Rationale of food waste campaign
In this project, I chose food waste as the topic of my campaign. I had several ideas, such as the whale killing in Japan and the global warming, etc., before making the final decision. However, compare to food waste, those problems are too big and untouchable for students in school. It is also hard for student to make any action corresponding to the campaign. Relatively, food waste is a more realistic problem that students can deal with. It is a persuasive phenomenon we see everyday, but just rarely pay attention to. To sound the alarm of this issue, I decided to choose food waste among all the ideas I had.
Last semester, I was working in dining hall and saw many trays of food got wasted everyday. However, for students who don’t work in kitchen, they will never realize this problem. To show students what I saw which shocked me, I decided to put the fact of food waste as the content in my campaign. I did a little bit research online, and found the quote “24 to 35% of school lunches end up in the bin ” (Stuart) which is related to my topic. I also exaggerated data to achieve a better result of my campaign like everyone else does. My design is consisted of two parts, image and text. For the image part, I designed a pie chart using the statistics to show how much food people waste. For the text part, I put “we eat%” and “we waste%” to indicate it is a pie chart. On the bottom, there is a tagline saying “love food”. Showing the fact with actual data is always a good way to shock people, so I believe this design can well achieve my goal.
For audiences, I decided to target all students who eat in dining hall instead of staff in kitchen. Since the amount of food kitchen prepares is based on how much students need, it is more effective to target students directly. Furthermore, the design will be printed on the plates in all dining halls since it’s the best place for everyone to get the message. According to the reading, “As we observe words in the landscape, they charge and activate the environment, sometimes undermining, sometimes reinforcing our perceptions.” (Drucker, 99) If this is only a random poster on the street, people probably will not relate it to themselves after seeing it. However, when it is in dining hall, the whole environment will reinforce the meaning of the poster since it is what people are doing at the time. At first, I was thinking putting the design on napkin because everyone need napkin when they eat. Later, I realized that people don’t really care about what is on napkin and it will also be too late to get the message after you finish food. Also, people grab plates before getting food. Thus, using plate as the medium is more reasonable to convey the message.
Food waste is a serious problem around the world. I hope my campaign can draw people’s attention on this issue.
Stuart, Tristram. Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal. 2009. Web. .
Drucker, Joanna. Language in the landscape. 1998. Granary books, 1998. 99. Print.