that American culture is drifting away from community oriented food experiences.

Saturday October 22nd 4:30 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.

136 West 21st Street - 7th Floor Join us for an afternoon exploring the problem-solving power of food and design.

Contact Will at wlentz@sva.edu for more information.

38

American culture is drifting away from a concept of commensality. Commensality literally means eating at the same table. More broadly, according to Susanne Kerner, and Cynthia Chou, it is the act of coming together to eat and drink in the same physical or social setting. Their book Commensality: from everyday food to feast, surveys anthropological and sociological studies of commensality around the world. This collection of works emphasizes the “interdisciplinary collaboration necessary to understand and explain the social and emotional context of food sharing.”

As I set out to do my own work in this space, it was clear that if such collaboration was necessary just to understand and explain the ield, even more would be necessary to design and create social impact within it. And this is evident from the many types of people working to ind opportunities in this space for design. For example, Hasan Shahid Ferdous, a PHD researcher in interaction design, has dedicated much of his time to understanding design opportunities around the disruptive nature of digital technologies around the dinner table. And he’s developed a number of great indings focused on opportunities.

But his restriction to studying the physical disruption of digital tools is where I see limitations and diferent opportunities. Seamless, and many services and products like it, hijack our behaviors before we ever get close to the dinner table. Their content disrupts independently of the physical inluences the object has. By promoting isolating behaviors in eating, cooking, and grocery shopping, they don’t even create an opportunity to navigate the balance between human-computer and human-human interaction at the table.

Here I plant my stake in the ground, between disruptive digital food services and the commensality that is so integral in shared food experiences. This is what I see as my part of the decentralized conversation. It is a battleield on which our social values unknowingly ight against our desire for convenience, eiciency, and independence. It is the contemporary urban food system.

Hassan Shahid Ferdous - Human-Computer Interaction Research

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

Foo Experi

Digital Tools

Hum Intera

50

od iences

Physical Tools

man action

51

52

53

Food Experiences

Digital Tools

Physical Tools

Human Interaction

54

Food Experiences

Digital Tools

Human Interaction

55

56

connects

on

an event in time

RSVP for

as post

hosts

want to share

care for the

work to build with

a table

a passion

wellbeing

social capital

to share with

guests

want to share

of their

with work to build

57

58

59

between a lunch box and a picnic basket

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

Colla

A Social Dinin 72

aboreating

ng Experiment 73

74

75

balance

76

77

78

79

80

Lift

81

82

83

Extend

84

85

86

87

88

Sharing Spoons

89

90

91

Thanks!

92

Fernando Aciar Brent Arnold Emilie Baltz Andrea Cameron Alexia Cohen Kevin Cook Josh Corn Abby Covert Molly Culver Steven Dean Elizabeth Gralton DeSilva Ravi DeSilva Elisa Difeo Holly Herzfeld Dixon Sheryll Durrant Doug Fertig Eric Forman Alexa Forney Janna Gilbert Aimee Good Lauren Gralton Dan Gross Claire Hartten Jingting He Da Young Hong Marti Hurwitz Arjun Kalyanpur Gahee Kang Michael Kenney

Erin Kim Oya Kosebay Eva Lindpaintner Julia Lindpaintner Louis Elwood Leach Marko Manriquez Frank Millero Xumeng Mou Miguel Olivares Zena Pesta Oscar Pipson Jeanne Rosner, MD Ailun Sai Alexis Sicklick Sinclair Scott Smith Michael Stewart Liz Stretch Jen Sturtz Felisia Tandiono John Thackara Karen Vellensky Sam Wells Jenny Westerkamp White Arrow Design Ariel Lauren Wilson Jenna Witzleben Teng Yu Bruce Zeines

Products of Design: Allan Chochinov Alisha Wessler Marko Manriquez Nadia DeLane Gabrielle Kellner Krithi Rao PoD Class of 2018 Penland School of Crafts: for the greatest commensal circle I have ever had Above All: Mom, Dad, and Molly Joyce Porter Rosemary Lentz

93

94

95

96

EATING TOGETHER Eating together: Explorations of an Anti-Social Food System is the masters thesis work of one Will C. Lentz. In this work, we follow Lentz through a dive into the reality of an urban food system, the world of digital food services. Here, Lentz reveals to us the power of food experiences to build social capital, transcend social barriers, and develop stronger interpersonal skills. It is a truly masterful exploration of the way in which physical interventions in the food world can still help us approach such an ancient ield diferently.