[-empyre-] No Free Lunch

[Stefani Bardin]

Hello!

Stefani Bardin here following up on Amanda’s wonderful launch of Food + Art + Tech Month.  I’m an artist and academic and my focus is on the food system through myriad lenses including science, biology, medicine, art, tech, design and community outreach.  Out of the gate I’m going to start talking about a Food + Climate Change project that I’m currently involved with.

For many New Yorkers our relationship to food is filtered through the lens of restaurants, grocery stores, bodegas, street food carts and trucks.  As Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City writes, “Food arrives on our plates as if by magic, and we rarely stop to wonder how it might have got there”.
The Soil Food Web = the pathways of connectivity between the soil, the weather, plants, animals and human that participate in our food ecosystems – is so important in understanding the role we play in how are food is grown (and ultimately cultivated, prepared and distributed) and its impact on our health and the health of our environment.

The relationship(s) of these systems and modalities are the backbone of the No Free Lunch mapping project –  started by myself and Marina Zurkow at ITP <http://tisch.nyu.edu/itp> at NYU in the Spring of 2015 – an endeavor born out of our respective art practices that look at food systems, climate change, fossil fuels, science and eating.

 In the span of a day and a half more than 30 ITP + Food Studies students from NYU, scholars, artists, engineers, farmers, technologists and designers presented very short presentations about their work and research that addresses the systemic issues we are trying to tackle, solve and map. We pivoted off these presentations into breakout sessions to begin to parse ways of mapping the context and content of these issues, who is doing really interesting work to address these issues and what is the best way to represent this information. 

You can read about the participants here:

 http://www.nofreelunchitp.net/ <http://www.nofreelunchitp.net/>
The Institute of Public Knowledge at NYU <http://ipk.nyu.edu/>  has given us support (over two years)  to create a 3-Dimensional and interactive map that explains and explores the Soil Food Web of New York City (and the immediate farm regions), modes of food access and distribution, the role of natural resources and their vulnerabilities related to climate change and how all of these components of our Food System can be accessed and understood as a related entity.  The other layer of this map is an aggregate of artists, activists, farmers, designers, technologists, food organizations who are tackling – head on – ways to improve upon current systems, mitigate fall out from climate related collateral damage and connect our communities so individuals understand the Food System but more importantly their role in it and how they can participate.  Our goal is to grow the project beyond NYC  - but we’re starting with what we know, where we live and our already existing networks.

Here is the link to the working group:

 https://ipk.nyu.edu/ipk-working-groups/foodandthecity <https://ipk.nyu.edu/ipk-working-groups/foodandthecity>

We are so interested in hearing from you all on my many levels including knowledge you may have about great interventions currently happening in the food system.  
Any experience you may have had around mapping/visualizing/building a platform for such a fluid, mercurial and unwieldy topic?

I’m so looking forward to the conversation this month with all of you and am really grateful to have the chance to participate.

Cheers,

Stefani


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
www.stefanibardin.net

NYU + Parsons
stefanib at nyu.edu
stefani at newschool.edu

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