Design against food waste? Count me out

Trendy laments about food waste look unlikely ever to make much improvement on the poor incomes so widely offered in Britain’s creative industries.

On 25 October, a freelance Web designer, Paul May, 35, along with two fellow squatters, leapt over a wall behind an Iceland supermarket in Kentish Town, London, approached a skip used to dump Iceland’s waste food, and grabbed £33-worth of old tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese and Mr Kipling cakes. Shortly afterward, the three were arrested, held in cells for 19 hours, and charged under Britain’s little-used 1824 Vagrancy Act. Challenged about this move, the Crown Prosecution Service declared that there was ‘significant public interest’ in putting the miscreant trio on trial this month. Article click here

An outrageous attack on civil liberties? Entirely – indeed the actions of the CPS were so outrageous, the chief executive of Iceland wanted the charges dropped. Article Click here A telling example of how some Londoners try to make ends meet nowadays? Very probably. Yet there’s a little more to this case than meets the eye.

For the Guardian, the case highlighted ‘how much supermarket food is discarded, despite long campaigns to reduce the waste’. Yet efforts to minimise food waste, whether in supermarkets or the home, look unlikely ever to compensate for the low wages that too many designers are still paid. It is all too easy to blame mass retailers, and wanton, profligate, Benefits Street families, for not recycling their food scraps. However, a good designer will have better, more ambitious projects to work on.

Led by the government, WRAP attempts to moderate our consumption won’t do much for professionals like May. In 2010, Design Week reported that the average salary for a junior artworker employed on brand design in London was about £20,000. For freelancers like May, pay will frequently be lower even than this. Trendy laments about food waste look unlikely ever to make much improvement on the poor incomes so widely offered in Britain’s creative industries.

There is another thing. The case of Paul May serves as a warning to all those well-meaning but misguided designers who believe that design’s main cause should be to help reduce the world’s consumption. In recent years, dozens of books, articles and websites have come out bewailing how design has encouraged people into buying too much and not having any happiness at the end of it. The titles are lurid: Affluenza: How overconsumption is killing us—and how to fight back; www.TheMinimalists.com and, most recently, James Warman’s Stuffocation: how we’ve had enough of stuff and why we need experience more than ever. For Warman, ‘stuffocation is that feeling you get when you look in your wardrobe and it’s bursting with clothes but you can’t find a thing to wear’. About this, impoverished designers such as Paul May – leave aside those in developing countries – may care to differ.

Last, the May case should give pause to those designers who continue to hold that their profession’s future lies in working with the state to change people’s behaviour. This point of view, which now stretches from Warwick University Business School, through the Danish government, to the US, tends to be far too credulous about the motives and benefits that surround government campaigns to alter our lifestyles, beat obesity, lower energy use and cut down on waste.

After an outcry, the CPS thankfully dropped the charges against Paul May and his mates. But perhaps some rule-breaking designers would now care to redesign the behaviour of… Britain’s criminal justice system.