Why Food Might Be Getting Left Out

A New York Times article written by William Deresiewicz in 2012 argued that despite the emergence of a new dearth of literature, awards and media surrounding food and food culture that mirrors that surrounding art, our efforts to elevate our appreciation for food have only hit a cultural ceiling composed of varying layers of foodie-ism.

“But food, for all that, is not art. Both begin by addressing the senses, but that is where food stops. It is not narrative or representational, does not organize and express emotion,” he wrote. “An apple is not a story, even if we can tell a story about it. A curry is not an idea, even if its creation is the result of one.”

While he is correct to point out that in many ways, our obsession with food has not led to art but replaced it as a “vehicle of aspiration and competition,” we’d say there is still strong potential for it as a medium, as has been explored throughout history.

Food as Visual Medium

Let’s start with how we might come to perceive food (still discernible as food) as a visual medium:

• Food as the subject, where it’s stylized and presented in its raw or prepared-dish form as the primary focus of the work.
• Whole foods or images of food that are used to complete larger works.
• Ingredients as the medium such as sculpted sugar or chocolate, and other instances where the ingredients are valued for their physical properties as a working material.
• Consumable “almost too good looking to eat” items such as cakes incorporating strong influences from other fields such as fine art, architecture and hard sciences.

The point is that however they’re used, so long as we can discern it looks like food, food evokes an immediate understanding and intimacy whether we consume them physically or just visually. For those that understand the context behind certain foods, their visual forms become just as codified and capable of carrying nuanced messages as other mediums.

Experience and “Performance” Revolving Around Food

In the mainstream, we might be put off attempts to “say something through food” with the likes of Dining in the Dark or Ichiran’s ramen-booths-for-one some might write off as gimmicky hedonism. But if art is meant to express and change perspectives, the ability for that to happen through food can’t be ignored when we can directly participate.

We’ve written about Virgilio Martinez’ Central, which takes diners through the layered ecosystems of the Peruvian Andes as well as “Hawai’i” Mike Salman’s Chef for Higher cannabis dinner parties meant to heighten the senses while decreasing inhibitions. These and other unique concepts that are coming out of culture look to reimagine how we approach food from the dining perspective. As with any multi-sensory installation, we pay for admission to restaurant concepts that increasingly resemble galleries, where everything from the serviceware to music is curated from other artists. Here, we’re simply paying to experience the chef’s “set” that encodes history, culture, and vision through their take on genres, their trademark mix of flavor, texture and scent notes.

Even outside of the restaurant context, however, there are plenty of ways artists are exploring themes in ways that are uniquely designed around food as the medium, even if we might not label it as art right away. Take LA-based art collective Fallen Fruit Collective as an example: its Public Fruit Jam encourages strangers to negotiate and collaborate on making a fruit jam using each participant’s respective ingredients. Similarly, their Endless Orchard project allows citizens to plant, map and share fruit trees, making it both public art and social initiative.

Distilling and reassembling flavors and scents

Lastly, we see culture, constantly in search for new experiences, immersed in a phase of experimentation. Whether they’re rooted in the culinary or scientific tradition or both, globally-minded artists and audiences alike are taking to different combinations of flavors, smells, and textures, whether they’re old or new history.

It’s this deconstructed approach to the sensory properties of food — and necessarily, smell — that remains a vast playground for exploration at the individual level. They divorce our existing preconceptions around food and use their elemental flavors, textures, and aromas as emotional notes with which to assemble sensory experiences for different purposes:

• Isolation: From trending flavors like yuzu-flavored everything to beanless coffee made by the same people behind Impossible Meat, both instances involve isolating the flavors we recognize and like while removing those we don’t.
• Sense memory: Copenhagen-based “flavor company” Empirical Spirits seek to bottle scenes and memories through its science-influenced approach to taste and aromas.
• Translation: Oki Sato of Tokyo and Milan-based design studio Nendo created chocolates that embodied Japanese onomatopoeic words to describe texture, effectively using food to translate meaning between formats.
• Augmentation: Sometimes, these elemental properties are used to add an extra dimension to other art, such as Art of Bloom’s use of scent to support its recent AR exhibition in Long Beach.

The Takeaway

As we can see, food is difficult to frame artistically once it leaves the context of the farm, kitchen, dinner table and restaurant, but we’d argue that yes, it absolutely exists as art we’ve only begun to explore. Whether we get to taste it or not, food can be used as a medium of great depth and complexity as with any art.

If we were to compare it to sound, the next most powerful emotional medium we have, we have the ability to manipulate emotion through food with flavor and aroma notes, textures as timbre, the whole spectrum of color, the Scoville scale, among other factors. Combined in thoughtful ways, they record memories, encode messages, drive narratives and shape culture all the same.

No More “Slam Dunks”

For some time, we’ve tried to take a more optimistic stance on how AI will actually free us up creatively by saving us the effort of doing menial “soul sucking” tasks, leaving us to focus on the more enjoyable creative tasks. But an article in the Atlantic by former Kickstarter vice president of data Fred Benenson suggests our optimism might be misplaced. As it turns out, the most creative tasks are actually the hardest ones and enjoyable depends on how much challenge you still enjoy when tackling only these becomes your “one job”.

Benenson talks about how five years ago, it was company staff that were deciding which projects were approved to start soliciting money from the public. But when the number of both investors and investment-seeking creators exploded, they turned to AI to deal with the increased number, including periodic surges in new ideas.

• Holiday weekends meant the approvals team was backed up with hundreds of proposals and the same number of frustrated creators waiting for a response.
• Benenson oversaw the development of an automated system that considered each project’s stated purposes and its creator’s track record, among other factors.
• High-scoring projects would immediately get approval, meaning the system soon took over 40 to 60 percent of the manual approvals for incoming projects.
• Although it sped up the process, it also meant a dramatic drop in the average quality of projects that human reviewers would see. These were the ones that needed more nuanced consideration.

The outcome? It meant no more “slam dunks” — as in no more instances where a project was so strong or excited staffers so much that approving them was a no-brainer. What was left for them were all the tough calls or others with a dubious or even questionable level of promise.

The Balance of Mastery, Challenge and Enjoyment

In an email to Benenson, author and clinical psychologist Alice Boyes talked about the need for balance: “Decision making is very cognitively draining, so it’s nice to have some tasks that provide a sense of accomplishment but just require getting it done and repeating what you know, rather than everything needing very taxing novel decision making.”

Humans need a blend of mastery, challenge and enjoyment for a healthy mood. The exact mix differs, but all of those ingredients need to be there in some measure. What throws off the ratio is the introduction of AI systems that pass unclear or low-confidence decisions to humans, a trait of the best of these systems, according to Benenson.

Small and regular challenges that are well within our abilities, give us the sense of mastery and continuity (the feeling of progression) over our work as well as needed breaks from harder tasks. On the flipside, if every task we manage to complete is by the skin of our teeth because of exceeding difficulty, we never develop a sense of regularity or that we’re gaining something. We’re constantly fumbling over one finish line, unsure of how to get to the next one or where it is.

The Darkest Implications

To see how bad this could get once there are no more “easy calls,” consider the job of a Facebook content moderator. Where the platform’s AI is pretty adept at flagging certain content that obviously violates its standards, the technology just isn’t up to par. What’s left for the human moderator is to deal with not just a lot of the NSFW or NSFL content that ends up there, but a lot of stuff that isn’t objectionable at first glance, but that needs to a nuanced understanding of different contexts to see if it actually violates Facebook’s Community Standards.

In several articles for The Verge, Casey Newton has written extensively about the misery these contracted workers experience when they constantly need to tackle such tasks that are so granular or downright traumatic and perform them with a high degree of accuracy and efficiency. The issue is less that humans are being made to do these tasks (someone has to do it, to be sure), but the sheer volume of these tasks combined with a lack of ways to off-set that stress.

The Takeaway: AI as Subcontractor

Technology has always been about enabling us to do more, but perhaps this should be clarified to “greater” in the context of creativity whether we’re artists or creatives.

• There is still some enjoyment in small challenges and some of the menial work because it reinforces our sense of mastery.
• From plugins to machine transcription, Automation and AI still have a valuable role in saving time on repetitive, menial or low-difficulty-but-tedious tasks. But the question is what we do with the time saved (or gained, depending on how you look at it).
• It’s tempting to feel obligated to fill that extra time indiscriminately with more projects or tasks (with no direction), but what about the act of distancing, switching to other tasks within your workload, or further refining the work that’s already completed?

To simplify this: where we’re sure we can do so, we subcontract parts of bigger projects to handle the workload. If we treat AI as a subcontractor (albeit a very efficient one), then we retain the power in the relationship as we should.

The problem is that issues arise in “no excuses” scenarios where we are subcontractors alongside AI where “it’s already done the ‘easy’ work for you. Why aren’t you handling an increased load of harder stuff?”

Timestamps

Links

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• Inside the Race to Monetize Esports Apparel

By the Numbers

Kai Chan, a distinguished fellow at the INSEAD Innovation and Policy Initiative, put together the Power Language Index in 2016, which measures which languages in the world hold the most influence based on five key factors.

• (G)eography: countries spoken, land area, tourists (inbound)
• (E)conomy: GDP, PPP, Exports, FX market, SDR composition
• (C)ommunications: Native speakers, second-language speakers, language family size, tourists (outbound)
• (K)nowledge & Media: Internet content, feature films, Top 500 universities, academic journals.
• (D)iplomacy: United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Supranational Organizations (SNOs).

Based on these factors, Kai presented the world’s top 10 languages, their respective number of native speakers and their score for each factor:

1. English: 460 mil (G1, E1, C1, K1, D1)
2. Mandarin: 960 mil (G6, E2, C2, K3, D6)
3. French: 80 mil (G2, E6, C5, K5, D1)
4. Spanish: 470 mil (G3, E5 C3, K7, D3)
5. Arabic: 295 mil (G4, E9, C6, K18, D4)
6. Russian: 150 mil (G5, E12, C10, K9, D5)
7. German: 92.5 mil (G8, E3, C7, K4, D8)
8. Japanese: 125 mil (G27, E4, C22, K6, D7)
9. Portuguese: 215 mil (G7, E19, C13, K12, D9)
10. Hindi: 310 mil (G13, E16, C8, K2, D10)

These numbers don’t include the number of non-native speakers. In the case of English, Kai’s research reports over 500 million people who speak it as a secondary language. Other figures place the total number of English speakers at between 1.5 and 2 billion people.

The Perceptual Impact of English

This staggering influence of a single language that came about through various blends of colonialism, commerce, religion, media, and education, extends into many industries including that of news.

In their analysis of 54 million news items from 4,708 news sources in 67 countries in 2015, researchers Lei Guo and Chris J. Vargo found that wealthier countries both attract most of the world news attention and are also more likely to decide how other countries perceive the world.

Miraj Chowdhury, the Bengali editor for the multilingual Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN), points out how two newspapers in Bangladesh have circulations of over 500 million, yet the English-language Daily Star with only 50 million dominates the international narrative about that country.

Quality withstanding, it represents a situation where a single source disproportionately shapes a perspective not because of what it does, but simply because of what it is. This dynamic has profound effects on both the news and journalism industries:

• A story isn’t a story until it surfaces in English: Journalists Ben Nimmo and Aric Toler wrote about the Russian journalists who exposed the troll factory back in 2013, before it was involved with American politics.
• Awards can’t judge non-English assess properly: Unathi Kondile, South African editor of a Xhosa paper, points out how judges can only properly assess Afrikaans or English written content. This means submitting Xhosa content for consideration becomes a waste of time.
• Applications based on English ability, not talent: Journalists have to submit applications to international conferences and fellowships in English, which does not reflect their journalistic talent but does affect their chances.
• Translations skew perspective towards English readers: Journalists quoting non-English-speaking subjects might be forced to translate terms that have no common or accurate English equivalent. Similarly, emphasizing interviews conducted in English can mean a less than accurate picture.

Linguistic Privilege

Seeing the ‘p’ word might trigger a few eye rolls, but in the context of a globalized world, this one can’t be ignored because it applies to basically anyone reading this analysis and because it remains a source of inequality far beyond the world of journalism.

Linguistic privilege is yet another package of benefits we can unwittingly receive whether we’re native or near-native speakers of English. It’s also one we’re less likely to feel because after all, we’re all speaking the same language, right?

Yet we aren’t always speaking it on the same level. When we interact with people who are non-native speakers (especially with a poor command of the language) or people with impeded speech, it’s easy to forget how uneven things are. To give some examples of how “not all languages are created equal.”

• “A language is a dialect with an army and navy”: Many regions have a prestige variant of language that is still held in a high standard such as Received Pronunciation (the “Queen’s English”) for the UK and General American English within the States. While there are actually many accents and dialects of English, only a handful that almost always includes those two, command the same impact. This is why they dominate ESL materials and the aspirational goals of many learners.
• The cool factor: If you take English, pair it with digital media and package it with modern aesthetics, it makes for a very effective vector for spreading language and its associated culture (and potentially politics) — and for having it be received more readily. It goes without saying, English is not one of the most widely spoken and officially supported languages, it’s one of the coolest too.
• Mobility: Of all the non-native languages we’ll see while traveling, there’s a much higher chance it’s going to be English. Even if native words are not translated for us to understand, having them transliterated for us to reference (such as on road signs) is already enabling us to travel and move around with ease.

The Key Takeaways

It’s very easy to dismiss the issues of non-native speakers as “well, you gotta learn English. That’s the way the world works,” but this attitude might only be accurate for so long. The number of secondary-language English speakers is rising daily, and more and more people are growing up speaking more than one language.

This isn’t a call to “stop being ig’nant,” and go out and learn a foreign language (though there’s plenty of other benefits in doing so, even if they’re not cognitive). It’s a reminder to recognize the place English still has in our globalized world, where that reputation came from and how that can skew entire dynamics.

So next time you find yourself in situations where English is the lingua franca between you and another person:

• Dial back: This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to “dumb down” your language, but scale back the in-jokes, the pop culture references, the jargon and the slang. You might be understood better if you used less of them.
• Slow down: We get it, it’s hard to be patient when time is money. But be aware of how stressful it is for some non-native speakers to try and communicate with you all the same. Consider slowing down when you’re speaking and process what people feel and intend versus purely the words they’re using when you’re listening.
• Let them breathe: Similarly, if someone is translating for you on the spot, keep in mind that it is also a challenge and stress you don’t have the burden of. Let the person helping you know they can relax if you don’t need the play-by-play or be polite when you do want to know what’s being said.
• Empathize: If there’s miscommunication, try to think from a communication problem-solving standpoint towards understanding and common ground versus whose understanding is to blame. Everyone’s seen the rude tourist who assumes they’ll be understood better by being louder, getting more irate and gesturing more wildly. Don’t be traveler.
• Dig deeper: Assumptions already mess things up between native speakers, the same applies when communicating with non-English speakers. There’s no harm in asking questions to get the full story or more details. If there’s content or a good story on the line, it’ll be much better for it.

English, like a lot of cultural capital, is something that’s so widespread now that it becomes its own thing depending on the region. There are as many varieties of English as there are music genres.

In the case of a “foreign” accent, it often means another language is pulling on it, affecting the way it sounds and making it unique. Like with any sound outside of your comfort zone, it might sound strange and you might not appreciate all of its nuances, but recognize there’s a scene for it, one you gotta respect either way. Who knows, your next client, collaborator, friend or opportunity might come from it.