Hasta La Ideas

Fat David by Scholz & Friends, Hamburg, Germany

Lately I’ve been unusually cranky: It may be the frustrations of a difficult marketplace where economic adversity forces one to tolerate the otherwise intolerable. It may be the extra hours of summer sunlight here in the Pacific Northwest, which brings about an initial euphoria that can descend into mania. But with a gnawing conviction, I’ve come to believe that this crankiness is the physiological manifestation of an uneasy realization: there is too much opinion in the world and precious little fact. For the past two months I’ve found my idle thoughts converging on three disjointed but persistent topics: food, information and society. With time these three topics have paired themselves off into a set of relatively stable couplings: Food and Information, Information and Production, and Production and Society.

Cheap Tasty and Vacant
A few months back I was at a conference in Portland where one of the speakers made reference to Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, reframing the title as In Defense of Product. I was so taken by the idea that I walked out of the conference, crossed the street to Powel’s and bought a copy. I wont go into a lengthy explanation of that book here, but for those who haven’t read it, Pollan’s book builds upon his eater’s manifesto: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Within this straightforward statement resides an insight relevant to any contemporary consumer dynamic: scale your consumption to a level that’s sustainable. I explored the potential implications of this manifesto for product designers in a recent post entitled Featurism is Fat: Lessons on consumerism from the organic food movement. What’s particularly intriguing in Pollan’s book is the back-story he builds around nutritional science. Throughout the book Pollan describes how the mass marketing of foods in terms of nutritional value helped industrial agriculture productize produce, ultimately reaching its zenith in an American diet that is chemically rich but nutritionally vacant.

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