Feeding the Eye is a clarion call to designers - recognise the impact of your work and embrace your potential. Do not simply pay lip service to the ethical, the environmental, the sustainable. Believe in the capacity of effective design to inform choice and effect change. Believe that design has a power beyond the neomania of capitalism and consumption. This is not a myopic utopian vision but a call to be proactive as opposed to reactive.
Feeding the Eye questions orthodoxy. It takes a position and maintains it. Food, politics and economics form an unholy ménage a trois – a heady and seductive cocktail of appetite, power and greed. The government peddles information with a double handedness – the nannying voice of the healthy eating mantra but all the while allowing the most economically profitable – the food manufacturing industries, with their £80 billion a year, to dictate and control our insatiable appetites. Berating the economically challenged to adopt healthy eating practices but all the while pushing the highly addictive narcotics of sugar, salt, and fat.
It is the free market economy model that has dictated food policy, as opposed to a more integrated social, environmental, and health orientated one. With a growing global population and an inequity of resources, the imperatives of future food security are at the fore of economic, political, environmental and ethical debates. Feeding the Eye is a clarion call to a new generation of designers to challenge this orthodoxy and locate design within this polemic as a force for good, healthy, sustainable eating practices.
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