Critical food design: Between utility and values

Abstract

This paper takes as its starting point the distinction that Stanisław Pietraszko drew between the natural world and the human world, with the division of the latter into the orders of civilization, society, and culture. In the human world, food and eating as a form of meeting natural needs are located in the order of civilization, and as an activity that exemplifies and expresses values, they are inscribed in the order of culture. Critical food design undertakings that transcend the pragmatics of nutrition are analyzed in order to illumine the possible intersections of the useful and the cultural, where culture is understood as “a mode of life by the values.”