Food=Quality Time by Joana Sebastião

DOSSIER DE PESQUISA / Joana Sebasti達o

Dossier de Pesquisa - Worldchanging Joana Sebastião 5872 Ilustrações por Joana Sebastião / Design de Comunicação V Prof. Pedro Almeida Prof. Isabel Castro / Faculdade de Belas Artes Universidade de Lisboa 2012/2013

Dos nove temas propostos no enunciado do projecto Worldchanging, decidi tratar aquele que trata do ‘Território Urbano-Rural’. Escolhi tratá-lo do ponto de vista da alimentação pois é uma problemática que me interessa particularmente, tendo-me focado, não no que se fala mais agora que é a obesidade, mas em algo que está muito próximo e relacionado, a perda dos hábitos alimentares, no que toca às refeições e ao seu momento sagrado. Neste momento são poucas as pessoas que realmente aproveitam o tempo da refeição para relaxar e que realmente percebem a origem e o sabor dos alimentos. E daí surgem-me estes quatro capítulos do meu trabalho ‘City and Food’, ‘Speed’, ‘Conviviality’ e ‘At Table’. Em cada um deles temos contacto com uma série de textos que, a meu ver, se relacionam com esta problemática e que vou explicar sucintamente para dar uma ideia geral de cada capítulo. Como pertenço a um curso de Design de Comunicação, decidi ilustrar os textos (com desenho e palavras), porque achei que poderia ser uma boa forma de os sintetizar, ou pelo menos de dar uma ideia de que cada um fala. ‘City and Food’ é o capítulo que desencadeia todos os outros. Encontrei este nome depois de ver a TedTalk de Carolyn Steel com o nome “How Food Shapes Our Cities”. Contém excertos da introdução do livro “Hungry City”, de Carolyn Steel também, no qual ela nos questiona acerca do que é para nós a visão da cidade e fala-nos também de como a cidade e a comida são essenciais à noss vida. De seguida, temos um texto do livro “Worldchanging” com o nome “Cities” que surge da necessidade de ter um texto sucinto que explique o funcionamento das cidades porque como diz Alex Steffen “We live on an urban planet”. Posteriormente,

INTRODUÇÃO

introdução temos os textos “Doing the Right Thing Can Be Delicious” e “Slow Food” de AnnaLappé e Sarah Rich, respectivamente, que falam mais acerca de comida e da forma como comemos hoje em dia, sendo que o segundo texto enuncia para o programa ‘Slow Food’. O capítulo “Speed” ganha nome através do capítulo com o mesmo nome do livro “In the Bubble” do John Thackara. Este contém dois textos: “From Velocity to Virtuosity: Design Principles for Speed” e “Fast Trains, Slow Food” do autor. No primeiro, John Thackara falanos da maneira como a velocidade e a constant aceleração definem a maneira como comunicamos, comemos, viajamos e inovamos nos produtos. No segundo, podemos, mais uma vez falar sobre a temática da alimentação e sobre o Slow Food. Para o terceiro capítulo, ‘Conviviality’ fui buscar o nome ao capítulo com o mesmo nome do livro do John Thackara. Este contém dois textos do autor cujos nomes são “Connected Communities” e “Link and Do”. Peguei nestes dois textos porque são essenciais para perceber a temática que é falada no quarto capítulo. Penso que são fundamentais para perceber a força da connectividade entre as pessoas, pois se trabalharmos sozinhos e vivermos num sistema egoísta e de individualização torna-se mais díficil de conseguirmos fazer mudanças. Daí a frase de Alex Steffen “Imagine a beter future. Find your allies. Share Tools. Build it. Start Now!”. Em jeito de conclusão, surge o quarto capítulo ‘At Table’ cujo nome vem do capítulo com o mesmo nome do livro “Hungry City”. Os dois textos presentes no capítulo “An Ancient Feast” e “Companionship” são o agreagado dos temas falados anteriormente, falam da nossa mudança nos hábitos alimentares, das nossas

tradições e da valorização da partilha e companhia das pessoas e, acima de tudo, da importância da refeição e da valorização da mesma. E agora posso explicar o nome do Dossier de Pesquisa: “Food=Quality Time” que penso que está resumido com a explicação de todos estes capítulos. Porque nós somos aquilo que comemos e assim, a cidade também é o que nós comemos. Porque temos de desacelerar um pouco e perder/ganhar tempo a saborear uma boa refeição. Porque temos de valorizar estes momentos e partilhá-los com as pessoas que nos rodeiam. E, acima de tudo, temos de não perder os costumes que sempre tivémos ‘da bela da refeição’. Joana Sebastião

Em relação ao meu tema, eu gostaria de trabalhar com a Slow Food International (pois uma parte do trabalho deles relaciona-se com o que eu quero falar, como mostro na página seguinte) mas ainda não consegui uma resposta.

INTRODUÇÃO

2.8. do alimento ao prazer, à sociabilidade e ao convívio A estrutura organizacional de base do movimento Slow Food chama-se convivium, cujo significado evoca o banquete, a reunião em torno da mesa, não somente para comer juntos, mas sobretudo para favorecer o diálogo, a troca de ideias, o prazer do convívio. Este talvez seja o aspecto mais nobre que a cultura do alimento conseguiu fortalecer ao longo do tempo. O convívio, a troca de ideias e de experiências, a afetividade, a amizade e até mesmo a realização de acordos de trabalho: muitas vezes tudo isto acontece à mesa. Por volta da metade da década de 70 do século passado, Ivan Illich, um dos mais importantes intelectuais da idade contemporânea, divulgou um novo conceito de convívio e de sociedade convivial, contrapondo-o ao utilitarismo e aos sistemas produtivos que mortificam o trabalho de milhões de pessoas. O convívio fortalece a busca do bem comum e a capacidade de cada um de moldar seu futuro, gerando eficiência sem degradar o meio ambiente. Se observarmos a pequena produção agrícola, a economia local ligada a cada região, os produtores tradicionais de alimentos podem ser considerados os verdadeiros protagonistas do convívio. O apoio que o movimento do Slow Food e do Terra Madre garante aos agricultores, aos pescadores, aos pastores do mundo é, neste momento, a mais importante obra de mudança de um sistema alimentar

que deixou de funcionar. A máxima expressão de convívio se manifesta numa relação responsável de consumidores com produtores. Não mais consumidores passivos, mas coprodutores conscientes e responsáveis. Os novos mercados rurais, a agricultura apoiada pela comunidade, também são formas de um novo convívio. São os novos aspectos da política, capaz de transformar não só a economia, mas também as relações entre gerações; capaz de estimular os jovens a voltarem para a agricultura ou, nos países mais pobres, capaz de dar dignidade aos jovens agricultores. A transmissão de saberes entre gerações é também um ato de novo convívio. É importante reafirmar a definição de convívio da nossa organização de base, pois no convívio pode haver não somente o prazer de um banquete, mas também as novas formas de convívio. Somos o único movimento que faz viver em seu interior o direito ao prazer e o empenho social e cultural ou o prazer do empenho compartilhado. O convívio em seu duplo sentido (alimento e sociabilidade) é um elemento indispensável para o bem-estar da humanidade e pode expressar-se com grande criatividade e com formas diferentes nas diversas regiões do mundo. Todo o movimento Slow Food é chamado a exercitar esta criatividade com empenho e paixão.

CITY noun 1. a large or important town.

AND FOOD noun 1. any nourishing substance that is eaten, drunk, or otherwise taken into the body to sustain life, provide energy, promote growth, etc.

CITY AND FOOD

Close your eyes and think of a city. What do you see? A jumble of rooftops stretching off into the distance? The chaos of Piccadilly Circus? The Manhattan skyline? The street where you live? Whatever it is you imagine, it probably involves buildings. They, after all, are what cities are made of, along with the streets and squares that join them all together. But cities are not just made of bricks and mortar, they are inhabited by flesh-and-blood humans, and so must rely on the natural world to feed them. Cities, like people, are what they eat.

Both food and cities are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they are almost too big to see. Yet if you put them together, a remarkable relationship emerges – one so powerful and obvious that it makes you wonder how on earth you could have missed it. Every day we inhabit spaces food has made unconsciously repeating routine actions as old as cities themselves. We might assume that take-away is a modern phenomenon, yet five thousand years ago, they lined the streets of Ur and Uruk, two of the oldest cities on earth. Markets and shops, pubs and kitchens, dinners and waste – dumps have always provided the backdrop to urban life. Food shapes cities, and through them, it molds us – along with the countryside that feed us. More than anything else, I wanted to know how building were inhabited. Where the food came in, how it got cooked, where the horses were stabled, what happened to the rubbish – these details fascinated me as much as the perfect proportions of their facades.

Carolyn Steel

Most of all, I loved the unspoken bond between the two: public/private, upstairs/downstairs, divisions within buildings, and the way they were subtly interwoven. I suppose I have always been drawn to the hidden relationships between things. Writing it (the book) has been a bizarre as well as lengthy process, since it has taken place during a period in which many of the themes I was linking together – food miles, the obesity epidemic, urbanization, the power of supermarkets, peak oil, climate change – were rising inexorably in the public consciousness. Carolyn Steel

cities We live on an urban planet. For the first time in history, a majority of us live in cities. How we grow those cities, how we build neighborhoods, how we provide housing, how we choose to get around, how well we incorporate nature into the places we live – these are the challenges that will largely determine our future. The challenges are daunting. In the metropolises of the Global North, we face legacies of neglect and pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages, aging infrastructures, and suburban sprawl. Meanwhile, in the booming megacities of the Global South, the problems look massive and unsolvable: exploding populations, crippled local governments, poverty, need, and collapsing systems. And with millions and millions of people moving every year from the countryside to the city, all of these difficulties can seem even more insurmountable. The United Nations estimates that over 3 billion more people will live in the cities of the Global South by 2050. Seventy percent of humanity will be urban then, and almost everyone will live within a day’s trip of a city. Appearances, however, can be deceiving. For, along with the boom in urbanization, we’re seeing a boom in urban innovation. Simply put, we’re getting better at building cities. But are we getting better fast enough? Are the problems getting worse quicker than we can imagine solutions? We’re in a race between urban possibility and urban collapse. The hopes of humanity depend on the outcome. Cities are the key to a better future, and in order to ensure that future, we need to understand them, to consider why they matter, and try to make them better. In some ways, urban life feels timeless. In depictions of cities from a thousand years ago, we can rec-

ognize people practicing their trades, buying and selling at markets, building homes, and celebrating holydays. Human behavior does not change very quickly. In a number of different ways, though, the cities we live in today are entirely new creations. Their size, the speed at which they change, the disparity between their richest and poorest residents, the global interconnection they give rise to, and the varieties of cultures they host – these are all unique to the twenty-first century. The magnitude and velocity of change in the world’s cities today dwarf anything we’ve ever known. If we could deconstruct a city like we can strip an engine, and lay all the pieces out on a cloth on the lawn (a very big cloth, a very big lawn), we’d be stunned by how many moving parts a city has. Leaving aside the most interesting part of urban life – the people and their relationships to one another (for cities are, above all else, the original social software) – we’d find a mass of large systems: the power lines strung out in a patchwork (in some cities, crisscrossing the entirety; in others, reaching only the richest neighborhoods); the branching pipes that carry water (in some cities, delivering it to home taps; in others, to central pumps from which people carry their water home in buckets); the spun glass of telephone lines and radio waves and satellite signals (in some cities; in others, the weekly mail-delivery bicycle). Everywhere, we’d find the overlapping grids and weird rootlike structures of flight paths and train tracks and roads and sidewalks and trails. Cities are the most complicated machines we have ever built. When we think of large cities, we’re used to thinking of London, New York, Tokyo. But by 2015, there will be dozens of new megacities – many about which

CITY AND FOOD

most of us in the developed world know little. What, for instance, do most of us know about Lagos, Nigeria, and the lives of its people? If we answer “nothing”, we’re hardly alone. And yet, the UN predicts that by the year 2015, the city will be home tom more than 24 million people – making it the third-largest in the world. As is true in much of the Global South, many of the people who live in Lagos live in slums. Unfortunately, this common occurrence contributes to why we’re used to thinking of cities as problems. But in reality, cities hold out tremendous promise as we try to steer a course toward sustainability. Urban living, especially in compact communities, is a powerful tool for reducing our ecological footprint. Growth that is concentrated rather than sprawling preserves farms and forests outside the city, and helps facilitate the adoption of new technologies and techniques for building green cities, which will have a great impact on the planet’s future. If we are serious about sustainability, one of the most consequential things we can do is to vote with our address and live in a city where bright green solutions abound. Cities also promote prosperity. They are the engines of our global economy, offering greater opportunities for finding a job, educating our kids, starting a better life. Urban theorist Richard Florida likes to point out that forty on the largest megacities in the world, home to 18 percent of the world’s population, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly nine in 10 new patented innovations.” But well-designed cities don’t just help us become prosperous; they meet our most basic needs – from clean water and adequate housing to education, health care, and other social services – better than spread-out suburbs do.

And no two cities are alike. Even present-day cities modeled on past ones (likes Shanghai’s Bund, built to resemble a European city) end up entirely unique as people live in them, use them, and change them. A few people know almost everything about their city and can tell you its history, shed light on its character, and reveal its hidden corners. And though such people, with a lifetime of knowledge, are extremely rare, they are the maps and encyclopedias that can help us figure out how to transform our cities. Before the breed vanishes, we need to learn its secrets. We have to know a place to make it better, because no single urban-planning tool will ever work for every city, and because the more we know and love a place, the more we want to participate in determining its evolution. Much of the power to direct our cities’ futures rests in the hands of politicians, planners, and powerful interests (the wealthier the place, the truer this is), but its increasingly the case that we citizens hold the tools, models, and ideas to demand better solutions, and even to begin implementing them ourselves. We are the collaborative architects of the cities we inhabit. Alex Steffen

CITY AND FOOD

doing the right thing can be delicious We’ve become a long way from a diet that is sustainable and healthy for our bodies, our communities, and our planet. Although the industrial food revolution of the last century promised abundance and an end to hunger, in many ways it has delivered the opposite. The United States produces more than twice the required daily caloric intake for every man, woman, and child, yet as many people in the United States go hungry as populate the entire country of Canada. According to the UN, worldwide 1 billion people go hungry every year, and 18,000 children die every day from needless hunger. The industrial farming revolution of the last century – particularly the introduction of chemical pesticides, mono-cultural production, and confined animal feedlots – has made farming one of the world’s worst polluters. In the United States alone, we blanket the country with billions of pounds of pesticides. Industrial farming also has the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s biggest contributors to greenhouse-gas emissions. Our petroleum-dependent farms eat up oil faster than you can say “Gulf War”, using ten calories of fossil fuel for every one calorie they produce. According to journalist Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, the production of just one two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of half a gallon of gasoline.

Even worse, as industrial farming pollutes our environment, it also pollutes our bodies. Research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on exposure to environmental chemicals indicates that most of us walk around with a significant “body burden” of chemical residues, many from farm chemicals. Devouring the fast food, junk food, and fake food that saturates our supermarkets and restaurants has led to a host of health problems as well, from obesity-related diseases that lead to premature death, to certain cancers and neurological and hormonal problems that are associated with the chemicals used in our fields. Our fake-food culture is also largely to blame for the nearly 76 million annual cases of foodborne illness in the United States, which lead to more than five thousand deaths every year. Yes, the twentieth century may have seen the fastest revolution in our dietary and agricultural practices in human history, but around the world, citizens (eaters, farmers, policy makers, researchers, and health advocates) have also fostered a different sort of revolution in food and farming, one that holds real hope. Indeed, this new century may see a revolution in food equally startling to the twentieth century’s – only this one will be much better for us. Oh, and it will taste much better, too. Anna Lappé

‘‘Slow Food is an idea, a way of living and a way of eating. It is a global glassroots association with thousands of members around the world that links the pleasure of food with a commitment to community and the environment.” ‘‘Slow Food made me realize how important it is for farmers, producers, cooks and consumers to work together in order to defend our agricultural heritage.” [Madieng Seck, Senegal]

‘“I choose Slow Food because to change the world, you have to change the menu first.” [Gigi Padovani, Membro Slow Food]

CITY AND FOOD

slow food “Slow Food unites the pleasure of food with responsibility, sustainability and harmony with nature.” [Carlo Petrini, Fundador e Presidente da Slow Food International]

What ever happened to going to the market for fresh food, cooking at home, sitting down, and eating slowly enough to taste our meal? What happened to gathering together with family and friends to share conversation, trade recipes, and try something new in the kitchen? What happened is fast food. Hardly anyone has remained immune to the instant-gratification food culture we live in, or the breakneck pace of a regular day. But one person did decide that this grave problem warranted a backlash, and in 1986, in response to an outrageous plan to build a McDonald’s on the Spanish Steps of his native Rome, Carlo Petrini issued a rallying cry to citizens worldwide to drag their feet and slow down the acceleration of modern cuisine. Thus began the Slow Food Movement. The movement encourages us to rediscover and rededicate ourselves to the pursuit of pleasure through food. But it’s not just about delighting in all things edible. Slow Food is fundamentally about supporting

local farmers, preserving cultural customs, promoting organic agriculture, and teaching people to rely on themselves – not on franchised eateries – for their sustenance. The Ark if Taste projects seeks to catalog and preserve “forgotten tastes” – traditional foods that have become endangered by our modern food system (raw milk, which is not legal to sell in many places because of hygiene laws set by industrial agriculture, is a good example). The Slow Food Movement’s snail mascot has made its way speedily around the globe, leaving a trail of motivated slow foodies in forty countries. You can easily join your local association or start one in your hometown and be a participant in the Slow Food Movement’s resSarah Rich toration of food culture.

SPEED Noun 1. rapidity in moving, going, traveling, proceeding, or performing; swiftness; celerity: the speed of light; the speed of sound.

Have we reached a similar juncture, when it comes to speed? For generations, speed and constant acceleration have defined the way we communicate, eat, travel around, and innovate products. Our designed at an ever increasing pace, and speed is worshipped uncritically as an engine of investment and innovation. But the signs are that speed is a cultural paradigm whose time is up. Economic growths, and a constant acceleration in production, have run up against the limited carrying capacity of the planet. The carrying capacity of business is also under pressure. When continuous acceleration is the default tempo of innovation, it leads to “feature bloat” in products and the phenomenon, which we are seeing now, of customers who resist the pressure to upgrade or software continually. Absolute speed – in computers, as much as in cars – remains powerfully attractive for many of us, but acceleration seems to have lost its allure. Many of us want faster computers, but we also want to live more balanced lives – lives lived at speeds we determine, not at speed dictated by the logic of systems beyond our control. Questioning speed and acceleration raises interesting design and innovation questions. Should we continue to design only to make things faster? Is selective slowness consistent with growth and innovation? How might faster information help us live more lightly on the planet?

John Thackara

SPEED

From Velocity to Virtuosity: Design Principles for Speed The design challenge is not to slow everything down, but to enable situations that support an infinite variety of fast and slow moves—at a rhythm dictated by us, not by the system. Ivan Illich described the speed issue as a prison, out of which there is no exit, when it’s presented as an either/or choice: ‘‘We discuss fast and slow, endurable and destructive speed. We fantasise about becoming ‘slowbies.’ We speak of the good life as a slow life. But it’s not about being fast versus being slow. It’s about being Here, being Now, being—and that is the English word—Quick. You know what the word ‘quickening’ meant: the first kick of a baby in the belly of a woman. ‘Quickening’ meant: coming alive, quick. We might be already beyond the age of speed by having moved into the age of—and I say the word with a certain trembling—‘real time.’ The move toward real-time is one way out of the world of speed.’’ Slowness does not have to be a drag on innovation. Products and services that incorporate selective slowness, and that are consistent with economic growth and continued technical innovation, are already being developed. John Thackara

SPEED

FAST TRAINS, SLOW FOOD The aim was to develop project ideas for services and situations that connect people, cultural resources, and places in new combinations. Food, for some reason, dominated our discussions of quality time. Slow Food has grown into a large-scale international movement, with over sixty thousand members in all five continents. Debra Solomon, an artist-chef based in Amsterdam, persuaded our group that slow food and quality time are linked in cities everywhere. Solomon herself had just returned from working with dumpling vendors in Nanjing, China, and street food sellers in Bangalore, India. Systems for the distribution of organic and seasonal slow food are emerging everywhere, it turned out—even in the speediest cities. Organic produce, products of certified origin, and fresh, natural, seasonal produce are becoming easier to find throughout all metropolitan areas. Often these are accompanied by attempts—parallel to the ones seen in logistics—to make the whole line of production and distribution more visible. Some organic fruit and vegetable home delivery organizations (e.g., Odin in Holland, Aarstiderne in Denmark, and Le Campanier in Paris; a similar service is provided by Handan Organic Vegetables in China) connect the producer directly to the end user, providing a delivery service for seasonal fruit and vegetables. Subscribers receive a weekly crate of fruit and vegetables, the contents of which vary according to the season and what has actually been harvested. A particularly interesting collaboration network enables Bombay Lunch Delivery in Bombay. This initiative organizes the daily distribution of thousands of homecooked meals produced by the wives of employees in offices throughout the city. The success of the service

is due to the organization of its underlying structure. A network of ‘‘meal porters’’ (the dabbawallah) acts as a link between the wives who cook the meals and their husbands working in the offices; each pays a monthly subscription for the service provided. Today, people who do not have a family but wish to receive a homecooked meal can also subscribe to the system, which has been so successful that since late 2003, it has also been possible to order meals online. Another way to close farm-to-table loops in a leisurely way is to adopt a tree. Or a hen. Agritime, in the province of Bolzano, Italy, hires out apple trees and grapevines. Whoever adopts a plant follows through the cultivation process during the year, joins in the harvest, and receives the fruit. A similar arrangement is offered for hens and their eggs. Some people prefer to get their hands dirty. Urban family vegetable gardening has been regaining popularity in Great Britain, where numerous local associations hire allotments to people who want to work their own piece of land, even in the major urban centers, and gather the fruits of their labors. These associations are linked through the National Association of Allotment and Leisure Gardeners. A growing number of cities promote themselves as slow cities—even if we reach them quickly. Citta Slow, the Slow Cities movement, was founded in Italy in 1999 following the success of the Slow Food movement. Citta Slow advises city managers to promote the quality of hospitality as a real bond between visitors and the local community. Slow food, slow trams, slow cities: These are more than passing fads. Demographic change seems certain to diminish further the demand for accelera-

was that as networked communications dissolved inefficient ties to people and place, companies would access different suppliers, procure new items, and so drive down prices. But experience has shown that relationships based on the development of mutual trust through time remain the vital essence that makes markets work. Social ties and personal relationships that have developed slowly through time have proved to be as valuable as brute speed in many industries that experimented in disintermediation. Journalist Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal chronicled the struggles of one family-owned food distribution business in Oakland, California, that matches buyers and sellers in the eighty-billion-dollar-a-year food produce industry as it toyed with an e-commerce model. Gomes described a vivid scene that featured ‘‘six salespeople in a small noisy [Ezio Manzini] office, buying and selling produce using telephones, fax machines, and 20-year-old Downshifting is also changing patterns of work. software on a recent-model IBM minicomputer about The average number of hours worked per year has the size of a small refrigerator.’’ The dot-com proposibeen falling in most rich countries over the past detion was simple: Use Web technology to build an aucade. In recent years, 20 percent of Americans, a very tomated business-to-business exchange—and banish large number, reported that they had made voluntary billions or even trillions of dollars of inefficiencies. More lifestyle changes that resulted in their earning less speed seemed a prime target in a sector whose prime money, such as changing their jobs, quitting work, or rule is ‘‘Sell it or smell it.’’ It turned out that the main going from a full- to a part-time job. And these were assumption behind the Internet exchanges was wrong: not only the old. Juliet Schor, who has pioneered reThe technological workhorses already in use were efsearch into downshifting, finds that these downshiftficient enough and had little to gain from the Internet. ers tended to be more young than old—indeed, they ‘‘I could sell ten times more produce by just getting on are disproportionably found in the eighteen- to fortythe phone and hustling than I ever could on a website,’’ year-old range. said one trader Gomes interviewed. As Gomes wrote Business shows some signs of a return to slowat the time, ‘‘the abrupt leap from old-fashioned perness—thanks in large part to a revalorization of time sonal relationships to the ruthlessly competitive world as an element of trust. During the dot-com years, it of electronic exchanges was more than many could was thought that ‘‘disintermediating’’ people from handle. The boosters failed to balance the cost efficienbusiness processes would improve efficiency and recies of electronic transactions against these personal duce costs. The theory of eco-nets, agoras, aggrerelationships.’ gation, value chains, distributive networks, and so on John Thackara tion.People live more slowly as they get older, and we would do well to note that more than half of all adults in Europe and the United States are over fifty. By 2100, one-third of the world’s population will be over sixty. This group is bound to influence time regimes. Twothirds of disposable consumer income will held by this age group—and it’s a group that tends to appreciate quality more than quantity.

‘‘Slowness is fundamental to quality.

To appreciate quality, I have to take time.

With a glass of wine I have to smell it, look at it, I have to take my time to drink this wine. Even beyond that, to be able

to understand that is a good glass of wine, I had to do something before—to learn, to spend time in study.”

SPEED

CONVIVIALITY adjective 1. friendly; agreeable: a convivial atmosphere. 2. fond of feasting, drinking, and merry company; jovial. 3. of or befitting a feast; festive.

CONVIVIALITY

Connected Communities A network is not, per se, a community. A community embodies trust and social capital that develop through time as a result of embodied interaction between people. The Internet complements communities—it does not create them. Connections between people can be enabled by technology, but trust is dependent on the passage of time and the contiguity of bodies. As Pekka Himanen and his colleagues have written, ‘‘the tools and governance principles of the open source software community, in some modified form, could yield new approaches to community organization and problem solving.’’ To do this, we need supporting infrastructures that enable dialogue, encounter, and community. The collaboration tools and social software for these better-connected communities need to be designed. So how do we design support networks as effective ways to enable mutual support? A number of researchers have been preoccupied with this question for quite some time. Eve Mitleton-Kelly, for example, a professor at the London School of Economics, creates connectivity netmaps of organizational communications—e-mail, telephone, instant messaging, etc.—in order to reflect real-world interactivity and coevolving patterns of connectivity over time. The aim is to reveal unexpected linkages and connections—or gaps—within social networks. Another researcher, Valdis Krebs, has developed social-analysis software that maps social networking in academia and other domains. ‘‘Experts have long argued about the optimal structure of a person’s professional network,’’ says Krebs. ‘‘Some say that a dense, cohesive network brings more social capital, while others argue that a sparse, radial network, one that provides opportunities for innovation and entre-

preneurial activity, equates to greater social capital.’’ Krebs has constructed a links map of the so-called Erdo˜s network (about a celebrated mathematician by that name) that shows both patterns—a densely connected core, along with loosely coupled radial branches reaching out from the core. These experiments in mapping social networks can be fascinating, but the conclusion I draw is that you don’t design social networks as you would a railway or cable network. Social networks generally start out small and develop gradually. The modest design actions we might take to improve the efficiency of information transfer within a network are to create hubs, or add new links, to act as artificial shortcuts between otherwise distant regions. Mapping social networks and analysis of the topology of communication links within a network may help identify where such interventions are needed. Equipped with this information, managers or community stewards might be able to adjust network architecture, create clusters of linked individuals, or put together groups with complementary expertise. John Thackara

CONVIVIALITY

LINK AND DO

Design strategies for the creation of communities of practice have been considered by a number of leading organizations. Communities of practice are largely informal, voluntary, and self-organizing—like all communities— so it is a challenge for organizations to shape them. Etienne Wenger, an expert on the subject, cautions that ‘‘without an understanding of their dynamics and composition, community of practice initiatives can be wasteful, ineffective or even harmful.’’ Social computing, coordination technology, community software, and ‘‘groupware’’ in this context are just that: tools. Tools for collaboration, such as the Internet, agents, wireless, and knowledge mining, are support for the process, not the process itself. ‘‘All real living is meeting.’’ Martin Bu¨ber’s focus on dialogue and community marks him as an important thinker for service designers. His fundamental concern with encounter as the basis for our relationships with one another and the world is a salutary antidote to technology push. Ivan Illich, too, was at first dismissed as a crank when he argued for the creation of convivial, rather than manipulative, institutions for learning, health, and care. As I noted in chapter 4, in French the word for these timeless insights—la vie associative—recognizes the importance of association in the widest sense of the word and the effect that such association can have both on the life of the

individual and on the life of a village, town, region, or country. In institutions such as churches, tenants groups, and youth organizations, people freely combine to produce goods and services for their own enjoyment. Many organize around enthusiasms ranging from swimming clubs to beekeeping societies and train-spotting circles, from allotment associations to antiques groups and basketball teams. These groups provide a sense of belonging and identity as well as a setting in which to meet and make friends with people. Throughout history, human beings have always established social communities, developed rules of social exchange, embedded their members in complex reciprocal relationships, and built social trust. We don’t have to invent conviviality: It’s already there. John Thackara

AT TABLE “The fate of nations depends on the way they eat…” [Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin]

AT TABLE

AN ANCIENT FEAST

More than half the meals we eat are eaten alone; the majority of those consumed on the hoof, in front of the telly, or sitting at a desk. Our lifestyles are increasingly fuelled by food, not structured around it; not least because of the enormous social changes that have taken place over the past century or so. In 1871, there were six children in the average British household; by the 1930s that figure had shrunk to two; by 2003 it was less than one. Thirty-six per cent of households now consist of couples and 27 per cent people living on their own. Our splintering domestic arrangements mean that we are relying increasingly on restaurants for our social dining. Over a third of the food we consume in Britain is now eaten outside the home; a figure that by 2025 is expected to rise to half, close to the current level in the USA. The trend has even got the supermarkets worried: with a ‘share of stomach’ worth £34.5 billion in 2003 and rising fast, the catering industry is closing the gap on their dominance of the convenience-foods market.The supermarkets have responded by stocking takeaway brands such as Pizza Express in their stores, and ready meals claiming to be ‘restaurant-quality food to eat at home’. Whether we eat out or in, there ir no doubt that formal dining in Britain is on the wane. A quarter of households no longer even have a dining table large enough for everyone to sit around. But although most

of our meals (or ‘meal occasions’, as the food industry insists on calling them) consist either of fast food or ready meals (‘meal solutions’), there is one kind of occasion for which only one sort of meal will do. Whenever we have a really significant event to celebrate, a feast is still overwhelmingly the way we choose to do it. Tables may be shrinking and lifestyles speeding up, but nothing has yet replaced feasting as a celebratory mechanism. Dinner parties may no longer be quite the make-or-break social events of a century ago, but even they retain a certain potency. Being asked to dine at someone’s house remains something of an honour, and an unmistakable token of friendship.

Carolyn Steel

COMPANIONSHIP We are omnivores, which mean that the rural sharing food goes deep into our past. Our hunter-gatherer forebears had to find ways of distributing the spoils of the hunt equably among themselves, and the fellowship of those far-distant meals resonates with us still. Although modern lifestyles have made solitary meals increasingly common, we generally prefer to eat in company. Few acts are more expressive of companionship than the shared meal. As the Latin derivation of ‘companion’ indicates (from cum ‘together’ + panis ‘bread’), someone with whom we share food is likely to be our friend, or well on the way to becoming on. Eating among friends instills a powerful sense of well-being in s, arousing primitive emotions of which we are barely aware. In the final scene of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’, Bob Cratchit and family sit poised to tuck into an enormous turkey, sent round unexpectedly by Bob’s miserly, but now repentant, employer Scrooge. As we contemplate this heart-warming scene, we cannot help but feel the future happiness of the Cratchits is assured, and that, by extension, all is well with world. Splendid dinners such as this, fictional or otherwise, exert a powerful influence over us, creating a paradigm against which all other meals are judged. Sharing food with those to whom we are closest is a primal act, but as people who grew up in a large family can testify, the rules of engagement still have to be learnt. Restraint at table is a cultural, not a natural skill, and when we are young, we can be tempted to deprive our siblings of the juiciest slice of beef, the largest piece of cake. Watch a pride of lions eat, and you get some idea of what table manners are covering

up. The default state of wild animals is hunger; the satisfaction of that hunger a basic instinct. When hunting animals share a kill, they eat warily but fast, with the more powerful animals getting the ‘lion’s share’. That is not to say that animals do not have elaborate strategies for sharing food (they do), or that animal parents do not regularly deprive themselves of food in order to feed their young (ditto). But in the animal world, the right to eat, like the right to mate, usually depends on the display of individual power. While good for speeding up the effects of Darwinian evolution, this approach to food-sharing could scarcely be called civilized. Yet its principles lie under the surface whenever people share food too. In his 1910 essay ‘Sociology of the Meal’, the sociologist Georg Simmel touched on the primitive underpinnings of shared meals. Hunger, he argued, brings people together by necessity at certain times and in certain configurations, making the common meal the most potent ordering device in society, inclusion or exclusion at such gatherings is socially defining; yet the civility of the table is just a veneer to mask the real motive of the meal: the satisfaction of individual selfishness. Whether or not one signs up to Simmel’s somewhat misanthropic view, there is no doubt that in human society, power and status have a large part to play in determining what, when, how much and with whom one gets eat. Merely to sit at table confers a certain status: in order to eat, someone has to cook; in order to be seated at table, somebody must serve. All meals, however humble, have an implicit hierarchy, in which diners enjoy a higher status than those who cook and serve their food. Since cooking and eating occupy complementary positions in the social order,

AT TABLE

that means that the social and gender divisions of the kitchen translate – in reverse – to the table. Everyone has to eat; but the history of dining has been dominated, like society itself by men, and powerful ones at that. Long before Brillat-Savarin made his most famous observation – that you are what you eat – the essential tribalism of the table was well understood. We are hard-wired to feel close to those with whom we share food, and to define as alien those who eat differently from us. The tribal nature of food is clear from the frequency with which it has been used by one nation as a term of abuse for another, as in ‘Frog’, ‘Kraut’, ‘Rosbif’ and ‘Limey’. The latter reference, from the British practice of carrying lime juice aboard ship to avoid scurvy, is pertinent. Food rituals have always been integral to life at sea, as a way both of boosting morale, and of ordering the social and fighting hierarchy of warships. Nineteenth-century gun crews ate together at tables slung between their weapons, taking turns to serve each other from the ship’s galley. The natural camaraderie of the table was thus transferred directly to the fighting effectiveness of the ship: men who ate their meals together worked better as a team and would more readily die together. The power of shared meals to forge human bonds makes their context particularly significant. Beyond the table, a series of questions arises. Does the meal have a ‘purpose’ other than the mere feeding of those present? Who is allowed to attend? Whose table is it anyway? The answers to these questions, and to others like them, hold the key to food’s influence in society. In ancient Greece, Zeus himself was the god of hospitality, and no crime was considered more hei-

nous than the betrayal of trust at table. Participation in a xenia, a friendship meal, bound host and guest together in a bond of loyalty close to that of kinship – even the diners’ descendants were forbidden to fight one another in battle. All of which would have made Homer’s description of Agamemnon’s return from the Trojan Wars doubly horrific to the audience of his day. The hero was murdered at his own table, slain by his wife’s cowardly lover Aegisthus, who had plotted to murder his superior opponent by laying on a feast for him and attacking him as he ate. Above all else, the shared meal is a social tool; open to manipulation, use and abuse, gestures of friendship or betrayal. Paradoxically, some of the easiest meals to ‘read’ in these terms can be elaborate feasts such as those held at the Inns of Court. However arcane their rituals, one at least knows what the main purpose of such meals is: to reinforce the prestige, traditions and fellowship of the Inn. The message is clear. But the social dynamics of private hospitality can be far more ambiguous, as the etymology of the words ‘host’ and ‘guest’ suggest. Both derive from the Indo-European ghostis (stranger), from which the Latin hostis (stranger, enemy) comes: the root of our word ‘hostile’. That the words host and hostile should share a common root may seem odd until one considers that it is the act of hospitality itself that binds people together; that can turn strangers – and potential enemies – into friends. Carolyn Steel

REFERÊNCIAS

SCHNEIDER, Stephen, Good, Clean and Fair: The Rhetoric of the Slow Food Movement, National Council of Teachers of English, 2008 STEEL, Carolyn, Hungry City - How Food Shapes Our Lives, Vintage Books, Londres, 2009, p.9-12,206-2014 STEFFEN, Alex, Worldchanging - A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, Abrams, New York, 2011, p.48-49,191-192 THACKARA, John, In The Bubble - Designing in a Complex World, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2005, p.29-44, 131-134 WILK, Richard, Fast Food/Slow Food - The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System, Altamira Press, United Kingdom, 2006, p.3-13 http://www.slowfood.com/filemanager/official_docs/ SFCONGRESS2012__A%20centralidade_do_ alimento.pdf, A Centralidade do Alimento - Do alimento ao prazer, à sociabilidade, ao convívio, ao compartilhamento, p.16 http://www.ted.com/talks/carolyn_steel_how_food_ shapes_our_cities.html, 1 de Maio 2013 http://www.slowfood.com/, 1 de Maio de 2013