The thought occurred to me this morning, as I toasted a very lousy piece of white bread. I was toasting it, because it was lousy, not because I like toast.
I used to eat good bread, when I lived where good bread was readily available. I never used my toaster. Now, I live in a place, where good bread is not readily available. Now, I toast bad bread all the time.
Look at the carbon and energy foot print of a toaster.
Wouldn't America (and places like America) and the environment be better off designing good bread, instead of good toasters?
What should design's role be in rectifying this issue? Does it have any moral imperative in this issue, or is okay for design to continue enabling bad bread and big, unnecessary energy/carbon foot prints?
I am trying to keep the politics of design very close to the design of an object here. I am trying to use very plain language here. I am keeping it brief. I am rooting the discussion in a mundane, every day experience that everyone is familiar with. I am minimizing abstractions here.
I am talking about bread and toasters.
Freshness
Bread is only good when fresh.
When turning stale, it can be salvaged by toasting. Or submerging into liquid (e.g. gravy).
When stale, it can be salvaged by using it as an ingredient in other dishes.
Preservatives can extend the usable life of "uncooked" breads. However, many breads with preservatives (e.g. bagels, english muffins) are better off toasted to begin with.
The toaster can be eliminated, but stale and/or toaster-dependent bread can not. Therefore, the other applications of stale bread must be embraced by the public.
A matter of supply, demand, and will.
Good bread, as Woody points out, is only good when fresh. This is the problem. Preservatives are put in place to keep the bread 'fresh' (or rather, not stale) while in transit from the mass-production facility. In order to have good, fresh bread one must account for the timeframe in which the bread remains truly fresh, the radius in which it can be transported within that time-frame, and the demand of the product by which the producer can make and fulfill orders.
The problem of good bread is one of supply and demand. It is also a matter of convenience. Humans are lazy. We buy crap bread at the supermarket because we are AT the supermarket, and there is conveniently an aisle labelled "Bread". Should there be a bakery nearby, even if only a few blocks distant, one almost eliminates the consumption of good bread. I know this because I have performed years worth of testing in which I walk past a bakery but do not buy any bread.
So, in addition to supply and demand we must also account for human will. Which is not inconsequential in some areas, but in the area of breakfast food human will has been shown to be lax to the point of absurdity (see below) Pushing down the handle on a toaster is simply a much easier way to deal with lousy bread than traipsing to the bakery every three days to buy fresh bread.
I have to say...
I was not thinking so much about the stale vs. fresh issue, as much as simply eating better quality bread.
But, hey, I've turned over a new leaf. I'm committed to eating bad bread without toasting it. I am in a region of the country with exceptional jams and adequate butter. I will die a few years early because of hyperbuttering, but...I will leave a smaller carbon/energy foot print without my toaster. 🙂
Designers can design...
Designers can design bread....
There is a honest trend to design or re-design simple things.
Some are like boutique design stores. For candies, spaghetti, soap, why not bread, provably there are.
But I don't think we'll all have one of them at the corner of our home, but at least is a contemporary way to start...
Is a matter of Baker vs supermarket?
Are you just talking abut bread?
"Look at the taster so you don't realize how bad is the bread"
If the problem were just the bread....
It could be also about:
*Design cancer drugs after designing nice cigarette boxes.
*Design Advanced and sophisticate fertilization treatments instead of sex at time to have a child.
(an as in Idotcracy that considers "unsophisticated" the ones that doesn't do it in the old way)
*Design Smart jars and packaging and drinks when we have fresh water.
I love it...
The world's propaganda apparatus is pumping "global climate change to destroy the world," designers are talking green, architects are building green, urbanists are talking about packing persons into massively high density communities to end sprawl in order to save the planet, environmentalists insist on switching cars from internal combustion to hybrids, clean diesel and hydrogen, but the simple, painless notion of substituting good bread for toasters has got DesignAddicts backpedalling. How can we expect hundreds of millions of Americans to give up their SUVs, to give up their McMansions, to give up their energy sink high rise coops and luxury hotels, when DAers are not even willing to give up their toasters? 🙂
God forebid that I had advocated giving up coffee presses for tap water. Yeow!!!!!
Ah viva la inconsistencies.
http://www.toaster.org/
Woodywood...
If you only use your toaster once, or twice a month, and could settle for pan-fried bread instead, then think of how much energy and evironmental degradation could have been (and could be in the future) saved/avoided, by simply not making that toaster, or hundreds of millions of them.
Isn't this the logic underpinning so much of the green movement? Not so much live better with less, but live better different goods and services that are more humane and more benign in their impact on the environment.
Now, I am certainly open minded enough (in fact eager) to consider whether doing away with hundreds of millions of toasters (and unfortunately that industry, too) and substituting them with better quality bread (occassionally even pan fried) would lead to some adverse, unintended consequences that would lead us to choose to keep making and embracing toasters, but it does seem a product that an environmental impact statement ought to be done on, so that such a finding and course of action could be presented rationally.
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