A major challenge in ensuring that food system transformation is coherent across scales of concern is triangulating between real-world practices, data interpretation, and governance decision-making. In response to this challenge, we present emerging experiments in making food systems data digestible, using food not only as the subject of the research, but as a socio-culturally, environmentally and politically impactful design material. Using food to co-construct edible data physicalisations enables us to bring diverse stakeholders to a shared table, to leverage social and hedonic aspects of communal eating and situated expertise, and create openings for new understandings of the data, its interpretations and impacts. As we will demonstrate, co-development of edible data physicalisations makes visible divergent understandings of the data, as well as impacts of diverse data readings. It does this through an evolving negotiation of the ways that tangible representations of data might be understood, involving people’s sensing, socio-cultural bodies in a cross-sectoral meaning-making process. We present the outcomes of a workshop in which designers, chefs, fishermen of diverse genders, governance actors, economists, food studies scholars and data scientists co-create edible data physicalisations to represent historic and contemporary changes in fishing practices in the Baltic Sea. The resulting meals bring focus to the interplay between real-world practices; data selection, collection, presentation and interpretation; and governance decision-making in new ways. We hope this novel approach to data representation and engagement opens new opportunities for advancing the development of Arctic marine food systems policies and practices.
Panel on Ocean Food Systems in the Arctic, organised by the University of the Arctic Thematic Network on Ocean Food Systems, Convened by Brooks Kaiser and Melina Kourantidou.