The future of food needs interfaces

Technology has had a giant impact on the global food system. Designing human interfaces can help advance the future of what and how we eat.

“We are very interested in design processes and how we can use design as a tool to help feed 9 billion people by the year 2050. And what that means is really re-imagining our food system as a whole, from how our food is produced to how it’s packaged and then distributed, and on our personal relationships with the food that we eat,” says LinYee Yuan, founder and editor of Mold, a media website and paper magazine focused on how design can improve the global food system.

The concept of interfaces is central for the Mold editors when exploring how design processes can impact the food system in a positive way.

“We really see a huge potential in the way consumers themselves have a role to play in driving change within the food system. And so, interfaces can really mean anything from how that package is presented on a grocery shelf to the tactile experience you have when you’re eating it or preparing it,” says LinYee Yuan.

According to Johnny Drain, who also edits Mold, “What you see with the current state of the global food system is that a lot of those interfaces have evolved in a way that actually separates people from how food is grown and who grows our food. What we’re interested in is how can we redesign or design those moving forward, so that the human element, that connection is closer and actually leads us all as consumers to helping create a better global food system that works better for people, works better for producers and works better for the planet.”

A brief history of the modern food system

From the production of crops and livestock to the logistics of supplying grocery stores and restaurants with fresh or preserved ingredients, not to mention the massive scale of producing processed foods, the global food system is heavily technologized.

Many of the technologies that make it possible to feed the globe’s growing population have been around for a while.

Artificial nitrogen fixation, the process of taking mostly inert nitrogen from the atmosphere and binding it into ammonia that can be used to fertilize soil (as well as produce high explosives) was invented in the beginning of the 20th century. This, the Haber-Bosch process, has been called the “detonator of the population explosion” by researcher Vaclav Smil, arguing that it is the century’s most impactful invention. It allowed the human population to grow from 1.6 billion in 1900 to the 7.6 living on the planet today.

In the century before, the invention of canning and pasteurization had leapfrogged ancient technologies such as salting and fermentation for preserving food. And half a century later, the Green Revolution, that is the widespread adoption of hybridized high yield crops, irrigation technologies, agricultural management, petrochemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, especially in the developing world, laid the foundation of the modern global food system.

These technological developments, while fundamental to feeding the world by doubling agricultural output and halving the real price of food, are not without their failures and a tragic historical irony. In a nutshell, the monoculture farming of the Green Revolution laid the foundations of the highly centralized and deeply commoditized food system we have today.

“The world was in dire need of a cheaper way to produce food but it has gone too far now and we need to get back to trying to gently coerce, and this is where good design comes in, gently coercing people into eating better diets and also designing food systems that help people see that if you eat this rather than this, you’re going to have a better life,” says Johnny Drain.

Use restaurants to change the food system

“A restaurant is like a lever. If you see the food system and you see all these different players, all the way from the farmers to the consumers, if you are at the restaurant level, you control a lot of spending power,” says Simon Hamacher, co-founder of Informal. “By changing restaurants, you are in a very very strong position to change a lot of things in the food system.”

Currently, this power is afforded to big chain restaurants that operate at scale. But by using technology to empower chefs, the same power can be used to create change by connecting them together. “You can design similar systems without being super centralized that benefit restaurants that are on the same platform and give them firepower beyond their size,” says Simon Hamacher.

Born out of their experiences building Slurp Ramen Joint in Copenhagen, Informal has as its goal to re-envision and redesign how restaurants operate using technology and design to improve the experience of both running a restaurant and eating there.

“I think you realize very quickly how instrumental technology can be, from an efficiency but also from an experience perspective,” says Simon Hamacher.

Learning from how other industries have already automated basic processes such as inventory, scheduling and invoicing, chefs can use technology to focus on the essential task of cooking rather than act as managers and accountants. But this requires design and not just technology.

“As a chef you don’t want to deal with twenty different apps. You want to have one interface and you want to have most of it automated,” says Simon Hamacher.

However, in many parts of the restaurant industry the idea of automation can get pushback, especially from chefs.

“There are two paradigms. One is robotics,” says Simon Hamacher referring to pizza-baking and burger-flipping robots. “There are a lot of startups that bring robotics in and I think chefs are a bit sceptic of that because it challenges the idea of what cooking is about . The other paradigm, what we believe in, is that you can use technology to augment the chef’s capabilities and enable the chef to do things that they could not have done otherwise.”

The technology is here but it needs design to be implemented

In the same way as a lot of software for automating basic business practices is available for entrepreneurial chefs, agricultural technologies have also moved ahead since the days of the Green Revolution.

“A lot of these technologies are actually already out there and available for implementation at certain scales. But I think that where design steps in and creates a window of opportunity is for translating a lot of the complexity of these technologies and of these systems into information that consumers can access and use as well as farmers and people who are invested in the supply chain,” says LinYee Yuan.