What’s the Social Issues around cooking? — a workshop report
Hello from Japan! I am working with over 300 colleagues in Tokyo office. Although physically separated, we work together as a global company. Today I would like to share my experience in Bristol office.
Our mission is “make everyday cooking fun!”
Cookpad is a company that has been pursuing this mission for 20 years.
Besides recipe service, we have some initiatives to think about how we can make everyday cooking even more fun. One of them is Social Issue Mapping Workshop.
What’s the issues that are worth tackling?
Industrialization of food production, poor health, food waste… we are aware there are many social issues around cooking. However, we don’t know how they are interrelated and how we can turn around the cycle. Also we need to decide which ones are worth tackling as Cookpad.
There came a project of Social Issue Mapping. The original version of “Social Issue Map around food and cooking” was made by Japanese members. It encompasses wide range of issues but strongly reflects Japanese perspectives (e.g. eating alone children and seniors, stereotype that women should cook).
We are expanding this project globally to understand the different issues around cooking in different societies. This is essential for us to have a common ground of where to focus on and bring greater impacts to the world through businesses.
Social issue mapping project in Bristol
In Bristol office, we carried out this workshop in December 2017. Almost all 30 staffs participated in a workshop regardless of their current work or position. Engineers and administrative staff were mixed up and worked together to share their perspectives and concerns related to food and cooking.
As a homework, members read recent news and articles and brought topics that one concerns the most. We shared, mapped, and discussed how they are interrelated. The discussion was heated.
At the end we talked which areas are worth focusing on as cookpad.
Findings from the workshop
Many issues are common across countries
In prior to UK, the same workshop was carried out in Japan and in Thailand. What is interesting is that despite different social backgrounds, most of the issues were raised commonly in all three countries. Increasing number of time competitor, industrialization of food production and unhealthy diet are some of the examples.
Remarkable issues in the UK
Followings are the topics that were discussed hotly.
1. Plastic waste of food packaging
Quite a few members are concerned that supermarkets started to cover fresh foods by one-way plastics since a few years ago. One purpose is to keep the food hygienic and prolong its shelf-life. From another viewpoint, it let us buy easily, or even buy too much, than selling by weight. The strong antipathy of consumers can be observed in large number of letters sent to supermarkets and the government.
We discussed is there anything we can do for this issue as Cookpad. We concluded that our approach would be to empower people and let them take actions instead of directly fighting with retails or the government.
2. Diversification of diet
Especially vegan is widely recognized in the UK. In cafes or in restaurants, we can easily find several menus with “V” mark as well as on packed products. A Vegan Festival on the weekend was packed with men and women of all ages. I could feel the rising interests in a vegan diet.
The background of the vegan trend seems to be the resistance toward large-scale farming for ethical and environmental reasons. People got to know the reality of stressful animal production and express their opposition by becoming vegan.
If the choice of diet become diverse, we may have stronger motivation to cook so that one can eat. However, when it comes to eating with others, it could be inefficient to cook separately and end up in buying different foods or eating separately. A dining table will be divided.
We do not have an answer of how a family dining tables should be, but believe cooking experiences from childhood would help one to have autonomy on making decision on what to eat and how to eat.
3. Cooking becomes a passive media contents
Cooking shows are popular on TV and cooking movies are overflowing on social media. Interests in cooking are rising, though as passive consumable contents. It’s a reality that people watch cooking shows on TV while eating delivered pizza in a couch, instead of standing up and go into the kitchen. Maybe we can say that the interest in cooking is rising but changing its characteristics from active production to passive consumption. And when we get used to the perfect image of cooking through media, doing ourselves brings just a disappointment and no appreciation. That situation would lead us even more to the passive consumer side.
A community management staff shared that we receive voices from users saying “food pictures on cookpad don’t look nice”. That is the reality of everyday cooking, but nice looking pictures are indeed attractive. We talked that a possible approach is to bridge the gap by photo filter or other technologies.
What was the outcome?
The above findings were shared to the staffs around the world through internal blog. It will also feed into the original social issue map.
Besides those, there were some changes observed in the UK office. One of the members started an initiative of film club to watch documentary movies related to cooking, eating and food.
In cookpad, each single member is persistent in the mission. It is really exciting that this kind of workshop does bring changes to the office. Through products and these kind of activities, we pursue to make everyday cooking fun!
