Week 3 Session: The food mileage map

This week’s question: what does a kitchen lose when every ingredient is available in every month — and what does the availability cost?

Inherited from week 2: the appliance was sold as modernity. This week asks what had to be built behind it for the promise to work.

Before the session#

Photograph the three most off-season or exotic items in your refrigerator. Not the three most interesting-looking — the three that have travelled furthest or that could not have been grown near here this month. Get the label in the shot, including any country-of-origin marking.

Do this before Wednesday. The tutorial is built entirely on your photographs and there is no substitute set.

Read Freidberg’s introduction and your chosen commodity chapter, plus the Twilley cold chain chapters.

In the session#

Bring a laptop if you have one — one per pair is enough.

• Building the map (35 min). Using mapping software, we place every item the room brought and trace a plausible route from origin to your kitchen: growing region, port or airport, shipping or air freight, distribution centre, retailer, your fridge. Where the label does not say, note the gap — an unstateable origin is a finding, not a failure.
• Costing it (25 min). For each route, estimate the implied ecological cost: distance, likely transport mode, refrigeration maintained throughout, and the refrigerant itself. State your uncertainty. A confident wrong number is worse than an honest range, and this discipline is directly assessed in the essay.
• The seasonal calendar (20 min). We put every item on a calendar of when it would be local. Most rooms discover they are collectively eating as though it is four different months at once.
• What was lost (10 min). If knowing what grows when is no longer necessary, is anything lost that a person would actually miss? Argue both sides.

Afterwards#

Keep your traces. They are reusable in the Critical Essay if you take a commodity or a supply chain as your phenomenon.

Next week Module 2 begins and we go inside the box. The Fridge Ethnography opens then — if you share a fridge with people who might object to being written about, raise it with Simone Ravel this week rather than in week 6.