Choose or constrain, the reasons of The Soft Protest Digest

In parallel to our talk on food resiliency for the 11th internationale design Biennale of Saint-Étienne last May, we wrote a long article which was published in Azimut magazine titled: “Choose or constrain, the reasons of The Soft Protest Digest”. This article attempts to understand the shifts which shook the food system in the last century, by confronting two notions: "choice" and "constraint”.

In a first part, the article focuses on the birth of agriculture as well as the technologies which allowed farmers to select and breed wild species in order to design new ones, which would have the optimal characteristics: domestic species.

In the following chapter, the article investigates how industrial production entailed a hyper-specialization of species turned towards an economy of time and space, to which artificial selection could not properly answer. The food industry had therefore to call on a technology of “constrain”, which would ultimately objectify the living: ergo the creation of mechanically, chemically and genetically modified crops.

The third and last chapter focuses on the actual repercussions of these industrial practices on the environment as well as on regional culinary cultures. Acknowledging the environmental and cultural impact of our contemporary food system, the article narrates how The Soft Protest, Digest came to be.