The phenomenon of food waste has continuously been shocking the population every time the news features a video of Dunkin Donuts workers dumping hundreds of fresh donuts into the trash or a dumpster diver revealing the thousands of perfectly edible produce in the dumpsters behind a grocery store. To the grander population, this is only now shown to light, and as people get informed on sustainable living we try to meal plan and compost. Yet, food waste is a much bigger dilemma in the grander scheme. As we found out over the process of research for this project, the effects are grave.
When we began to work from the initial idea of “big corporations are protected by governments, which greatly influences the lives of ordinary people” we decided on focusing on how food prices= food waste= food insecurity+ climate impact, and when we figured out that we had the data to back all these parts up, we got going. It was rather easy to find information on Canada, as the government is transparent enough, and so we decided to focus on the statistics of the three most populated provinces, Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia.
The information presented by both the provincial and national reports we found was rather astounding, the main reason as to why is the fact that the province’s population did not reflect the amount of waste produced, same as how the waste produced did not have a constant percentage of inedibility to edibility. Ontario is vastly more populated than Quebec, by some six million fewer people. Yet, the difference between the edibility of waste produced was 6% more than the latter, which made little sense regarding the provinces being extremely geographically similar. The amount of waste produced was odd in the way that while the food wasted somewhat matched consistently with the provinces’ scales, British Columbia producing 2.2M, Quebec 3.1M, and Ontario 3.6M, the Greenhouse Gas Emissions produced were extremely close between Quebec and Ontario, while BC accounted for a particularly low amount. Another interesting observation we saw in the data gathered that we visualized in our prototype is the similarities between food insecurity and not-so-different food prices between the provinces. Each crane has four little red people, one of which hangs or falls off the crane as the others climb, which represents the similar statistics that the province’s share of BC- 8.2%, QC- 8.1% and Ontario-8.2%.
The design of this prototype was based on a vague idea we had for another project idea concerning multiple cranes that are lifting something of various sizes. Yet, as it solidified and we added to it using the information we found, it was like watching a puzzle come together. The little people climbing the crane was something that came along rather quickly once we linked food prices and food insecurity. All the while, the green water balloons were brought up as the only way to quite literally visually represent GHG emissions, yet were something we physically added to the prototype at the very end. The initial and broader idea for the whole setup is for the three cranes to add onto some fast food meal, perhaps even a happy meal, yet at the end, it came to be a plate divided into three that held garbage scraps that represented the amount of waste. The more scraps, the more waste proportionately generated by the province.
Here is a video of the prototype!
Here are the planning sheets+ sources (fourth page)