Here you are.
- SoupCycle Logo
I’m graduating this weekend from Bainbridge Graduate Institute.
Also graduating are Jed and Shauna, co-founders of Portland-based SoupCycle.
“Think delicious, warm, buttery saffron risotto soup personally delivered by bicycle to your front door. SoupCycle delivers locally-sourced, freshly made soups to homes and offices.”
It has been my privilege to have gotten to work with them on a logo for their new company:
Good luck Jed and Shauna!
- Food System Design
In a New York Times article from the past Wednesday, Karen Washington talks about how urban farming makes organic, fresh food available to more and more people, for cheaper:
“It’s not about making money,” Ms. Washington said. “We’re selling so that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There’s no Whole Foods in my neighborhood.
So many people in Seattle are doing similarly amazing things to make good food more available. I’m beginning to realize how many good projects I come across from day to day, and how much of my own work (whether design work or manual labor) is for groups who are focused on issues around local, organic, fair trade, or direct trade food.
Hence, to highlight the creative work people are doing to design better food systems, as well as to house a topical portfolio of my own design (graphic, web, or written) I announce the creation of the Food System Design category on this blog.
Posts with Graphic, Web and Silkscreen Design:
• Blog/logo for Full Circle Farm
• Website/identity for the Northwest Chocolate Festival
• T-shirts printed for Seattle Urban Farm Company
• Website/logo for Cascadian Edible Landscapes
• Illustrated theme for Genevieve CateringOther Food System Design Posts:
• (Local) Us vs. (Fair Trade) Them?
• Pay to farm
• The Problem with “the 100-mile Diet”
• Connecting Buyers and Sellers Locally = Protectionism?
• Local Food Flourishes in SeattleRelated Links:
- Genevieve Catering is up
About a month ago, I did some illustrations for my friend and BGI classmate Emily Reilly’s company, Genevieve Catering. Check out summer, spring, and (eventually) fall versions of the mostly-hand-drawn, floral (squash blossom) theme she’s using for her website. Emily’s company serves locally and organically grown cuisine, to create meaningful “full-scale banquets, house parties, organizational functions, or casual office gatherings.”
- Site Launch: Cascadian Edible Landscapes
I adapted a magazine-style wordpress theme as a CMS for a new website for Cascadian Edible Landscapes. Take a look at eatyouryard.com. For the logo, I used a scanned image of a wooden stamp (of an artichoke).
- NW Chocolate Festival 1.0 is live
Check it out.
- Seattle Urban Farm Company
This month, I’ll be volunteering with the Seattle Urban Farm Company, learning about permaculture and the local food movement.
I mentioned them once before in a post for Worldchanging. Come check them out at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show (Feb 20- 24th at Seattle Convention Center). Look for the t-shirts I printed, (bearing this logo designed by owner Colin McCrate and friends) soon!
In honor of all this, here’s “Farmer in the City,” from Scott Walker’s amazing Tilt (1995).
- (Local) Us vs. (Fair Trade) Them?
There may be tension between Free Trade and Fair Trade, and tension between Free Trade and Local Trade.
But between Local Trade and Fair Trade?
Worldchanging’s Erica Barnett, (who covers transportation and local politics for Seattle’s the Stranger) writes on the complex impacts of choosing to buy local, buy fresh, buy organic, and/or buy fair-trade food. A decision to buy local here could have impacts on third-world jobs—jobs that other consumers are trying to protect by buying fair trade.…[I]t turns out eating local can have unintended consequences as well. Recently proponents of strengthening fair trade markets in emerging economies have pointed out that the trend toward “eating local” may hurt farmers who depend heavily on overseas markets to make a living… Food miles, then, are not the single most important measure of responsible food consumption; how our food choices shape local economies (including those thousands of miles away) may be just as important.
Barnett links us to a recent article from the San Francisco Chronicle, by William G. Mosely, co-author of Hanging by a Thread: Cotton, Globalization and Poverty in Africa. Mosely writes:
We’re getting a glimpse of the future of this debate in the United Kingdom, where the tension between the local food and fair trade movements is acute. Just recently, the U.K. Soil Association, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable and organic farming, called on the British government to restrict imports of organic produce brought in by air. In a concession to the fair trade movement, this group would allow for imports from countries actively seeking to promote organic and fair trade markets within their own borders. Despite this concession, British fair trade activists are worried.
Barnett and Mosely agree that the solution
…is to push for stronger regulations on working conditions and better assistance for farmers in developing economies. In the meantime, we would do well to eschew zealotry — organic, locavorean, or fair-trade — in exchange for a mix of all three. Throwing up our hands and buying out-of-season, conventionally grown and paid-for produce is far worse than choosing fair trade over local, or vice versa.
Are fair trade, free trade and local trade necessarily at odds? Can we limit barriers to trade, within structures that ensure fair prices are paid to independent farmers, both here and abroad? If consumers believe they are faced with a dilemma between a) supporting their local economy and limiting the carbon
footprint of their purchases by shopping locally or b) supporting developing economies on the other side of the world through fair/direct trade purchases, they very well may end up “throwing up their hands and buying out-of-season, conventionally grown and paid-for produce” and clothing.As movements, “local” and “fair trade” seem to have shared goals (robust economies, social equity, environmental and community health, etc.), so we are going to need policies and business models that favor both styles of “check-out activism” — not one at the expense of the other.
Local Fair Trade, for example, works “by applying the principles of Fair Trade to local food.” Nice enough. What about the inverse — applying principles of local food to Fair Trade? Direct Trade is close, bringing the intimacy and sense of responsibility of buying locally directly and fairly to the places that goods can actually grow (often without the CO2 benefits of sourcing locally, of course).
In the end, we have to understand what we’re getting into when we buy. There may be no truly guilt-free shopping. But the reasons we strive for a healthy “local-living” economy are just as applicable to people living in Mexico, Eastern Europe, South America, Africa and Asia. Likewise, fair trade and organic movements abroad can’t be ignored, for instance, here in the Pacific Northwest.
Says Mosely:
While the local food craze is all well and good, we should not be so quick to denounce organic and fair trade foods that are imported from the developing world. By shunning these products, we do not encourage local markets to flourish in these countries, but we condemn these farmers to the ills of conventional production for the global market (the only other real alternative at this time). We should remain open to such products in the short term, but also work for broad scale changes in the rules of the global market place to ensure that even conventional agricultural production is safe and fairly compensated.
(photo credits: Harry Wagner, hen power)
- Pay to Farm
I’ve worked on a farm for free before, but this is ingenious.
From Emily Biuso’s “Down on the Farm With Your Sleeves Rolled Up” in the New York Times:
The arrangement at Maverick Farms is simple: vacationers pay $120 a night to stay in a room in the hosts’ beautiful two-story, 125-year-old farmhouse, and they are also invited to work at harvesting, seeding and other chores. For each hour of labor, $7 is deducted from the bill. Up to 25 percent of the bill can be worked off. At night, the farmers cook dinner from food they grew, and the guests/laborers are encouraged to join them. At the end of the stay, visitors can, if they like, leave a donation for the food they’ve eaten.
(photo by author, Channel Rock, Cortes Island BC)
If people will pay for the experience of connecting to the source of their food (and I can think of many reason why this is a reasonable way to spend your money, if you have enough of it), what other experiences will they pay for? How about urban agritourism?
- The Problem with the “100-mile Diet”…
…is that it has been framed as a dedicated lifestyle.
You either do it or you don’t. It’s puritanical, and is doomed to be an absurd farse of the 00’s unless it can be more widely embraced. “Carbon neutral” may be an even harder for the average person to reach, but it doesn’t sound like something your vegan brother in Seattle tries for a year before anemia consumes him. “Carbon neutral” is framed as a goal, not an ideology.
(photo: cookthinker)
It would be more useful if the “100-mile” label was seen as a way to be conscious of how far your food has traveled, or even better, how close the producers of your food are to you, and what little excuse you have for not knowing any of them personally. And maybe rather than calling it a diet (remember what happened to Atkins on his own diet?) we should use it to label our our products. 100-mile coffee is improbable where I live. Yet it should be hard to not buy a 100-mile apple. If we know what can be grown locally, we can seek it out.
Same goes for the 100-mile wardrobe. I may never wear 100-mile cotton in Seattle, but how ’bout 100-mile bamboo? 100-mile hemp can’t be that far off either.
(photo: franciscoantunes)
If we are educated about the things we buy, we will want better things. All of this gets more of us asking important questions. How many 100’s of miles did your clothing travel to be woven? How far then to be dyed? How far then to be sewn? How far then to reach the fantastic machine that makes you jeans look old and worn? How far then to the store where you bought it? How far then to store where you will sell it? How far then to the recycling station, where I will get it for free and turn it into something beautiful? How much money changed hands at each of these steps anyway?
I don’t know anyone who made any of the clothes I wear. I know people that printed some of it (6 or 7 items). I know someone who knows someone who made one piece. Is connecting to the sources of your food, clothing and housing just a kitschy dream?
