524: Designing the Future of Food with MOLD Founder LinYee Yuan

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. And I realized that it was important to reorient the work that I was doing with mold, specifically to address this coming food crisis, that we as designers have a North Star to work towards. This is Taste. I'm your host, Eliza Barbanel.

0:59Lynn Yee Ryan is the founder and editor of Mold, a critically acclaimed online and print publication about design and the future of food, and the founder of Field Meridians, an artist collective committed to strengthening local food ecologies in Brooklyn. It's so special to have her into the studio for an expansive conversation about using a design framework to reimagine our food systems and the power of examining nature in urban settings.

1:37So I think this conversation is going to be really great and hopefully really generative for those who are listening. Yeah, not to overhype it, but generative for us as well, I think. 100%. I think it'll be fun to chat about all of these topics. And I guess to start, just to give a little background of who you are and how you kind of approach food, I'm wondering if you could tell me about what kind of food memories you have from growing up and how they kind of have maybe impacted the way that you view food. Love this question. I am a first-generation Chinese-American woman, and I grew up in Houston, Texas.

2:22And so food has always been such a central part of my identity in my life. My family, which includes my parents, my grandparents on both sides. I have aunties and cousins and uncles who all, we all grew up in Houston together. And so, so much of the way that we convened as a family was centered around food, whether it was meeting in Chinatown at some restaurant my grandfather wants to try out on the weekends or eating dim sum after church or gathering around holidays like Chinese New Year or Easter or Christmas. It was always centered around food. And also for those of you who are either from Houston or who have visited Houston, Houston is an incredible city to eat in.

3:13And so, so much of my like sense of home is also, you know, kind of anchored in chicken fried steak at school lunch on Thursdays, or like eating like biscuits with sausage gravy and a scrambled egg for breakfast, you know, at a diner. So much of like the way that I think about pleasure and place and identity really is all about how we eat, who we eat it with. And yeah, just like not stressing about kind of the details around food sometimes, but just really being in the moment and enjoying it. Yeah, I love that. And I feel like everybody that I know from Houston just like reps it so hard and specifically the food.

4:07And I've never been. And every time I talk to somebody from Houston, I feel like my need to go there and just eat as much as possible gets greater and greater. Yeah, I really feel like I don't have enough meals in a day when I'm in Houston. I'm actually about to go to Houston for Thanksgiving. I have this tradition of spending a week with my family in Houston around Thanksgiving. And I've continued that with my children. And so we leave this weekend and I'm like just counting down the days and like we start planning like what we're going to go eat like months before. So I'm really excited about, you know, fried catfish and chicken fried steak and fajitas and kolaches and all the delicious things that I kind of wait for and kind of build excitement around about going back to Houston.

5:01Yeah, I mean, obviously, in a city like New York, we have so many different like cuisines that are available to us. But I feel like barbecue, like chicken fried steak, that kind of thing, like maybe we don't have here in the way that you would like to? Yes, this is true. I mean, this is kind of the beauty of regional cuisine. It's something that I think food should be seasonal and should be regional. And so I can't be mad that there's certain things that I can only get in Houston. And I think there are places and times where, you know, restaurants and chefs have tried to recreate a certain Texas flavor here.

5:43But I think like many great cuisines and many great foods from around the world, there's something in the water that just makes it specific to that place. And just the volume of delicious things that you can eat also. And it's also just like who cooks it, you know, like who's actually making the food in the kitchen? whose kind of hands are in the like flour, like all of those things matter. Yeah. But I mean, speaking about the history of great chefs that have tried to bring Texas barbecue to New York, you were one of them, right? Yeah. I don't know if I would say I'm a great chef, but back in the day, I moved to a ground floor apartment in Bed-Stuy.

6:26This was probably in like 2006. and I immediately bought a small smoker because I wanted to make brisket. At the time, it was really hard to find Texas-style brisket in New York. And I was in my 20s and had time on my hands. So I was like, yeah, I'm going to start smoking brisket for my friends. And so I threw a big party, like house party. I smoked probably 20 pounds of brisket. And one of my friends who had recently moved from Texas was like, we should just do this. And I was like, really? He was like trying to transition out of like finance job and wanted to cook. And so we decided to start a little Texas style barbecue pop up.

7:16This is the time when pop ups were still kind of a new fangled idea. The Brooklyn Flea had just launched. And so we found a little home at the Brooklyn Flea and we started slinging Texas style brisket sandwiches. My business partner made like the pickles, the sauce. We were cutting onions every week. We were actually like hand smoking, like overnight smoking brisket for our first season, which was crazy. And later as we became more consistent, we ended up buying electric smokers. But yeah, it was definitely a thing. I love that you had to qualify all this by saying that you finally had a ground floor apartment and you were able to do that.

8:00That's like the most New York detail. And was this your first like professional foray into food? I was a waitress in high school at a Japanese restaurant. And so that was my first foray into the food business. I had a lot of fun, but I was also in high school. I think I always just loved food. Um, food was always just so much part of the way I navigated the world. And at the time, you know, pop-ups were this kind of exciting concept. And so it made sense for me to kind of dip my toe in that water to, uh, you know, be part of this community of primarily young people who were like, let me just make one thing.

8:47and then have an audience to like be down to try it. And so it kind of worked out for us. Yeah, it's such an interesting moment. So it was kind of like pre-Smorgasburg, pre like all of that era that I think has created a blueprint for people to have this all thing that they're doing really well and then maybe even grow into a restaurant from there. That's right. So Brooklyn Flea was the first iteration of Smorgasburg. And when they moved the Brooklyn Flea, like expanded to Williamsburg, then they rebranded it as Smorgasburg. And now it's like kind of everywhere, which is great. And now it's in like multiple cities across the country.

9:19What? I had no idea. They have one in LA at least. I don't know. That's incredible. Beyond that. Yeah. I just shout out my business partner, Dennis Noh, who is an incredible human and a great chef and was really like carried the torch on that for us. Well, shout out to Dennis. Okay. I want to jump ahead a little bit in time and talk about the idea behind Mold when you first launched it. Like where did that idea come from to be having a food design publication? So I always introduce myself as a design journalist. And I was editing a design website called Core 77, which is an incredible resource for industrial designers.

9:56And I would also say a home for me where I kind of got like a crash course in high level industrial design by the people who actually practice design, like in brands who are at the forefront of, you know, really designing the objects that surround us in this world. And I really fell in love with design as a practice and as a profession. And at the time, this was probably like 2010, there were a lot of really interesting food design projects that were coming out primarily in schools, I would say. So there were a lot of interesting student design projects. And at the time, most design publications, like websites, were not covering food design.

10:45Design was still pretty focused on like furniture and lighting, technologies, like, you know, the iPhone was like this new thing. And so food design was really at the fringe of design practice. And as somebody who deeply loves design as a practice and also deeply loves food as a consumer and also as a maker, I thought, well, you know, this is something I would really be interested in spending my time with and at least creating an archive of these projects. I think that they're worth talking about. They're worth kind of collecting as a movement. And so I started Mold as a place for an archive, really.

11:31It was really going to be kind of like a tumbler. That was the original idea. And even the name kind of reflects that vision where I was like, oh, mold is a process in industrial design. And it also feels a bit like anti-food. I wanted to kind of be provocative and sit on this kind of fringe of food and design. And so that was the original intention to just be a place to talk about food design projects and also like what the borders of food design could be. Because even today, when you say food design, it's really confusing for people. People are like, oh, does that mean like plating your food?

12:19Does that mean like icing a cake? And I'm like, well, yes, it could be that. And also the design of the systems that distribute food or bring food from, you know, the farm or the factory to your door, how those things are tracked, how those things are measured. It could also be the systems that are actually growing your food or the systems that sell the food itself. Right. Like even a seed is a kind of food design in terms of the way that nature has designed the way that everything comes together. Or a person. Yes, that's absolutely true. And so I think that the more I wrote about it, the more I thought about it, the more I explored the terrain of what designers were considering in that moment, the more I realized how expansive that idea could be.

13:20And the more I wanted to engage designers of all stripes to understand that they have a seat at the table when it comes to questions around food. It was actually through a student food design project. Her name was Gemma Warner. She is a communications designer, an Australian communications designer. And for her thesis project, she created a series of posters that were infographics that translated this UN white paper into a series that explained how, if we continued eating in the way that we do today, how we would be facing a coming food crisis by the year 2030. So this was like around 2013. And so I was like, wow, that's literally around the corner and nobody's talking about the food crisis.

14:19That's something we should all be ringing an alarm around, especially food media. Like, why no one talks about the fact that our planet will not be able to produce enough food to feed everyone. It was just an absurd idea. And so when I encountered the student project, it did what it was supposed to do, which was to communicate the urgency around this idea. And I realized that it was important to reorient the work that I was doing with mold specifically to address this coming food crisis, that we as designers have a North Star to work towards. that if design is about offering solutions for preferable futures, then the work around feeding everyone and creating more equitable systems in order to do that should be top of mind.

15:23Yeah, I find it really interesting because when I think about the topic food design, I think that mainstream food publications talk about restaurant design and that's kind of it. Maybe if there's like a packaging rebrand for Manischewitz or something like that, it'll come into play. But I think this kind of expansive view of design is something that's missing and that has so much opportunity for insight. I'm curious if you would say there are characteristics that define like a quintessential mold piece or maybe other stories that you've published that you think really kind of encapsulate this ethos.

15:53When I think about a mold piece, I really think about mold as a publication, as a site for inquiry. So I think there's a certain kind of criticality and a curiosity that anchors all of the writing and storytelling we do. I also think that we center creative practice as part of that. I think we've kind of broadened our definition of design into more of the idea that design is about world building with intention and that oftentimes those stories aren't just limited to being told by designers who, you know, design with a capital D. but also farmers and scientists and seed stewards and community organizers.

16:43All of these people are world building with intention, using tools of creative practice that remind us that so much of our world is designed with intention. it's often up to us to recognize that many times the intention of those designs is not necessarily in the service of the greater good. So when people are like, oh, our food system is broken. Yes, and the food system is actually designed in a way to benefit corporations and certain people and places. and at the disadvantage of health for both people and planet and other places. And so my argument is that the system is not broken. It's actually designed with those intentions.

17:42And so for us to offer a counterbalance, we also need to think about what it means to design with intention at different scales and different modes, It's almost like a counter programming to the kind of systems that are currently dictating how we eat and what we eat. Right. Like, can you actually fix a system if it's working in the way that it's intended to versus building a whole new system? That's right. Vandana Shiva, who is the seed activist and I would say philosopher, she always talks about how the web of life is a food web. And I think about that often because in places like the United States, often the food web does not feel like the web of life.

18:36And so I think that much of the work of mold and the stories that we tell is trying to reorient us in that fact that when we have a relationship with our food, we are having a relationship with so many other living entities and places and people and non-people. and that when we eat, we should feel fortified by those things. And I think oftentimes we eat things that just feel like it's not fortifying anything. It's just like we're eating something that isn't to the benefit of our bodies or of the land that has produced it or of the people who have, you know, grown it. Yeah, yeah. I relate to that.

19:34This idea of talking about like sustainability and designing in that way makes me think about the way that you conceived having the print magazine of mold and that you had a set amount of issues, six issues, and you just released the sixth and final issue. And you decided to do that like years before that issue was actually completed. So I'm curious like why you decided to have a limit before you actually reached that point and if it felt when you reached that sixth and final issue and it was done, if you were really done with having the print magazine? Great question. So I have worked almost my entire career in magazines.

20:09I have had an obsession with magazines since I was quite young. I mentioned I grew up in Texas, and I think that magazines were always like this window to other ideas and places that were so much more glamorous and interesting than the suburb of Texas that I grew up in. And so I always hesitated in making a magazine because the idea of making a magazine in perpetuity was really daunting. And I always just felt like, I don't know if I want to make a magazine forever. And so when it was time to conceive of a print issue, there were other magazines around us at the time who were coming out and were like, I'm only making eight issues.

20:57I was like, wow, like what a mind-blowing concept. Like, that's right. We're making, we can make a magazine that's only eight issues. Like, that's cool. And so when we launched the Kickstarter for mold, the print version, I was like, okay, let's just say we're going to make six issues. If we can make more, if we get to six issues, let's see how we feel. And like, maybe we'll want to make more and we can over deliver. But I think that six issues feels right as far as kind of being an archive of how we're thinking about the future of food in this very transitional moment. And so, yeah, we've just launched with this idea that we're gonna do six issues.

21:49Each issue will explore a different facet of food at different scales. So we started with designing for the human microbiome. The last issue initially was supposed to be about designing for space. And the closer we got to it, I was like, oh like we have all these like tech bros who are trying to like go to space now to like escape the like horrors of planet earth and I was like this just feels like not the right vibe for me I grew up in Houston as I mentioned and I grew up near NASA so I actually grew up proximate to you know the space race, I guess. Like I had one of my best friends in like elementary school, her father was an astronaut.

22:40And I have fond memories of going to her house when we were little. And he was like building a plane in his backyard. And, you know, when you're like in like first grade or kindergarten, you're just like, yeah, that's normal. Fast forward to being an adult. And I was like, yeah, no one else had dads building airplanes in their backyards. Like that wasn't a thing. It's wild. Yeah. Meanwhile, Brooklyn, we're just excited to have backyard space, period. Get the outdoor space for the smoker. Exactly. So the closer we got to our final issue, we decided to design for a new earth. But that earth is actually planet earth.

23:19And it's about having a relationship with soil. So in a lot of ways, we kind of went full circle. And now that our six issues have kind of completed that cycle, it feels right. Like I feel like I've said the things that I wanted to say about this and we still publish online at thisismold.com. But I think the six issues, which range from designing for the microbiome to designing tableware and dining furniture to create new dining rituals. The third issue was about designing food waste to power cities of the future. The fourth issue was designing for the senses, but it was also about human computer interaction and computer sensing and the limits of that.

24:04The fifth issue was about seeds. And then the final issue is about soil. Yeah, I think editorially it's really nice. All the themes complement each other really well. And when you have the forethought, I know in your ad letter, I think you said you spent two years working on the last issue. So when you're working in that kind of timeline, you're able to think far ahead. I think you're able to create like a complete set in a way that if you're just continually working on the next issue, maybe that kind of like tightness of theme isn't quite there. Yeah. I also think that early on, I made a decision not to take advertising for the magazine.

24:39And that gave us an editorial freedom that really is like very few publications have. So we were able to publish on our own timeline. I also think that the biggest lesson that publishing the print magazine of mold has taught me is I really deeply believe in universal timing. Like when the magazine comes out, like that's when it's supposed to come out. and try as we might to like wrangle all those things and get people to like turn in their contributions on time or get designers to design the things on our timelines or whatever. None of that matters because like when it comes out, it's actually the time it's supposed to come out.

25:28And like, I think our last two issues are a great example of that. For example, the seeds issue, We started planning that in the fall of 2019. And then we enter into 2020. We're still like working on it. And then the pandemic happens. And then the George Floyd uprisings happen. And none of us were in a right mind to actually make work, really. Like, it just felt so weird. But it was equally right because when the issue finally arrived in the spring of 2021, globally we're emerging from all being by ourselves in this kind of liminal isolation. And to read these stories that people were producing and writing in the pandemic, I think it made us feel more connected.

26:29And the issue was always conceived as thinking about the seeds of ideas that people bring with them through times of uncertainty. And then with the pandemic hitting, it just felt very aligned with the type of responses that we would want to have in that moment. And so similarly, I think with the soil issue, we are kind of emerging from this moment. We have some space for reflection. And it's clear that the climate crisis is still ongoing. And global politics, whether it's genocide or war or, you know, demagogues, fascism, whatever it might be, the land will remember and the land will also not remember us when we're all gone.

27:31And so this is the moment for us to deepen our relationship with the land. And I would also say to reconcile with the fact that at least in the United States, the majority of us are on stolen land. And so what does that mean for us when we're trying to forge more equitable futures, especially more equitable food futures, when we are doing so on stolen land? And it's a question mark that I think the people who steward this land have the answer to. And so it's up to many of us who have platforms and power to actually create space to listen and for those voices to be heard as well. Yeah, absolutely.

28:20And I think even thinking about the timing of the issues and when they came out, the seed issue coming out in 2021 after 2020, I think about this phrase that I saw a lot as like a protest sign, which was they tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. And just how prescient it is to have that be in the discourse in the same moment that that issue was being made and being released. Yeah, it was obviously something we couldn't have anticipated. But yeah, I do believe in community timing, universal timing. And as you know, making a magazine is not something you do in isolation. It is a deeply, deeply collaborative sport.

28:55And so we're really lucky that our collaborators trusted us to, you know, tell those stories in that moment. And, yeah, I think we continue to really be indebted to the farmers and the scientists and the chefs that trust us enough to want to share their stories on mold. Definitely. And the fact that the print magazine is no longer being made has opened up space for you to work on new projects. And Field Meridians is one of those new projects. And I'm wondering if you could just say a little bit about what the intentionality is behind it and what kind of work you've been doing. Yeah. So knowing that we would only print six issues, I think about after issue three, I started thinking about what happens once we're done with our print run.

29:51And I'm somebody who clearly likes a side project, whether it's barbecue or making a magazine. And I just started thinking a little bit about formats, the future of mold, what would be the right container and shape for the work I wanted to do in the next 10 years. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wanted to actually know who my community is. And so I always had this idea that if we could gather people who read mold into a room that we would be able to, there would be some magic that would happen. I felt like we occupy such a niche space within media that those people who are familiar with the work probably have a very specific point of view on the world.

30:52And so our audience has from day one been quite global. And so the possibility of gathering everyone in one room didn't really feel possible. I thought about different formats like a bulletin board or a Reddit thread. I just didn't know what Facebook groups. I don't know. There was many different ideas around how we might gather our community. And then during the pandemic and the George Floyd uprisings, I realized the critical importance of knowing my neighbors and organizing amongst my neighbors and how much life that brought me. I when I was in college, I was a student organizer and I spent a lot of time and energy doing that work and I left college feeling quite burnt out.

31:52And, you know, full circle. Now I've been embedded in this community for over a decade. I have kids. We've gone through this very traumatizing experience together. And I was like, you know, there's nothing more important than knowing my neighbors because in this moment of great uncertainty, the people I live literally next door to are the ones who I need to like actually be in relationship with. And so Field Meridians really came out of this seed of wanting to know my neighbors and to also take the ideas that we've been like, you know, talking about, talking up for a decade on the safe space of the Internet into the more entangled, chaotic, messy level of the real world.