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Fall 2021
Knowing that we wanted the project to focus on seasonality in a way that explicitly challenge these distorted definitions of healthy eating, I lead our group in one of my favorite design exercises, “Crazy 8’s.” Folding a piece of paper into 8 sections, each person has 1 minute per section to come up with a design idea. Out of this brainstorming session we came up with the idea for a campaign to turn over the idea of “clean” foods. The campaign would be called Dirty Food Days, and would be a call to action to bring together communities to host regular events that give the opportunity to try and learn about local, seasonal foods that might not otherwise be accessible. By calling these foods “dirty,” we challenge the colonial ideals of cleanliness and health and invite participants to regain touch with the land on which they live. To start, we would test this idea in our local city of Edinburgh. We researched which foods were most commonly produced locally in Scotland; these would be the stars of our campaign.
The sexualization of feminine bodies is a common tactic used in product marketing campaigns.The vast majority of these marketing campaigns use this tactic to pique interest and subsequently convince people to buy a product they don’t need, probably using money they don’t have. Taking lessons from eco-feminism and the role of femininity in Lakota attitudes towards nature and food practices, we wanted to reclaim the narrative surrounding feminine bodies by utilizing this traditionally capitalist tool to attract attention to our proposed social change.The poster campaign represented the globalized foods through visuals that invoked sterility; cleaning gloves, tight plastic wrap. The local Scottish foods were represented as dirty, utilizing feminine sexuality as a means of reclaiming the connection between women and their history as foragers, providers, and preparers of food.
We created 11 total designs and pasted them throughout Edinburgh in highly visible public spaces. Each poster contained a QR code which led them to a simple website that I designed and created under the name “Serving UpScotland.” Depending on what foods were highlighted in any given poster, the QR code would take the viewer to a specific page of the site corresponding to thatFood.
In addition to the local test campaign, we sent out a survey across all of our respective social and professional networks to get a sense for how those located in other parts of the world might apply the Dirty Food Model where they live and what limitations they might be experiencing.
In summary, our results indicated there is a general willingness to live a lifestyle more in touch with food origins and providers. However, participants also admitted concern about a lack of knowledge about dirty foods and food providers within the context of their community, which serves as a barrier.
The final iteration of our campaign is an informational website that can be used as a tool to connect people with information about seasonal foods, providers, and events in their community. I was the primary designer for the mobile site, creating the mockups, visual design, and interactive Figma prototype. There are 5 main components to the site that are scoped specifically to the location, by zip code, that the site visitor has provided:
Our hope is that the Dirty Food campaign will serve as a kick starter for a larger social movement. Overtime, the term "Dirty Food"would be disassociated from the official project and become a socially ubiquitous term and form of pro-environmental action, like Meatless Mondays. Over time, "Meatless Mondays" became a part of the larger global vocabulary, with many people knowing and practicing the concept without awareness of the initial official campaign and organizations behind it .The goal is that via marketing and collaboration with official organizations, something like "Dirty Foods" can enter the larger social vernacular, becoming a concept and form of action beyond the bounds of our campaign. Overall, this project was a great opportunity to learn more about these practices and how arrangements can be interrogated to generate positive behavioral change. We were certainly challenged, with key difficulties being as follows:
No members of our group are part of an Indigenous community. We acknowledge our inherently limited viewpoint of understanding issues effecting Indigenous communities and how these constraints may hinder our comprehension. While we strived to draw on accurate research and avoid the appropriation of Indigenous cultures, we are aware of our limitations. Thus, our project would inherently benefit from discussion and active participation from members of Indigenous communities.
Large scale factors such as the climate crisis, created temporal issues when identifying, producing, and enacting an intervention within a few short weeks. Furthermore, we spent a great deal of time at the beginning of the project conducting research, which gave us a strong basis for informing our intervention but limited our ability to create and test prototypes. The latter half of the semester proved to be strenuous, as our overburdened workloads conflicted with the time we dedicated to Dirty Food
As we are all international students, we lacked local knowledge of the Scotland, and more broadly the UK. Ideally, we wanted to prototype Dirty Food within our local community but found our lack of local knowledge a challenge.We do not have an understanding of the local food systems, outside of what we could reasonably research.