{"id":947,"date":"2009-02-07T11:15:52","date_gmt":"2009-02-07T18:15:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/07\/know-your-food\/"},"modified":"2015-11-21T16:51:08","modified_gmt":"2015-11-21T16:51:08","slug":"know-your-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/know-your-food\/","title":{"rendered":"Know your food"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image948\" src=\"http:\/\/designswarm.webfactional.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/02\/knowyf3.jpg\" alt=\"knowyf3.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>After <a href=\"http:\/\/libarynth.org\/open_sauces_reader\">Open Sauces<\/a> in November, I got interested in food again, especially the way food is presented and communicated in the context of supermarkets. There&#8217;s something deeply depressing about the presentation of fruits and veg in the UK and there is also something cultural about that presentation. When I lived in Italy, access to certain vegetables was nearly impossible. In the UK, some of my American friends can never find the right types of chilis. In a way, global is a term more easily referring to people than our food, and I consider that a good thing.<\/p>\n<p>Following on from that, I wanted to get back to the essence of what food was before it reaches our markets or our local corner shop. There used to be a simple understanding not only about where food came from, but how it actually grew and how it was harvested.<\/p>\n<p>2 ideas surfaced: New guerrila food labels and a new way of displaying fruits and vegetables. In a day I managed to make the first one happen, the second one I would need a partner company to try this out. If you own a cool organic fruit and veg store or stall in London please get in touch!<\/p>\n<p>Idea 1:<\/p>\n<p>I thought I&#8217;d design a simple food label that would come on top of existing labels, something you could keep if you wanted to that would give you at least 4 pieces of information you didn&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>1. What the name of the item is, and its latin name. Why? I thought it was odd we&#8217;re quite willing to learn about plants and flowers in this way and not everyday items. Is it because they&#8217;re not posh enough?<\/p>\n<p>2. What the item looks like &#8220;in nature&#8221; or in its more natural environment, with roots, leaves, the whole lot. The idea is to show how it looks before it&#8217;s been cleaned up for public display. We often may forget that some thing grow under the earth or on its surface, as a fruit in a tree or hanging from plants. Zuccini for example, is more or less and un-ripened pumpkin that is picked early enough for it to still be soft. Its the same family as the cucumber, but people don&#8217;t usually eat it raw.<\/p>\n<p>3. When and where it was discovered. Fruits and vegetables don&#8217;t carry history with them, but it&#8217;s fascinating what you&#8217;ll find out about how Ancient Egyptians treated the onion.<\/p>\n<p>4. Any other piece of random information or history. I wanted to make sure to pique someone&#8217;s interest enough that they&#8217;d want to know more or keep the label. I found out that the asparagus plant is protected by the tomato plant from insects for example.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/alexandra666\/sets\/72157613476059484\/\">All pictures of the project are on Flickr<\/a> and were professionally executed by Matt Biddulph :)<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image946\" src=\"http:\/\/designswarm.webfactional.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/02\/knowyf.jpg\" alt=\"knowyf.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After Open Sauces in November, I got interested in food again, especially the way food is presented and communicated in the context of supermarkets. There&#8217;s something deeply depressing about the presentation of fruits and veg in the UK and there is also something cultural about that presentation. When I lived in Italy, access to certain&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/know-your-food\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Know your food<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29,104,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interaction-design","category-making","category-product-design","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-fh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1918,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions\/1918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}