To qualify as food design, technological details must be placed in perspective of the all-encompassing challenge of designing a successful, tasty food product that contributes to a desirable society. Articles describing food product development typically focus on technological issues, while they should provide a broader, multidisciplinary perspective to inform food design. Furthermore, food design articles also consider the creative and developmental processes followed to innovate. Including a description of the future consumption context can complete the discourse.

This article presents a project carried out as a design-led systemic action aimed at tackling food poverty among people experiencing homelessness in Turin, Italy. Building on their experience in this project, the authors discuss the complex and multidimensional nature of homelessness-related food poverty within a mature socio-economic context and argue how design enabled systemic actions to understand and tackle this phenomenon. First, the article describes the birth and development of the ongoing project. It outlines the background scenario within which Alimenta started eight years ago, by presenting the issues and the spotty response to food poverty performed by the civil society and the city administration at that time. Then, it outlines how Alimenta was designed to address the health and social needs related to the scarcity and the qualitative deficiencies of food resources for the people hosted in the city’s public shelters. It highlights the relevance of the multi-stakeholder perspective and of the co-design and co-production approach – promoted by the project team – in allowing the city actors to better deal with food poverty and to counter the several criticalities at stake. Second, the authors describe how by enabling multi-level relationships between local actors, and by coordinating and facilitating actions pursuing different objectives, Alimenta has contributed to a systemic response to the material and immaterial aspects of food poverty. The article thus presents the achievements of the project regarding the well-being of the beneficiaries and the new local food system created. Finally, a focus is given to the knowledge that the project has generated in relation not only to the phenomenon of food poverty and to the possible ways of facing it but also to the possible role of designers in this kind of contexts. Thus, the authors discuss the limits of Alimenta and the potential scalability of the designed interventions from a ‘design for policy’ perspective.

We report on community food growing as an instance of practice-based sustainability research focused on the design of interactive systems for food growing in future cities. We present a case study with a series of workshops using speculative and participatory design approaches focused on creatively exploring futures of urban food growing with a local neighbourhood community. Working with local grassroots communities is often perceived as more egalitarian for promoting viable long-term and embedded change in cities, yet little work has studied this approach for urban food growing. To explore how we might better articulate and conceptualize collaborative food growing futures, we discuss the creation of bottom-up visions as contestations to hegemonic narratives of power and control in cities. These are affected by, limitations of present resources and infrastructures, inability to work at scale due to lack of buy-in of stakeholders, and erroneous promises of future technologies. Through these reflections on grassroots futures as complex assemblages of social and material realities, we provoke researchers and practitioners to look at envisioning future possibilities with participants, as a web of practices and stakeholders. We further suggest that researchers and practitioners explore these interconnections through assemblages of socio-material realities and visions of high- and low-tech futures. This work is important because it provides a new approach to looking at the design of future technologies for cities and addressing systemic issues of hegemonic food systems through bottom-up actionable futures.

The food system in Vietnam is changing whilst the middle class is growing. Agri-food smallholders have the strengths of responding to the changing needs of the middle class by offering freshness, proximity and convenience but they also face increasing competition from larger and international firms. At the same time, issues with food safety are prevalent and a rising concern among consumers. For this study we completed sixteen co-creation workshops between local agri-food smallholders and consumers. The goal of these workshops was to explore the value of participatory processes, non-hierarchical decision making and creativity for smallholder firms in Vietnam through co-creation workshops focused on sustainability. The outcomes show that the workshops can stimulate customer understanding and participatory processes among the smallholder businesses, but creativity in the form of novel ideas less so. The workshops did not result in directly feasible or manageable product and service concepts. The topic of sustainable food opened a dialogue: insights between the firms and customers on this topic were mutually rich. The outcomes suggest that co-creation workshops can create a sense of community and urgency for sustainability. In the future, the challenge for smallholders is to invest in participatory processes with a long-term view on sustainability as well as come to practical design outcomes on the short term.

This research approaches co-created citizen science from an interdisciplinary design perspective and is aligned with ideals of democratic and participatory co-creation of knowledge, its dissemination and implementation. We propose a new theoretical and practical design framework to be added to citizen science: convivial food system design. Convivial food system design is a new relational and tactical way to approach the development of a regenerative food system. Citizen science approaches can also benefit convivial food system design through activating communities of practice to share their insights and actively participate in co-food systems design processes. The integration of convivial food systems design and citizen science offers a deep, holistic and radical relation between amateur, civic and academic (scientific) knowledge in the production of alternatives to industrial food systems. This article shows the possibilities and potentials of this new conceptual integration through a theoretical framework and case study ‘experiment’ – the Huon Valley Food Hub project, Tasmania, Australia.

This Special Issue is preoccupied with the question: ‘How can citizens play an active role in co-creating sustainable food systems?’. The issue presents four distinct empirical research studies that explore participatory actions, co-creation and citizen science in moving towards more sustainable urban food systems at the intersection of design and sustainability. The various contributions explore the role of co-design with citizens to create sustainable food systems by addressing issues related to food production, processing, transportation and consumption. The issue covers diverse topics in distinct settings, from co-creation with agri-food smallholders in Vietnam to a design-led systemic action against homelessness-related food poverty in Turin, Italy.

Review of: Food and Fashion, Melissa Marra-Alvarez and Elizabeth Way (Eds) London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 320 pp., ISBN 978-1-35016-434-5, h/bk, $40.50

Artisan chocolate is the name given to chocolate products made with reference to the traditional production process, which is followed and consumed with interest by many consumers today. The study aims to determine the framework of the concept of artisan chocolate with the aspects of professionals working on chocolate and to evaluate the chocolate production processes in terms of artisan applications. In the study that used the focus group interview method, interviews were conducted with experts in the field of artisan chocolate in different countries. The obtained data were analysed by a descriptive analysis method. As a result of the evaluations, five different themes were emerged. These include ‘Artisan Chocolate: A Passion Story’, ‘Chocolate Types and Quality in Artisan Production’, ‘Chocolate and Health’, ‘Professional Development and Change in Artisan Chocolate’ and ‘Future of Artisan Chocolate’. In light of these findings, the conceptual framework of artisan chocolate has been expanded and a new definition has been made. Participants generally associated the concept of artisan chocolate with passion, high quality, art and happiness. Tablets, bonbons, pralines, truffles and bark chocolates produced by artisan chocolatiers are considered healthful, contingent upon their cocoa ratio. Considering the study data, it is understood that artisan chocolate-making is valuable for sustainable cocoa farming. It is thought that the consumption of artisan chocolate will increase with the expanding interest in fair food, quality and naturalness in the future.

Disgust is a strong emotion influencing human behaviour in many domains, including food choices. For example, many western consumers are hesitant about eating insects. This is understandable as insects have been connected with the emotion of disgust. We conducted two design workshops to gain a better understanding of factors that can give rise to the emotion of disgust in the context of grasshoppers and explore alternative food design solutions. Based on the insights, we created four design fiction examples to illustrate how disgust can be an integral part of grasshopper consumption. We argue that changing the attitude of Europeans towards novel food items like grasshoppers requires exploring design strategies that neither solely focus on the sustainability benefits of insect consumption nor take disgust to be something that must be circumvented.