Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Tracking a Taco Around the Globe
If you bought a chicken taco in San Francisco, its ingredients may have circled the globe two-and-a-half times. Or, at least, that's one of the findings of an intriguing project developed by the California College of the Arts, where a group of students decided to trace the origins of all of the ingredients involved in preparing a single chicken taco sold from a taco truck in San Francisco's Portrero Hill neighborhood to develop what the students involved call a "tacoshed."
The findings offer a fascinating look at how distantly food ingredients spread, but also highlight the challenges in clearly articulating food information stems from, well, the fact that we cook. So, for example, the total distance traveled by the taco obscures a different point: the salt accounted for just 31 of the 64,000 miles that the ingredients were shipped. In contrast, the aluminum foil went more than 17,000 miles.
That said, as the students note, miles traveled doesn't necessarily equate with waste--and that poses one of the major challenges for how we understand the impact of our foods. As Good Magazine notes:
Rather than emphasize the current polarity between local and globally produced food, the students were given a chance to examine the values of both modes of production, from a systems perspective. Key to this process was a close look at the embodied energy in each ingredient, or the sum total of the energy necessary for its entire life-cycle. The students compared tomatoes grown in a greenhouse with those shipped from the Southern Hemisphere, where they’d been grown in summer weather. They looked at aluminum foil, which originated as an aluminum alloy that was mined in New Zealand, and had traveled farther than the elements of the taco, but can be recycled indefinitely without degrading in quality.
That is, the aluminum foil traveled the furthest--which, in and of itself, may or may not be a problem--which could be mitigated if said foil has been recycled.
I don't think we can realistically process all of this information each of the several times a day we have a meal or a snack. And while visualizations might help, I'd guess that as visually compelling as the map above looks now, it would seem as ordinary as a nutrition label if every restaurant, supermarket and taco truck had the same sort of map.
On the project's site, one of the stated goals was that "By thoroughly learning the process of formation and lifecycle what it takes to make a taco, we would be better able to propose and design a speculative model of a holistic and sustainable urban future." And to me, that's the key point here. A lot of this information is too complex for consumers to think about several times a day and will--or at least could--be far more valuable to designers and planners considering how best to produce and distribute food to meet the shifting, daily food needs of consumers.
(My thanks to my colleague Jason Tester for pointing me to this.)