Design approaches that can be applied to food and food systems are inherently political. No design project, no interaction with things, is free of judgment about what kind of world we want to live in.
I have continued to take notes on Heidegger’s Being and Time, thinking about things and design in the food system. In my last blog on the topic, I reflected on how our being steeped in time determines our experiences and the understanding of who we are, which has important consequences both in terms of food system and design. Our temporality, however, does not play out itself in abstract, but in the world in which we find ourselves, a world that does not exist independently from us. It is us that shape our physical environment through our interactions with it, while at the same time it makes us who we are. Even when the “world” looks like the content of the kitchen drawer of mine you can see in the picture: messy, jumbled, full of things that have been accumulated over time. I know that stuff is there, but at time is difficult to find it. I keep adding, all while subtracting stuff that broke or I don’t use any longer, for whatever reason. Some of those things are gifts, some I bought just because they make cooking more fun, some are essential to prepare meals. That chaos makes me and represents me as a home cook, somebody who is not a professional chef; in particular, somebody that is more concerned about getting stuff done conveniently and expeditiously, or at times providing food as a way to bring people together. Somebody who is not worried about the look of what he plates (you can check my Instagram feed @fparasecoli to see that I on purpose take pictures of dinners that do not necessarily look that great, just as a reminder that home cooking is a completely different beast from professional cooking, with different practices and goals).
Heidegger argues that “Da-sein understands itself and being in general in terms of the “world’” (19. I am still referring to the Joan Stambaugh’s translation, in case you want to check quotes and references). We cannot separate ourselves from what is around us, which can be interpreted and experienced collectively as the “world,” both in its present aspects and as tradition, that is to say as the tangible traces of history that we choose to keep, reproduce, or give particular value to. Because of our finding ourselves in the world, Heidegger argues that our existential attitude is necessarily one of “care” (37), in the sense that we develop ourselves in our handling and producing things, or using things to make more things, as in the case of my chaotic kitchen drawer (thank you to philosopher Lisa Hedlke at Gustavus Adolphus College for reminding me to bring my high flying reflections down to tangible examples). By doing and making, we associate ourselves with the world that things constitute while shaping it. Heidegger states that for humans “being toward the world is essentially taking care”(53). Such interactions are at first based on possible uses, as Da-sein is “initially economical and practical to a large extent.” “A useful thing is essentially ‘something in order to’” and a reference to other useful things, which in their totality constitute “material for living” (64) and are “discovered before the individual useful thing” (64).
Here we find central elements of design as a specific way of interacting with the world. Firstly, the relationship with things is an active one, geared toward making and transforming the world (you can check anthropologist Tim Ingold’s video Thinking through Making to get some interesting insights on this matter). Secondly, things often provide scripts for our actions: they do not determine what we do with them, but they can influence our decisions, preferences and behavior. Just having certain things in my drawer pulls me toward certain preparations, or even dish choices. Things become objects that carry meaning. Thirdly, the interaction does not happen with things in isolation; even when we deal with a single thing, we are actually dealing with their totality. This is an important insight towards a systemic approach in design, which is also very important to understand food systems and how we can operate in them. For designers, creating a new plate or a constructed environment like a store should mean connecting the work at hand with its context and the environment at large, thinking about the possible unintended consequence of their choices on other components of “the world.” Intervening on one element of a system can have wide repercussions (and unintended consequences) on other elements connected to it. This has become clear in the recent events surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic: an issue of lack of space between workers in meat packing plants has created gaps in the continuity of production, which in turn has caused shortages in distribution and retail, while generating a glut of animals that could not be processed and had to be killed and destroyed (right at a times when lines at soup kitchens and food banks become longer and longer).
Even before distinguishing single things, we “dwell near” them, we are “familiar with” them as they are objectively present together, in their messy totality (51). Based on this inherent connection with the world, we develop our own “being-in-space,” which does not refer simply to our physical body as just one other thing in the world, next to other things, but a fundamental characteristic of our being. “Being-in is not a ‘quality’ which Da-sein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, without which it could be just as well as it could with it… Da-sein is never ‘initially’ a sort of being which is free from being-in, but which at times is in the mood to take up a ‘relation’ to the world.” Because of this basic participation in the world, “Da-sein can explicitly discover beings which it encounters in the environment, can know about them, can avail itself of them, can have ‘world’.” The world, “which does not have a primarily ‘spatial’ meaning” (62) is “a characteristic of Dasein itself” (60). We do not exist outside the world and our being part of it. Actually we cannot understand ourselves if we do not embrace this encounter with the things we are not, which are different from us but whose presence contribute to who we are. “Being-in-the-world, as taking care of things, is taken in by the world which it take care of” (57).
We realize that initially we take care of individual things because of their “handiness” and their “what-for,” that is to say their usefulness and usability. Actually, things become present to us as individual objects when we cannot use them any longer because they are damaged, missing, or get in our way. We become aware of things when they do not work, when they are not convenient any longer, or when they actually turn into problems. During the pandemic, this is what happened to many of us, as consumers in post-industrial societies who had until then blissfully been part of very complex system of production, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, sales, and waste management that was mostly invisible because it was working just fine for us. Then our favorite brands disappeared from shelves for long periods, or the prices of food went up, or out preferred cut of pork was not available because of labor conditions in meat packing plants we had never thought about, or strawberries become harder to find because of lack of migrant labor. Suddenly it dawned on us that the food system is not magically there, but it is instead a very strategic –and mostly invisible– infrastructure that we tend to give for granted. We have grown used to have it there, available, accessible and convenient, if we have the money to afford it. As Nobel Prize Amartya Sen would put it, if we are “entitled” to it.
Also, we learn about the totality and complexity of this system of relations (what Heidegger calls “worldiness”) through singular interactions with individual things, rather than by acquiring abstract knowledge. In the case of our contemporary food systems, it takes more than reading or listening to fully understand its problems and their significance for us. We are dealing with a specific kind of knowledge that for Heidegger is “being in and toward the world” (56). Our relationship with the environment, with “a context of things at hand,” is then not an add-on to our being but a vital part of our being humans.
However, Heidegger makes clear he is not discussing knowledge as a theoretical relation between a subject and an object. “When we just look at things ‘theoretically,’ we lack an understanding of handiness” (65). He then adds: “This familiarity with the world does not necessarily require a theoretical transparency of the relations constituting the world as world” (81). Our initial association with things is through work and making, an existential attitude that not only considers specific goals, but relates to the totality of useful things as the horizon of our being. This sort of knowledge problematizes a neat separation between subject and objects, and takes away the primacy of theoretical knowledge: emotional, practical, applied, embodied types of knowledges, as well as craft, constitute the original interactions between humans and the world. “Handiness is not grasped theoretically… What everyday association is initially busy with is not tools themselves, but the work” (65). We start knowing by making, by encountering the usability of things. “The forest is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock, the river is water power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’” (66).
This revaluation of practice-based knowledge immediately put the knowledge of generations of cooking women, cooks, farmers, shepherds, and other people in the food system whose activities are based on craft in a different light. And, it goes without saying, reconsiders the intellectual relevance of design non only as theory but also as practice. Not that everything that humans do is design, though. As designer Ezio Manzini points out in his Politics of the Everyday when discussing our actions, “many of them we carry out unconsciously, routinely, within tried and tested conventions, or with reference to such a limited field of possibility that there is no freedom of choice” (39). So, not all making is design, which includes capacity of analysis, creativity, and the ability to plan, prototype, and test. Non every food-related practice is design, which increasingly requires systemic approaches, that is to say the ability to look at things in their totality, even when we are busying ourselves with one specific aspect of reality.
Heidegger seems to be proposing a way of looking at human experience that repositions man in its inherent connection with things (including food) as both inert thingliness and useful technology. It is an essential aspect of humans’ “being-in-the-world.” This connection makes distinctions between materiality, practice, and discourse secondary, as these dimensions are always constituted together. At the same time, the projectuality, either voluntary or involuntary, which we find in human experience is inherently temporal: it reassembles selected elements of the past, which are often given new meaning as they become part of different contexts, to make sense of the present while we shape our vision for what’s to come. Making is always remaking and future-making, which entails evaluating the past, the present, and the preferred future, choosing what we want to keep, what to change, and what to discard. For this reason, design approaches that can applied to food and food systems are inherently political. No design project, no interaction with things, is free of judgment about what kind of world we want to live in.
I will be updating this blog post as I continue reading Being and Time.