Food Stories
This design project explores our disconnection to what we eat and probe ways to build value back into the food we consume, as an effort to minimize the negative social and environmental impact of normative food habits in the context of Nordic countries. The patriarchal industrial agriculture that prevails in Northern European food systems today has shaped a food culture that is fast, accessible and carnicentric. The centering of meat has led to a dissonance where we continue to consume animals as food, although it contradicts with our fundamental beliefs, by distancing ourselves from the production.
The complexity behind these food systems makes it difficult for us as consumers and individuals to dismantle the prevailing power structures. When we as a society have cut off our sensibility towards other living beings it makes it even more difficult to connect and build relation to e.g., fruit, vegetables and grains.
Meat-eating is seen as a neutral behaviour, perceived as an uncontroversial everyday practise. This creates a problematic invisibility that makes it difficult to talk about, relate and refer to without first being able to name it. Through applying methods of languaging we embodied, the centering of meat-eating as a norm in society, in the term carnicetric.
​
In order to build relations of care, integrity and compassion back to the stories of our food the project proposes an interactive zine as part of the journey of getting there. A gentle element of interruption in everyday doings can be a reminder to value food as something more than just filling.
The Food Stories zine can act as a tool or point of diffraction through which the receiver will create and shape the final outcome of the project in the moment they chose to engage with the tasks. Each time it is picked up by a new person it will be differently extensive and vary in appearance and implementation. Through thinking and knowing with the stories of our food we hope that relations of care can grow, relations that in turn could create a ripple effect in the socio-cultural systems we live in.
