The chapters and commentary in Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Marcus Foth, and Greg Hearn’s edited collection make an unorthodox and engaging contribution to food studies well beyond Human-Computer Interaction, writes Siobhan Magee

Magee, Siobhan

LSE Research Online

2014-11-18Book Review: Eat, Cook, Grow: Mixing Human-ComputerInteractions with Human-Food Interactions edited by JazHee-jeong Choi et al.blogs.lse.ac.uk /lsereviewofbooks/2014/11/18/book-review-eat-cook-grow-mixing-human-computer-interactions-with-human-food-interactions-edited-by-jaz-hee-jeong-choi-et-al/The chapters and commentary in Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Marcus Foth, and Greg Hearn’s edited collectionmake an unorthodox and engaging contribution to food studies well beyond Human-Computer Interaction, writesSiobhan Magee.Eat, Cook, Grow: Mixing Human-Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions edited by Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Marcus Foth, and GregHearn. MIT Press. 2014.Find this book: This October I attended the 2014 NordiCHI [Nordic Computer-HumanInteraction] Conference in Helsinki. I spent my last evening in the city at areception at the City Hall, chatting to other delegates while – rather aptly –attempting with wavering success to balance my plate of buffet food, wineglass, and eye contact. One paper that had particularly resonated withattendees was ‘Tackling Fussy Eating by Digitally Augmenting Children’sMeals’. The paper struck a chord because it explored a topic with quality ofbeing both down to earth and, I found out, quite contentious. ‘FoodWorkswas designed to digitally augment a plate of food and provide rewards forcompletion of the meal’ (Ganesh, Rogers, O’Hara, Marshall 2014) reads thepaper’s conference. ‘Isn’t it better if children eat healthy food withoutexpecting a reward other than good health?’ asked one delegate. ‘I’m not sure that would work with my kids’, saidanother. ‘Fantastic idea- really got me thinking!’ said a third.One would be hard pressed to find someone without an opinion on food and eating. The exploration of and relieffrom dinner table politics that might come with interactive technologies is but one area of exploration taken by Choi,Foth, and Hearn’s 15-chapter edited collection. I stress this fragmentariness because the editors are, as theyacknowledge, taking on a vast and almost peerlessly vexed issue, not ‘only’ ‘food in human-computer interactions’,but of food.Food is ‘good to think with’ and, as this book demonstrates, good to design with.  But food is also a problematic areaof research because the stakes of trying to ‘make things better’ (if only our comprehension) around food areunusually high. With the ubiquity, in some circles at least, of aspiration to ethical food consumption, this is as true inso-called ‘everyday life’ as it is in research. This is cause for dissent.  In his recent New Yorker article ‘Shut up andeat: A foodie repents’, erstwhile Guardian restaurant critic John Lanchester writes of the belief so common amongsthis milieu that ‘by taking loving care when we purchase summer corn, heirloom tomatoes, organically fed andoutdoor-reared chicken, we’re doing something with political significance…I’m thrilled by this notion, and yet I can’tsubmit to it. For a start, we can’t feed the whole world this way’. This seems to me to speak to a question feltparticularly acutely to those studying or thinking about consumption (including food): how best to see all walks of life(including ‘elites’) as a worthy of nuanced study without being able to lose site of one’s case studies, fieldsites andso on as locations on a bigger structure of inequality.1/3Credit: Jason Jones CC BY-NC-SA 2.0The Introduction tells us that the book stems from the three-year project Eat, Cook, Grow: Ubiquitous Technologyfor Sustainable Food Culture in the City (p.1). This might have been a preferable book title with which tocommunicate the book’s aim of ‘add[ing] a bottom-up perspective to the conventional top-down agenda’ (p.2). Justbefore referencing the World Food Programme’s Hunger Map comes the volume’s crux:‘Food is critical to our sustenance and, in its varied forms, is often an object of pleasure and desirewith equally varied intensity. As such, while food may create personal moments of adversity orjouissance, it has also played and unquestionable role in shaping the broader political and socialagendas throughout human history, and has co-evolved with the tangible and intangible facets ofhuman society’ (p.1.)The point of the book is to situate the focused research questions and quite discrete design interventions (forexample, a ‘farmers’ market probe as a week-long diary’ (p.139)) that characterise most of the projects described,against a background that transcends HCI and its allied disciplines and, indeed, the academy.While the rationale by which each chapter is deposited into one of three subsections – ‘eat’, ‘cook’, and ‘grow’-occasionally feels arbitrary, the section forewords by Anne Galloway, Yvonne Rogers and Kenton O’Hara, and EliBlevis successfully frame the chapters in their broader significances.An ‘Eat’ chapter, ‘Not Sharing Sushi: Exploring Social Presence and Connectedness at the Telematic Dinner Party’(Comber et al.) exemplifies how food poses productive challenges to HCI as an area of research because it is‘innately physical and sensorial’ (p. 65). Telematic Dinner Party (TDP) speaks to related projects that seek tofacilitate conviviality between far-apart kin, such as ‘CoDine (Wei et al. 2011) [that] translates the messages of loveand respect that are expressed in the ritual of most Asian cultures of serving food to loved ones’ (p. 66). In contrast,TDP aimed to approach food not as ‘merely’ iconic, but as edible, with participants eating in the virtual presence offellow diners. However, attempts to cultivate shared eating by using top-down projecting of sushi were lessmeaningful than the play participants engaged in using the projector as a ‘light box’ ripe for virtual high fives (p.73).Humans interacted with humans, humans interacted with technologies, but getting them to interact with food in a2/3particular way was far trickier.Don’t tell John Lanchester but Toet, Meerbeek, and Hoonhout’s ‘Supporting Mindful Eating with the InBalanceChopping Board’ is one of several chapters that, explicitly or otherwise, use food to consider how technology canhelp humans to ‘slow down’. While the designs written of in this particular chapter are provocative, they are alsoeasy to imagine as mass-market products. Consider the InBalance Chopping Board: ‘users have to indicate whetherthe ingredient is a food product that one can healthfully eat always (“go,” as with vegetables), sometimes (“slow,”such as chicken with skin), or only very rarely (“whoa,” such as pork chops) (p. 109).  That such a design hardlyseems farfetched is a reminder that food-centred smart technologies ranging from the epicurean to the ascetic arealready a big-ticket reality in some parts of the world.Eat, Cook, Grow is a stimulating addition to food studies and HCI. It is also an accessible bridge between these twoareas and their interlocutors in and outside of research.Siobhan Magee is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at theUniversity of Edinburgh. Her interest in HCI comes from working with designers and informaticians on a multi-disciplinary project about secondhand things in the age of the Internet.Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books3/3

Book review: eat, cook, grow: mixing human-computer interactions with human-food interactions edited by Jaz Hee-jeong Choi et al.

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