Featurism is fat…and not the good kind

Lessons on consumerism from the organic food movement

A month or so ago I attended a conference in Portland, Oregon held by the APDF where I caught a presentation by Benjamin Linder from Franklin W. Olin’s College of Engineering. Among the slides in Linder’s lecture was one which re-imagined Michael Pollan’s bestseller In Defense of Food as “In Defense of Product”. This idea struck me so violently; I stood up, walked out of the auditorium, went directly to Powell’s and bought a copy.

For some time I, like so many in design, have been trying to conceive of the next ‘big’ model. Seeking to reconcile, often with mixed results, what it is I do for a living with the world I see taking shape around me. Equating product with food isn’t new, but when re-examined in the contemporary context, the corollaries between organic agriculture, low impact manufacturing and environmental sustainability become as numerous as they are thought provoking. What’s more, having achieved critical mass, the mechanics of the organic movement are finally mature enough to start informing other sectors of the economy.

The premise of Pollan’s book is summed up in his eater’s manifesto: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Central to his argument is the notion that nutritional marketing is a shell game devised to sell processed foods as the technical equivalent of their natural counterparts: whole foods. Pollan goes on to explain how longstanding scientific tampering with nutrients has left the North American diet chemically rich but nutritionally vacant. When seen through the product lens, the practice of adding nutritional value to industrial foods reveals itself as the produce equivalent of adding features and upgrades to poorly conceived product lines. It’s self-deluding tomfoolery: a myopic focus on capability over need that ultimately leads to systemic and environmental ruin.

Extending the metaphor, the strategies that Pollan describes for coping with industrial agriculture can be viewed as sketches for how we might re-imagine our relationship with mass production as a whole. Viewed in this light, the growing popularity of Community Supported Agriculture programs (CSAs), Cow-Pooling and the interest in Urban Farming become potential benchmarks for tomorrow’s production, distribution and revenue schemes. By artfully wedding long-standing components of small and mid sized production with hyper coordinated demand and delivery, these programs successfully and consistently deliver high quality produce in a schema that’s both efficient and sustainable.

Most provocative of all, food – cutting as elegantly as it does across issues of sustenance, commerce, and culture – has the capacity to affect societal change on a massive scale. Perhaps, motivated by the growing body of evidence implicating industrial agriculture in rising rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, consumers may yet surprise us all and demand the type of legislative change so sorely needed to bring about real change. Something, which the comparatively abstract issue of sustainability, has thus far failed to do.

I’ll leave it to you to imagine the full depth to which the food movement could invigorate design. But incase you find this whole conceit laughable consider this, in preparing this piece I debated a comparison between slow food and slow design only to find the concept already well established. So let me leave you with this my fellow traveler: Buy Stuff. Not too much. Mostly services.

ORIGINALLY POSTED on the SPARK AWARDS Blog