Our food system needs to be redesigned and revolutionized to make it more healthful, sustainable, equitable, and efficient. But the system is so vast and multifaceted that no single person, company, or organization will be able to effect change from farm to fork. It is much more likely that change will come from a variety of sources working to improve farming, to increase food security, to minimize food transport, to decrease food waste, and to provide us with information to make better decisions about what we buy and what we eat.

Designers, scientists, policy makers, engineers, farmers, grocers, foodies, and health care professionals are currently prototyping and testing ways to improve our food system. This was the focus of Food by Design: Sustaining the Future, a 2017 MODA exhibition that focused on a selection of projects representing changes in thinking and movement towards the goal of sustainability in future food systems.

The process of feeding ourselves involves massive infrastructure, advanced technologies, and dynamic systems that touch on just about every aspect of the world in which we live. Creating sustainable, environmentally-friendly, and efficient ways of producing healthy food presents a wide variety of design challenges.

Food by Design addressed cutting-edge developments and explored how farms of the future might operate. The exhibition also highlighted ways in which worldwide food distribution could be made more equitable, and how we could design systems that encourage people to make healthier choices.