Responsive - Food In The Loop: Brief

FOOD IN THE LOOP
After facing the brief related to food intended as cultural and social topic, this year POSTERHEROES talks about the whole food chain in its broader aspect. We believe that environmental sustainability should also involve the entire food’s life cycle and everyone (stakeholders) who takes part in it. That includes food’s production, transformation, conservation, transport and direct sell to the final consumer; making sure that every step is made without loosing resources. The consumer is the one who decides what to eat and consequently what the food system will have to produce. Hence we need to change our diet habits if we want to modify the entire system. The awareness of our personal food and nutritive choice will lead that change.

YOU SHOULD EXPLORE NEW PROPOSALS AND SUGGEST NEW POINTS OF VIEW.

CATEGORIES
PRODUCTION
The hegemony of intensive farming and livestock have caused huge social, ethic and environmental debates: i.e. consideration for animals and ecosystem, workers’ rights defence and care of consumers health. At the same time the quick and silent spread of new sustainable practices opens the way to different behaviours and farming: i.e. food self-production, social agriculture, woofing organisations. What do you think are the most sustainable production practices of food? How is it possible to encourage alternative consuming behaviours that care about the origin of the food?

TRANSFORMATION
The market request for ready-to-eat, long-lasting meals has determined the actual food processing system. Frozen, long-lasting and freeze-dried meals are worldwide sold in supermarkets. The cultural and geographic peculiarities are completely lost. The transformation fakes and flattens out the appearance of the food that everybody eats. Food’s flaws disappear and it’s not that rare to get to the phenomena of sophistication and / or food fraud. Yet, the food processing has historical roots strongly linked to the different local cultures influenced by traditions and religious. Is it possible to bring the attention back to the historical culture connected with the industrial and domestic food processing? How the contemporary system can restore a cultural and local connection with the processed food?

DISTRIBUTIONProcessed foods are moved among the five continents following fixed roads defined by a highly vertical distribution system. In order to assure to the food a fictitious freshness and a good shape despite the long time and space transportation, sophisticated systems are required. In opposition to the huge power of the large-scale distribution, the traditional and local distribution nets (i.e. farmer market, small producers, local sellers…) endorse the concept of local, fresh and nutritious food. How the consequences of a homogenous food distributed on a global scale, can be shown to the consumers? How can we promote alternative distribution system?

DISPOSAL
Every year one third of the food intended for human consumption is thrown away: 1.3 billion of tons of food become rubbish even before having the chance to get into our homes. The struggle against food waste is one of the challenges of this century, and a great possibility consists in the promotion of new behaviours and new model of consumption. We need to re-discovery the culinary practices, well known to the previous generations, of waste reuse; it becomes essential to create new ethical systems to share the nourishment in excess as well as to avoid the food overproduction. Which are the instruments to support this cultural revolution? Towards which model of consumption are we moving?