Kimchi In The Bubble
Posted on October 24, 2013 | posted by:During a phone call with my mother, she casually mentioned her plan to mail homemade kimchi to my apartment. Lightheartedly, I responded, “OK, thank you” and changed the subject. I was quite surprised a few days later when I arrived at my Brooklyn apartment to find a USPS box from Houston, Texas with my name on it. Did my mother seriously mail me kimchi from across the Unites States when she knows I have immediate access to one of the best Koreatowns in the country?
Well, yes. She did. I ate all of the 1,600 mile-kimchi and it was damn good.
In In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World, John Thackara discusses mobility and locality in regards to our ecological footprints and the design processes of product life cycles. Thackara asks us to consider “the need to move and foster new time-space relations: from distance to duration, from faster to closer” and says that “authenticity, local connect, and local production are increasingly desirable attributes in the things we buy and the services we use.” This is great and insightful and I agree. But if locality is so good, what validates distance?
Well nothing when it comes to the environment and sustainability. As Thackara reminds us, “small actions can have big effects.” On a large scale, the fairly simple act of mailing a couple pounds of food represents the fuel consumed and the emissions released from the vehicle driven from my mother’s suburban house to the downtown Korean market and back, from the house to the post-office, from the post-office to the airport, from the large jet aircraft flown from Texas to New York, from the second airport to the second post-office, and lastly from that post-office to my apartment. The alternative to this would have been a roundtrip subway ride and short walk to Koreatown to purchase a jar of fresh and pretty tasty, local kimchi. On a small scale, it represents unwanted gifts for the landfill in the form of two layers of heavy-duty, vacuum-sealed plastic*, one USPS cardboard box, and a ridiculous amount of packaging tape (better to be safe than sorry with kimchi). The alternative to this would have been a reusable, small glass jar and metal lid.
However, when it comes to emotions or cultural values, distance is priceless. The experience of eating something that my own mother put the energy into making, packaging and mailing brings about a pleasant feeling of nostalgia and joy for me and a feeling of nurturing and motherly gratification for her. How do we as designers leverage these conflicting issues? Is there a solution to the kimchi dilemma? Maybe the pleasance of nostalgia and the feeling of gratification can come from my mother dictating her recipe to me so I can make it on my own. Or maybe I should convince her to expel her nurturing desires on my brother and I should experiment with the vast abundance of food options locally made here. My kimchi example is rather meaningless compared to the global issues Thackara describes, but still begs the question, how many times can we say, “oh, it’s just this one time?”
On the next phone call with my mother, she casually mentioned that she had mailed some kimchi to my uncle as well. He lives in South Korea. Houston, we have a problem.
“The dance of the big and the small entails a new kind of design.” This design “involves a commitment to think about the consequences of design actions before we take them, in a state of mind that values place, time, and cultural difference.” Next week’s phone call will be convincing my mother that she can be design mindful too. If I can get her to consider a new or different perspective, then the first step will be a biggest.
*When I opened the box my mother had shipped, I found two vacuum-sealed packages of kimchi nearly on the verge of exploding. If you didn’t already know, the process in which kimchi is made includes a heavy dose of fermentation. Once raw kimchi is packaged and sealed, the microorganisms within the ingredients develop into live bacteria that release an abundance of gases, essentially creating a fart bubble. YUM.