Food’s Future Past
Design for
Decolonial Food Systems
Year
2018-2019
For three days, I reduced my food-related greenhouse gas emissions. I changed the ways in which I sourced, stored, cooked and managed food. waste. This experience highlighted how the dominant industrial food system, emanating from colonial logics, is tied to ideas of what ‘development’ means. To invite people to think about the food system and its links to ‘development’, I created a future scenario: It’s 2160 and a set of objects have been unearthed, dating back to 2030, the year that emissions from the food system were formally banned. The objects reveal that while the majority of people chose to survive on POWdER, a vegan powdered food that allowed the continuation of profit-driven, environmentally extricated lifestyles, other people found different ways to cope with the ban. Thus, a pluriverse of food systems was created, showing that there are multiple ways for socially and environmentally sustainable food systems to emerge.
Insight
Did your project evolve in unexpected ways?
One of the ways in which my project evolved unexpectedly was due to the fact that I used mostly recycled materials to make the objects and made them in a way that they could be reused. Thus, the objects and their stories were designed in response to what was available. A year on, I presented them as an exhibition in the Nourish 2019 conference, I had to find different objects and develop the narratives accordingly.
How did this project impact you as a designer moving forward?
This project has had a very big impact in my work since the course. It really encouraged me to be more imaginative and highlighted the importance of storytelling as a creative way in which to get people to think critically about many of the systems that we have taken for granted.
What was the most difficult part of this project?
The most difficult part of this project was to take the leap from what my own views and opinions were on the dominant industrial food system and to present them in a way that did not tell the audience what to think but encouraged them to think critically and present their own responses.
