Food Democracy: Critical Lessons in Food, Communication, Design and Art (Socially Repsonsive Communication, Design and Art: Memefest Interventions) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783207965 ISBN 13: 9781783207961

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Food Democracy brings together contributions from leading international scholars and activists, critical case studies of emancipatory food practices and reflections on possible models for responsive communication, design and art. The book includes recipes and essays that ask how to counter the role of the food industry as a machine of consumption.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr Oliver Vodeb is senior lecturer in the School of Design at RMIT, Melbourne. He is founder and principal curator of Memefest and Lipstick+Bread. His latest book Food Democracy: Critical Lessons in Food, Communication, Design and Art has been published by Intellect Books, UK.

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Food Democracy

Critical Lessons in Food, Communication, Design and Art

By Oliver Vodeb

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-796-1

CHAPTER 1

Hungry for Change + Thirsty for Life

The Socially Responsive Communication, Design and Art Kitchen and its Dishes

OLIVER VODEB

THE BOOK

This book engages food democracy with communication, design and art. Food is central to our lives, but broader knowledge related to food is increasingly dissolved in the standardizations of consumerist society. Knowledge about communication, media, design and art is largely subsumed to a discourse diluting responsibility through elevating the market as the main principle for the final justification of human actions. We argue that knowledge created under autonomous conditions can lead to change, as it has the potential to create new situations, and particularly that socially responsive communication, design and art can crucially contribute to food democracy.

Not long ago I talked with a university lecturer, an experienced and inspirational designer who regularly participates in radical social actions. He explained to me how a group of academics wanted to study one of their actions — having received a grant to do so. The activists were irritated, wondering what they would get back from the researchers. They felt that their activities enabled the researchers to get a grant, do the research and probably have a good time too, but were wondering about what impact the research would have. It is true, the usual scenario is that researchers, as a result of their work, publish papers in academic journals, which are mostly only read by an isolated community of academics. While I share many frustrations with current academia, this little story seems typical to me of an important part of the problem. While it is true that academia should collaborate more with social movements, I think social movements should aim to collaborate with academia as well. As is evidenced by this anecdote, a situation emerges where, instead of trying to bridge the different cultures, to create conditions for collaboration and if necessary to provide translation of the academic research to 'people on the ground' that could potentially greatly benefit the activists and their efforts, relations of exclusion were reproduced and a chance for the activists to influence academia (which they critiqued) was missed as well.

This book brings together different cultures — academic, activist and professional — and connects them with design, art, social sciences and philosophy. These cultures have different principles of rigour when it comes to knowledge production and research. Brought together in an inter/extradisciplinary manner, they have the potential to measure, think and produce affective insights and act in the world. Connected in a collaborative way and in different (non)institutional contexts, they open up possibilities for response ability.

This methodology, developed by Memefest, is practised through a unique international network, along with a series of events: the international Festival of Socially Responsive Communication, Design and Art, the extradisciplinary symposium/workshops/interventions and this book. The Memefest network connects people of various backgrounds from around the world interested in an alternative to the dominant practices engaged with public communication. The online network has almost two thousand members with various degrees of intensity of participation. The core of the network consists of the Memefest Collective and a close network of curators and editors who inform many of the Collective's decisions. Curators and editors are mostly long-time collaborators: academics, professionals and activists of various backgrounds.

The Festival of Socially Responsive Communication, Design and Art addresses themes of urgent relevance and creates a 'friendly' competition process that is more formative than selective, more research- and education- than star-driven. This process is an alternative to, and a critique of the dominant design and advertising awards, competitions that play a crucial role in constructing criteria of what is good public communication. Through a complex interplay of awards, their representation, legitimization and marketing-based quality criteria, these dominant design and advertising awards reproduce a self-promotional culture based on competition. They promote and naturalize values and communication and design approaches aligned with the logic of the spectacle and neo-liberal capitalism. Such awards are used as a marketing instrument for promoting the profession and designing its image, and as such are not an instrument for fostering in-depth understanding (Grant 2008; Vodeb 2008, 2012).

Memefest's Friendly Competition engages participants in urgent social issues and puts communication, design and art at the centre of the curated themes: 'Debt' in 2012, 'Food Democracy' in 2013 and 'Radical Intimacies: Dialogue in our Times' in 2014. The process offers a public forum for dialogue and provides participants with multiple forms of educational, curatorial and editorial feedback through the memefest.org website, which also presents a number of works regarded as outstanding. Works are also exhibited in the online gallery and made publicly accessible. In this way the Friendly Competition nurtures and rewards socially responsive communication, design and art (Vodeb 2008).

A range of research is generated from the Memefest Friendly Competition process. The Food Democracy issue of the Memefest festival triggered responses from 25 countries in the areas of visual communication practice, critical writing and participatory art. These projects are used to inform the symposium/workshops/ interventions event, which applies this research to a local context and develops it further. The symposium hosts leading scholars and practitioners and feeds directly into the workshop process where extradisciplinary groups work on developing public interventions in various formats. The groups are mentored and designed as self-sustaining, response-able communication/design/art studios. Within a given deadline, with fixed financial resources, the workshop process culminates in interventions in the public sphere. The Food Democracy workshops were especially significant because of the groundbreaking collaboration with the Aboriginal activist group — The Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy (BASE).

This extradisciplinary approach, which is also integrated in Memefest's Friendly Competition, is rooted in artistic institutional critique and directed towards practices that operate at the intersection of art/theory/activism:

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice. The word tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline; while the notion of reflexivity now indicates a critical return to the departure point, an attempt to transform the initial discipline, to end its isolation, to open up new possibilities of expression, analysis, cooperation and commitment. This back-and-forth movement, or rather, this transformative spiral, is the operative principle of what I will be calling extradisciplinary investigations. (Holmes 2009)

This experimental research happens at Memefest within a newly created public, connecting network-based self-organization, participatory action, critical research and public media and communication. These four elements of the process are considered to be crucial parts of movements for social change (Holmes 2012) and are used as a set of strategies for research, pedagogy and engagement. The process aims to unfold an expressive, analytic and aesthetic interventionist practice as well as to (self) organize situations of social exchange with an attempt to transform one's initial discipline.

The extradisciplinary ambition is to carry out rigorous investigations on terrains as far away from art as finance, biotech, geography or psychiatry, to bring forth on those terrains the 'free play of the faculties' and to carry out a lucid and precise critique. These are deliberate and delirious experiments, unfolding by way of material forms, conceptual protocols and situations of social exchange. Satire, hallucination and political activism go hand in hand with careful study and technological sophistication (Holmes 2009).

The ambition to transform one's initial discipline supports the broader goal of Memefest; of contributing to knowledge and understanding of public communication for social change — a process necessarily connected with a critique of the corporate university. The integration of different cultures of knowledge production with a network-based approach, supported by participatory practices, public communication and critical research — both on the level of theory and practice — has proven to be highly effective. The connection between university and marginal and critical social positions is a crucial part of Memefest's activities and its research methodology.

This book presents these processes and the resulting generative insights. It offers knowledge and tools, which are critical both for understanding current situations and are empowering future interventions — hopefully also by you, dear reader.

Appetite for Destruction?

Food is directly related to power, which is largely embedded in food systems. The global food system can be seen as the interplay of food production, distribution, consumption and representation. In the era of privatization of everything, fundamental human needs get colonized through corporate strategies and the food system becomes a machine, which excludes people to maximize profit. On an everyday level, we have almost no chance to participate in the production and distribution of food. Besides providing nutrients to our bodies, food plays a profound social, cultural, economic and political role. It can bring people together or set them apart. It is used as a tool for social control or reclaiming autonomy. As our most intimate experience with the natural world, food can truly connect us with nature or it can alienate us from it if this intimacy is broken.

The capitalist food system is designed to serve a handful of influential food-producing corporations. As a radical profit strategy, corporations are putting exclusive copy rights on seeds - the very source of life and a public knowledge bank, as seeds were cultivated through centuries in a close relation between human and nature. With the strategic use of sugar, salt and fat, food can be manipulated to have the chemical effect of drugs. Addictive relations to food are designed by advertising as well, in many cases food advertising even promotes behavioural patterns, which resemble illicit drug cultures and food itself is more and more designed to be a drug-delivering device. The food system also serves distributors of food, which work on the principles of economies of scale and globalization, rendering small-scale and local food distribution into niche projects. Our consumption and eating habits support a toxic food culture, and the media, together with marketing-based communication practices, institutionalize power relations fundamental to the predatory food system. The food system is reproduced by a culture of appearance driven by advertising, branding and packaging that create a superficially designed world of designed food. It is common practice that more than 30 per cent of fruit and vegetables are thrown away at harvest because what has grown does not match imposed standardized aesthetic visual preferences. Supermarkets react quickly to critique, smell the potential profit and start selling vegetables and fruit labelled as 'ugly' for lower prices. Yet, what is still lacking is a connection with nature and a sustainable culture — 'ugly food' is just a nice little supermarket brand.

Food production has an immense environmental footprint. An astonishing figure is that around 55 calories of fossil fuel in the form of fertilizers, farm equipment, pesticide, processing and transportation are used to produce one calorie of beef meat and on average ten calories of fossil fuel are used to produce one calorie of processed food (Pollan in Khong 2013). Recent research by WWF and the Zoological Society of London found out that tuna and mackerel populations have declined by 74 per cent between 1970 and 2012, outstripping a decline of 49 per cent for 1234 ocean species over the same period. This alarming situation is of course critical to human food security.

New evidence suggests that the common factor between the tragic deaths of refugees in the Mediterranean sea in the last years and the Arab Spring are food shortages driven by global warming. Syria's civil war has caused the first withdrawal of crop seeds from a 'doomsday' vault, built in an Arctic mountainside of the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago to safeguard global food supplies, that stores more than 860,000 samples from around the world. The seeds include samples of rice, barley, wheat and grasses suited to dry regions; they have been requested by researchers in the Middle East to replace a seed collection in the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war. Together with the world's population numbers rising, food will become the biggest issue of survival and geopolitical dominance very, very soon. This is the dark picture, but it is far from being the whole picture.

Organic food with attached values that prohibit the use of toxic substances and GMO components and promote more humane treatment of animals is becoming mainstream. The UN urges us to eat dairy free if we want to counter global warming. A company called Impossible Foods is openly battling the meat industry by scientifically developing vegan hamburgers, the meat substitute of which is completely plant-based but smells, cooks, bleeds and has the same texture as beef. Urban gardens are growing around the world; food as a topic is getting high attention in design, art and social sciences, with whole new university degrees focusing on 'food systems' being launched. Awareness of locally grown, home cooked food is more present than ever. The world's most influential and very expensive Nordic restaurant Noma plans to reopen in the middle of its own urban farm, right next to Copenhagen's anarchist autonomous squat Christiania and Guerrilla Grafters — a group who create public interventions through placing fruit-bearing branches onto non-fruit-bearing, ornamental fruit trees in the streets of San Francisco. Street food brings the world's cuisine at affordable prices to every corner of our cities and food design is becoming its own area of academic investigation. Food has long been the subject matter of artists, and galleries are devoting big exhibitions to it. Farmers around the world are organizing protests, many times using network-based technologies, while restaurants incorporate a sense of politics, social and environmental responsibility in their business models. Global protests have cut Monsanto's (the leading producer of genetically engineered seed) profits by 34 per cent in 2015, and radical networks are distributing food from food banks and other sources to those in need. Under a law set to crack down on epidemic food waste alongside the context of raising food poverty, France has prohibited supermarkets from throwing away or destroying food; instead they must donate waste to charities, food banks or for animal feed. Italy has made the stealing of food legal if done out of severe hunger. A growingly evident, visible presence and role of food in our everyday lives makes everyday people experts on the complex importance of our relation to food. Without a doubt, a culture critical of the dominant food system is growing around the world and people want to be involved and to engage with food in political ways.

All these examples, either contributing to the problem or part of the solution, are closely related to communication, design and art.

Neo-liberal society is strictly regulated and heavily over coded. We have trouble leaving our private self and creating a distance to social mechanisms that impose this private position in the first place. But this is crucial. In the age of the privatization of everything, occupying a common space and creating an intimacy of relations that form around public matters is key to breaking out of the simulacrum of imposed pleasure: respect-collaboration-imagination-intervention. Food Democracy addresses the problem where people are turned into consumers and vote solely through their buying power and purchase choices. It is evident that such assumed power not only has big limitations but also reproduces power relations imposed by the neo-liberal market, which don't create democracy, but colonization.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Food Democracy by Oliver Vodeb. Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783207965
• ISBN 13: 9781783207961
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 554
• Herausgeber: Vodeb Oliver
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar