What comes to mind if someone asks you to draw some fruit? Or a fridge? Emma Atkins, PhD student at CenSoF researching fridge design and food waste, discusses insights from a recent food research workshop.
In June, about 20 food geographers from around the country joined a two-day away day in Bristol. We visited a beautiful community garden and had workshops on how creative methods are used in food research, and I had the honour of organising the ice breaker. What came out of it was fascinating and made me reflect on where our food and food technology comes from – not just geographically, but historically as well.
I decided to organise a couple of rounds of ‘relay Pictionary’. It was like regular Pictionary – but a race between teams. We had four tables of around five people each, on which were some flipchart paper and marker pens. At the front of the room was a table with four piles of prompt cards, one for each table.
A participant from each table came up and picked up a prompt card, went back to their team and drew what was on the prompt card. When someone else on their team correctly guessed the prompt, another person on the team went to get the next prompt card from the front. This continued until the prompt cards ran out, at which point a team yelled ‘Pictionary’ and won the race.
The first round featured prompts all related to food items: bread, cheese, fruit, vegetables and so on. When the round was finished, I stuck the flip chart papers on the wall, so we could compare how each team drew the food items. I found it fascinating: everyone had drawn very similar images for each item of food.
Which fruit?
For fruit, every team drew an apple, and then most also drew a banana. Being in the UK, these are very common fruits people eat, and the teams had drawn them in almost identical ways.
Similarly, carrots were drawn for the prompt of ‘vegetables’ on every paper: another common food product in the UK, with a distinctive shape.
It was discussed that being in the UK for this exercise meant that certain food items were understood in a certain way: if we were in, say, South Asia or West Africa, would ‘vegetable’ look very different? How would people understand the prompt ‘fruit’ and what items would be the most simplest incarnation to draw?
We discussed how these are the kinds of food items people draw when under pressure, and when they want other people to understand exactly what they mean. Participants noted that they reached for the very simplest and most baseline images of food that they could think of, while also making them recognisable.
For example, it was observed that although there are many types of cheese, it is hard to differentiate between them easily, so the stereotypical ‘Swiss cheese’, triangular in shape and with holes in it, was used to make this drawing as clear as possible.
Cheese please
When asked about why this was *the* cheese stereotype, participants pondered about how cheeses in cartoons are drawn, in children’s books and on TV. That begs the question: how did this type of cheese become so prevalent in cartoons? Where do all these archetypal images come from, and at what point did they become the archetypes?
For the second round of Pictionary participants drew kitchen objects, including the fridge, the toaster, the microwave, and the hob. Again, participants drew very similar drawings for these objects.
One of the conceptual frameworks I am using for my PhD is called Science and Technology Studies (STS). It concerns itself with how science is ‘made’ and how technology comes to be. There are numerous examples of how certain objects and knowledges arose not simply because they were ‘the best’ but because of other compounding factors.
From icebox to fridge
A good example is the refrigerator. In her piece ‘How the refrigerator got its hum’ (1983), Ruth Cowan Schwartz details that the electric compression fridge ‘won’ against the gas absorption fridge not because the technology was necessarily superior, but because of the national rollout of domestic electricity networks by President Roosevelt, the size and influence of electric utility companies, and the aggressive marketing tactics of the electric fridge manufacturers. Without these factors, we may well have gas instead of electric fridges in our kitchens.
The drawings of the fridge made me reflect on this research: in another world, how would our fridges look different? The design of the fridge is indebted to the icebox, which was patented in the USA in 1838 (Gantz 2015). When manufacturers were creating the electric refrigerator, they didn’t want to stray too far from the familiar icebox design – they were already asking their consumers to give up a comfortable piece of technology for a relatively unknown entity.
Keeping the ‘box’ made the move to an electric fridge easier, even though it may not be the ‘best’ design for storing food. Studies (including my own) are showing that having deep shelves and drawers can make food more at risk of going off if it remains hidden from view and more easily forgotten.
Smart fridges
Some designs in the mid-20th century attempted to move away from the traditional ‘box’ design, but they were not successful; and although food waste is now high on the agenda, fridge manufacturers seem to simply be heaping on more digital gadgets (like cameras and smart screens) onto the same boxy hardware. Will we move away from the ‘box’ one day? What would this Pictionary round look like in the future?
The Pictionary icebreaker was a great tool of bringing out the archetypes of food and food-related objects, and made participants consider why these archetypes exist. Other workshops that feature mundane objects and things, or STS-related themes, would benefit from this exercise. It was also rather playful and I hope it made everyone relax and feel more comfortable participating in the subsequent workshops.
References
Cowan, R. S., 1983. How the refrigerator got its hum. In: MacKenzie, D. and Wajcman, J. (eds), 1985. The Social Shaping of Technology. pp. 202-218
Gantz, C., 2015. Refrigeration: A History. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company.