Abstract from last week…

FOOD OPERATIONS
MORGAN PINNEY // abstract // 5 March 2009

THE ISSUE

Food is at the epicenter of impending crises as well as integrally related to the current economic one.  In his October 9th 2008 letter to the President-Elect, environmental journalist and professor Michael Pollan presents the critical case for re-thinking how we think about food:
“… you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.  Unlike food, these are issues you campaign on- but as you try to address then you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them.” 1

The issue has operations and implications locally and globally, politically and culturally.  What we eat and where it comes from, how it is grown/produced, processed and distributed: these questions affect us at the individual, local, national and international levels.  Questions to and by the media and government related to the issue of food are increasing.  The need for action across disciplines and at multiple scales is necessary.  Food as a critical, contemporary issue is well positioned for a thesis investigation and proposition.

THE PROJECT

Sited in Clinton Hill, between the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy, my thesis project seeks to address urban food production and distribution at the community scale with the intention of developing a case-model.  In yet another op-ed piece directed at the presidential candidates last fall, sustainable agriculture expert Fred Kirschenmann asserts, “the core issue here is to shift our food policy from subsidizing commodities to supporting communities.”2   This speaks to two basic principles: people need food to live and people come together around food.  I argue food has the potential to mobilize and support sustainable, diverse development within a community by establishing a measure against dilution of difference and the anesthetizing effects of gentrification.  Architecture can activate that potential spatially.  Approached as a infrastructural system, architecture may have the capacity to imagine and instigate a larger paradigm shift: an architecture of hope can start with food.

1.  Pollan, Michael.  “Farmer in Chief” The New York Times Magazine: The Food Issue  9 October 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin

2.  Barber, Dan and Fred Kirschenmann. “Menu for the Next Prez” Grist, Op-ed dialogue, http://www.grist.org/feature/2008/10/23/food_policy/  23 October 2008.