Facing the shortcomings in the food system in the past few months, many of us have shared the troubling feeling that something we felt was solid and secure is really not so. Martin Heidegger’s reflection on “average everydayness” and how we navigate it may help us be better prepared for what’s to come. We can start by rethinking how we relate to material things…
As the world is shaken by the far-reaching consequences of COVID-19, greater attention has been drawn to the structures and the shortcomings in our food system and how they affect our daily lives, even if we had never given it any thought before. Because of food shortages, price increases, lack of resilience, and waste, many of us have shared the troubling feeling that something we felt was solid and secure is really not so. We seem to realize how important something is (in this case, an invisible infrastructure made of very tangible things) only when it does not work for us any longer, when we expect something from it and we don’t get it.
Disruption generates justified anxieties, but can also offer real opportunities to implement changes that now appear urgent. As I have argued before, design can provide important and timely contributions to the food system in terms of systemic thinking, innovation, and interventions. It has been suggested that design is always future-making, as it projects itself into modeling, prototyping, and testing. Nevertheless, design does not emerge in a void: designing never starts from scratch but is always to redesign, taking stocks of what is around us and taking it from there. It forces us to acknowledge the tangible remnants of the past, how they influence us but also how they allow us to express our creativity. Getting a little more abstract, temporality, the human experience of time, is central to our interactions with the world. As Robert Valgenti, professor of philosophy at Lebanon Valley College observed in an email conversation on this topic, “design does not begin ex nihilo, but always in conversation with its own past such that its future possibilities are the result of past possibilities that have been actualized and that constitute the current reality or state of things.”
Design is always steeped in context and circumstances, in the world as it already exists out there, in the way it has been shaped through history and time. If we used design approach to plan any intervention on the global food systems, it would be impossible to ignore what has already been done and what is already there, both in positive and in negative. Any change we may want to introduce has to necessarily take into consideration the raise of productivity and the expectations of always growing numbers of global consumers, environmental damage, climate change, and the financialization of food, just to mention a few urgent issues. At the same time, all these elements can turn into building blocks, or at least stepping stones, for change, if we put our mind to it.
Design can provide useful methodological and practical input as it is still rooted in the materiality of things and spaces, but it has also been shifting its focus towards practices, services, and systems, which nevertheless still need things to take place. In such systems “we ourselves as beings are variables, in addition to culture, politics, economics, materiality, chemistry, aesthetics and the senses,” as Susan Yelavich, Professor Emerita of Design Studies in the Parsons School of Design at The New School suggested to me in an email. Design also focuses on user experience, showing how the material qualities of things have an impact, both practical and affective, on us. Things can make us feel happy, frustrated, sad, depending on how they feel in our hand, how easy they are to use, how intuitive their functions are. Also the sensory characteristics of what we eat affects us: a flavor can excite us or bore us, a texture can feel consoling or upsetting. Our awareness of ourselves as existing in space as sensing individuals (technically called proprioception) and of ourselves in movement also contribute to the sensory experience. Kneading dough, it turns out, has felt comforting for many of us stuck at home during the pandemic. The colors, the shape, and the sounds of food wrappings may increase out desire to buy an item. The lighting and the temperature in the aisles of a supermarket can influence our shopping behavior and affect our moods. The rough surfaces of wood and stone in an organic food store can convey to us feelings of authenticity.
The picture at the top of this blog is my own kitchen. Those things give me all sort of feelings: the reassuring weight of the Dutch ovenand its bright color; the minute details of my tiny stove-top coffee pot and its classic design that brings back tons of memories, this time tinged in an unusual red; the funny shape and the ridges of the shiny, larger coffee pot; the warm light from under the cabinets… and all that before I even start using those objects. Designers – as well as marketers and manufacturers – are well aware of these sensory, gut-level, emotional relationships with things, and they often leverage them to have us buy more. Yet, existing things can be repurposed, reused, or just used creatively in ways that can improve our lives.
As design processes involve constant interactions between designers, engineers, marketers, consumers, and critics, they need to be understood and assessed as part of broader design cultures, that is to say the messy network of shifting and evolving connections between those human actors, design as theory and practice, production, the infrastructure that supports it, and everyday life in its cultural and material aspects. As a consequence, design can help us operate in assemblages that are not only made up of human actors, plants, animals, microorganisms, and soils, but also of objects, places, and the more or less visible flows of energy and materials that remind us of the (often stubborn) thingliness of the reality we are part of. We cannot just conjure food on supermarket shelves and on our tables.
In the field of research I work in (food studies) we are well attuned to assessing our interactions with food, starting from the flavors, taste, and embodied memories that define cooking and eating. We also highlight the cultural relevance of practices, the impact of ideas and values on how we eat, as well as the dynamics of food production and consumption from the social, economic, and political points of view. However, at times I feel (mind you, I may be wrong) that we do not pay enough attention to the material aspects of all that. Chefs and food scientists hone in on the physical and chemical characteristics of foods, nutritionists to its contribution to human metabolism and health, agronomists and zootechnicians to the best way to produce it. Although interdisciplinary collaborations can bear great results, we cannot expect food studies to delve into all these dimensions. Nevertheless, we can end up forgetting that we ultimately deal with materiality and its resistance or pliancy to our actions and goals: in other words, we inevitably bump into the “thingliness” of things. This relatively scarce emphasis on materiality is particularly surprising because we often end up treatIng living communities of beings (yeasts, humus, a meadow, a bank of sardines, or a herd of cows) as if they were inanimate things that are valuable to us only for their practical and economic uses.
As I do research (and often work) on topics and projects where design and food overlap, I have found myself reflecting on how design can advance my work in food studies, in particular thanks to the temporality of its approaches, its hands-on awareness of the thingliness of the world that surrounds us (or at least, our tendency to turn reality into usable elements), and its familiarity with the tangible aspects of things. As Valgenti pointed out, the world “is a specifically human way of encountering other entities in a rich context of meanings and relations.” When it comes to food, are our preferences and choices exclusively ours, or are they rather shaped by circumstances, personal history, cultural context, material environment, family and communal habits, and broader ideas and values?
These considerations prompted me to read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time again. I am reading it in the Joan Stambaugh’s translation (in case you want to check quotes and references). I will be quoting the text frequently and extensively, as I think it is necessary to really soak in the author’s language to get his line of thought and possibly understand what he meant. At the same time, it is also necessary to interpret his work while remaining fully conscious of its controversial history. I am well aware of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism. Yet, I am definitely not the first one reading his work to reflect on design. Some of his later essays, such as Building, Dwelling, Thinking; The Origin of the Work of Art; and The Question Concerning Technology have widely been discussed in art, architecture, and design theory.
Being and Time is mainly a reflection on what “being” is in general: not just the individual beings we may encounter, but the being of these beings. What does this means to us as a particular kind of beings who can ask themselves such questions? And how do we understand the way we ask those questions and investigate reality? In the book, such way of being (our way of being as humans) is called “Da-sein,” which means “being there” in German (Heidegger creates his own vocabulary or gives new meaning to existing words, which complicates the reading). Not as abstract as one may think, as the “there” of being, as Valgenti suggested in our email exchange, seems to refer to “the fact of being enmeshed and interrelated from the start and never simply having objects simply present before us (as a scientific experiment would love to have them).”
Some of the arguments in Being and Time, in particular the analysis of our specific way of being-in-the-world and interacting with reality within time, deserve attention because, I suspect, they may shed light on the complicated relationship between food, design, and the material aspects of our lives. In fact, Heidegger’s attention to “average everydayness,” its modalities, and its structures as the key horizon to understand the meaning of our own being resonates with my interest in the things, the practices, the affects, and the ideas that define our relationship to food, from our sensory experiences to our entanglements with the global food system.
I started reading Heidegger in high school, when our philosophy teacher, a pretty conservative Roman Catholic priest, was trying to make us appreciate Aristotle and scholasticism while dismissing Heidegger (and most contemporary philosophy) as lacking credible arguments and methodological soundness. Of course, as a reaction I delved into existentialism, phenomenology, and other contemporary approaches. It was definitely not light reading for a high schooler, but I was stubborn and wanted to be able to rebut my teacher’s positions. I must admit, though, that he was the one lending me those books, which our school library did not carry, so I wonder if it was not just a ruse to keep me engaged with philosophy, as Thomas Aquinas was not particularly appealing to me…
What I am sharing here are just notes I took while reading. As such, they are not well organized, neither do they develop specific arguments. They may be the beginning of something more systematic, or maybe not. After all, the blog format is perfect to start playing with ideas, get reactions, and initiate possible conversations. I have already integrated suggestions and reflections from those I discussed these topics with.
Let’s start with temporality. Right at the beginning of the book, Heidegger states that “time is that from which Da-sein tacitly understands something like being at all. Time must be brought to light and genuinely grasped as the horizon of every understanding and interpretation of being” (15). In other words we cannot take ourselves out of time, which determines who and what we are. In fact, Heidegger continues “Da-sein always is as and ‘what’ it already was. Whether explicitly or not, it is its past…. Da-sein ‘is’ its past in the manner of its being which, roughly expressed, on each occasion ‘occurs’ out of its future” (17). What we are, is how we got here. Of course, we are free to relate to our past to build on it, refuse it, or pick the bits and pieces we can reassemble to determine who we are now and, above all, who we will be. From this point of view – as food studies scholars are well aware of – who we are as food producers, consumers, and eaters is the result of connections between who we are and were as individuals (our stories, our choices, our preferences) and what the communities and societies of which we are part are and were. In particular, food culture is heavily influenced by the objects, practices, and discourses that are actively selected and reproduced as tradition.
As Heidegger explains, “Da-sein can discover, preserve, and explicitly pursue tradition. The discovery of tradition and the disclosure of what it ‘transmits,’ and how it does this, can be undertaken as a task in its own right. Da-sein thus assumes the mode of being that involves historical inquiry and research” (18). In other words, we live in a world that we already find there, that has a past and determines our present opportunities to shape our future. What we do with these opportunities or hindrances is up to us. This awareness cannot but influence our relationship with the food system at various scales, from our shopping behaviors when we buy food online to the decision of buying Fair Trade coffee from a specific place in a specific country, which indirectly puts us in touch with a specific community of people. This world presents itself as something we can develop our own projects in, something we can intervene on. Something we can design.
This blog post is already quite long and dense… I will keep on sharing these reflection in a future post.