FoodPrint | FairShare Experience

FoodPrint FairShare Food Experience: prototype, testing and future recommendations.

Will Brown Master of European Design Glasgow School of Art

FoodPrint

Contents

03

What is this all about?

04

Experience proposal My FairShare dinner

06

Hypothetical future currency Human FairShares

08

‘Pale Blue Dot’ quote, Carl Sagan

10 11 12 13

Menu Air Land Water

14

Informative food stories

16

Quotes

22

Recommendations for future development

24

Refined proposal Food / art installation experience

2

FairShare Food Experience

What is this all about?

This booklet documents the FairShare food experience prototype as part of Will Brown’s Master of European Design thesis project, FoodPrint.

The FairShare food experience explores how we might expand people’s mindset and relationship towards food: from self-oriented motives, such as health, value for money and convenience; to altruistic motives, such as ecosystem balance, and ensuring that there is enough food for a rapidly growing world population. This proposes that we actualise a shift in thinking through tangibly experiencing the true environmental cost of our food purchases.

3

FoodPrint

Experience proposal My FairShare dinner

1 Guests arrive for a set time, have a drink and snacks while waiting for everyone to arrive.

The future currency is exchanged for the dish based on the environmental impact value.

3

Guests choose between 2 dishes for each of the 3 courses. Each course has a low impact value and high impact valiue.

2 A set price for the dinner is exchanged for a ‘future currency’ that has vaue of sustainability, not money.

At this point, the host describes the experimental nature of the event: valuing food for its environmental impact.

4

FairShare Food Experience

4

Each of the four courses arrives on a white tile. Handwritten descriptions of the environmental impact are drawn on the tile.

Guests are encouraged to order different dishes so that they can learn from each other.

At the beginning of the meal, the host addresses the whole group, reciting an updated version of Burns’ ‘Selkirk Grace’ that communicates a planetary thinking mindset.

5

6

Between courses and at the end of the dinner, guests are briefly interviewed on camera, describing their thoughts about the food experience.

5

FoodPrint

Hypothetical future currency Human Fairshares

6

FairShare Food Experience

7

FoodPrint

“Look again at that dot. That’s That’s us. On it everyone you lo know, everyone you ever heard being who ever was, lived out t aggregate of our joy and suffer confident religions, ideologies, doctrines, every hunter and for and coward, every creator and civilization, every king and pea couple in love, every mother an child, inventor and explorer, ev morals, every corrupt politician every supreme leader, every sa the history of our species lived dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

- Carl Sagan 8

FairShare Food Experience

here. That’s home. ove, everyone you d of, every human their lives. The ring, thousands of , and economic rager, every hero d destroyer of asant, every young nd father, hopeful very teacher of n, every superstar, aint and sinner in d there-on a mote of �

9

FoodPrint

Menu

The menu is split into 3 courses, with two options for each course. One option has a low human fairshare value, signifying that it is sustainable and vice versa for the high fairshare value options.

air for starter, land for main, and water for dessert. The participant is forced to choose between these, creating a tradeoff between the cost and what they would choose in an ordinary situation - since there is not enough currency to choose all three high fairshare value options.

Each course is centred around a theme relating to the environmental impact of food:

10

FairShare Food Experience

Starter

Air 4

fs

Bacon and Peruvian asparagus quiche with salad 2

fs

Stuffed mushrooms with nutty kale salad

11

FoodPrint

Main course

Land 6

fs

Aberdeen Angus beef burgers with blue cheese 3

fs

BBQ Black bean burgers

12

FairShare Food Experience

Dessert

Water 4

fs

Soft almond brownies

2

fs

Scottish raspberry Cranachan

13

FoodPrint

Informative food stories Each dish tells a contextual story around what makes it have a low or high environmental impact.

Starter // Air Bacon and Peruvian asparagus quiche with salad Meat and dairy has the highest carbon footprint out of the food groups responsible for half of agriculture’s carbon impact. Air freighted food is also quite impactful, with a pack of air freighted asparagus from Peru emitting 3.5kg of CO2.

Stuffed mushrooms with nutty kale salad All these ingredients are local, therefore reducing transport. Most of the embedded greenhouse gases are in the growing, with plant-based foods being very low.

Main / Land Aberdeen Angus beef burgers with blue cheese Per weight of consumable meat it takes between 10 and 15 times the amount of grain or vegetables grown - using large amounts of land.

Black bean burgers Since all the ingredients in this are plant based, it uses land very efficiently. On top of that, the black beans are packing with protein! It is possible to feed around 11 billion people on a plant-based diet.

Dessert / Water Soft almond brownies Each Californian almond is grown on 4 gallons of aquifer water that is pumped up from underground - since California is essentially a desert. 75% of our water footprint is external to the UK.

Scottish raspberry Cranachan Dairy actually has a high water usage, however these are all local ingredients, and Scotland is not exactly a desert.

14

FairShare Food Experience

15

FoodPrint

Quotes this air freighted asparagus, what would be the impact on a collective farming that, because they are not going to add value by selling it to Peruvians.”

Catherine: “It might be our age, but we were brought up on the meat and two veg thing, that is part of who we are, and the only way we would change is through reading.”

Gordon: “But its just not beef [referring to the bean burger]”

Tom: “what I can’t understand is that if you are dependent on the fish, if you are doing that, you are destroying the potential of your future business.”

Catherine: “I could give up beef!”

Gordon: “3.5kg of CO2, I do not know what that equates to CO2 produced by other means…”

Gordon: “The bean burgers were very nice, so I could have saved some money by going for that, but… I didn’t want to.”

Gordon: “We need to ask if we were not buying and eating

Gordon: “If we simply base it on air miles, then we might make

16

FairShare Food Experience

someone lose their livelihood.”

Very good point, because we have a global economy.”

Tom: “Fresh New Zealand lamb is flown here, its a shocker… and then they sell this lamb at the same price per kilo as Scottish lamb… you don’t get nothing for nothing, Scotland and the EU pay for that somehow.”

Liz: “The information we received now is impoverished - it is very little. Fair-trade is responsibly sourced, but what does that mean? What you have provided us this evening is much more detail, that would certainly make me reconsider… the fact that plants are so much more efficiently grown. 11 billion people, that is quite staggering.”

17

Catherine: “All the current labelling focusses on carbohydrates and proteins… it doesn’t have a traffic light system that says this uses bazillion galleons of water and tonnes of electricity and flown halfway around the world.”

FoodPrint

18

FairShare Food Experience

recipients of what is given to us - but to have the capacity to influence what we are eating.”

Catherine: “with the sustainable data too, the consumer is going to pass out from confusion from al this information

Tom: “How do you enfranchise the people who don’t have money to make the right choices?”

Catherine: “This is very counter commercialism, what it is doing is going deeper into the source of everything, the public is fully equipped with all the information.”

Tom: “The blurb and colour of the [traffic] lights on the packaging are not going to work until people are attuned to the idea that they can lose this.”

Catherine: “The customer can say no I am not going to buy this anymore.”

Catherine: “It all gets down to school education, that is where it starts, where it germinates.”

Catherine: “There has been a lot of secrecy around how much sugars there are - in Dolmio for example… that has 12 teaspoons of sugar”

Jackie: “There was mass heart disease in Finland… so they introduced proper school meals.”

Liz: “Now there is a opportunity for consumers not to be passive 19

FoodPrint

Catherine: “We’d want our children and grandchildren to have a good quality of life like we have enjoyed, and that might not be the case, because we have destroyed things due to our choices. There will come this tipping point where everyone will have to make the right decision… no?”

Gordon: “The government at the moment are never going to compete with the big food companies, because they can afford to spend more money on seductive adverts than the government to say hey, don’t eat that.”

20

FairShare Food Experience

21

FoodPrint

Recommendations For future development

01

Sustainability is secondary

02

Context context context!

03

Holistic perspective

In order to convince the most sceptical & stubborn of individuals, it is important to assure the personal and wider social benefits are being adequately met.

Place the informative stories in context of people’s everyday experiences, be that of the viewer, or enabling them to empathise with others who would be affected.

Remind the viewer of the interrelatedness of the worlds ecosystem, to highlight the fact that our environmental problems can not be exported elsewhere.Â

22

FairShare Food Experience

04

Confront cultural norms

05

Hierarchies of information

06

Refer to current successes

Encourage retrospection and reflection on the cultural upbringing that moulded our preconceptions and current behaviours.Â

To prevent overwhelming individuals with facts that are too challenging, feed information in stages, building on the previous to gain a richer understanding.

To help individuals imagine change, compare to existing successful shifts in the collective consciousness that we now take for granted; such as the shift in opinion around smoking, sugars, recycling and seatbelts.Â

23

FoodPrint

Refined proposal Food / art installation experience

6

1

8

2

7

3

24

FairShare Food Experience

1

Visitors select from food options that each use a different meat or plantbased subsititute as its main ingredient. This is paid for in much the same way as the food experience proposed earlier.

2

The area is set up like a pop-up restaurant, where visitors eat at long bench tables.

There are different enclosures in the area that each contain the animal that is related to the meat options on the menu:

4 5

3

Beef

4

Chicken

5

Crickets For each enclosure there is physical representations of the environmental impact of that as a food choice to contextualise the information in a relatable manner. These explore:

25

6

Greenhouse gas emissions

7

Water usage

8

Land area / amount of feed

FoodPrint

28