Laura Kozak
VFR: Laura, tell us about yourself, your interest in food systems work, and how you became involved in the Circular Food Innovation Lab.
Laura Kozak: I’m a service designer and researcher, and I teach in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University. A lot of my work asks how design can contribute to place-based efforts or come alongside the work of people in the community who are looking after the places where they live.
Food systems are such a rich space for this! Food systems tell us about how people relate to lands, waters, and other beings; reveal how we come together socially or show care for each other; and reflect our values and cultural practices.
I was involved with the first Circular Food Innovation Lab at the invitation of the team at the City of Vancouver (Erin Nichols from Solid Waste Services; Lindsay Cole and Lily Raphael from the Solutions Lab and Meg O’Shea, from the Vancouver Economic Commission), who were looking to boost the design capacity of the project when it began in 2021.
Many of our students at Emily Carr are interested in food systems – cultural foodways, food design, food sovereignty, waste prevention – so I jumped at the chance to get them involved in this work.
Practicing Neighbourly Responsibility: Foodways class (Emily Carr University CCID 302, co-taught with Jean Chisholm, 2024) shown here at UBC Farm with Will Valley.
VFR: Please provide us with a quick overview of the first CFIL project, its purpose and main findings.
LK: The first Circular Food Innovation Lab was guided by a pretty ambitious research question – “how might we work together to increase circularity in Vancouver’s food system so that food is not lost or wasted; access to food is nourishing, equitable, and culturally resonant; and habitats are protected for current and future generations of humans and beyond-humans?”
The design team and group of businesses involved used action research (finding out through doing) as a way to shape and test a series of prototypes to see what was promising in moving the food system toward that big question. The project surfaced lots of data about what patterns keep the food system stuck in terms of wasted food, generated nine prototypes that were implemented to varying degrees in food businesses, and produced a report called Peeling Back the Layers: Learnings from the Circular Food Innovation Lab.
Post project, a Food Coalition was formed to keep the momentum of this work going!
VFR: What was the motivation for undertaking the second phase of the project?
LK: The first CFIL initiated a lot of new relationships within our local food system, and opened up the space for different ways of imagining and experimenting with how our food system addresses waste. So often, research opens up new questions, and I think there was a shared desire to keep going from the core team and from the businesses involved.
In particular, we are coming back to this with an intention to look more deeply at questions of equity and decolonization in the food system, and to continue to foster relationship-building amongst different people in the food system who don’t always get the chance to meet or work with each other.
Erin Nichols at the City of Vancouver worked hard to secure funding through Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, which really makes this work possible, and Mitacs has come on board to support the students in the design team.
VFR: Designers, like yourself and your students, have a unique way of approaching complex problems like food waste. Tell us more about this approach and how it informs this project.
LK: Thanks – that’s such a great question to get to answer! Wasted food is a complex challenge, in that it intersects with issues of food security, climate change, social justice and health, and involves many actors across the public and private sector: there won’t be any simplistic “solution” to our research question.
Our methods recognize that different actors in the system – for example, the people stocking grocery shelves, doing procurement for a health authority, advocating for food sovereignty rights, or distributing rescued food to community organizations – have unique and important windows into the way things work in our food system.
These same people often have great ideas about the way things could be in our food system. Our role as designers is to collect and assemble these insights, generate prototypes that allow us to test shifts in the food system, and reflect this information back to people in and outside of the project. As designers, we can help the system see itself through the processes we facilitate and the things that we make, and also help the system step into different possibilities for the future.
Laura Kozak and Lily Raphael, sharing the CFIL project at ServDes 2023
VFR: What are you hoping to learn more about during this phase? And what will be new this time around?
LK: Working with the incredible group sitting in the Equitable Food Circle, a new group convening for this phase of the project, we are hoping to explore questions of how to decolonize our food system and move away from extractive relationships and dynamics that generate lots of wasted food while people, lands, waters and other beings are being deeply neglected by our food system.
A big part of this is to be led by Host Nations and their visions for our food system. We have an opportunity to look at food policy: to explore how current food policy shapes practices related to wasted food, and to co-imagine what alternative food policy could look like. Alongside this new work, we will continue to work with the findings and prototypes from the first lab.
VFR: On a personal level, which aspects of this project are you the most excited about?
LK: For me, I love to get to know people who do different types of work, and food people are the best! I’m excited that we’ve integrated some seasonal community kitchens into the research design, where we’ll be coming together to make and eat food (the other job I always wanted to have was to be a cook in a tree planting camp).
Seeing design students step into applied work like this, where they start to recognize what they can contribute to systemic change in areas that they care about, is also really meaningful to me, and for this project we have a truly incredible design team, which includes Morgan Martino, Frankie Fowle, Sania Siddiqui and Maria Azam.
I also love that we live in a place where there are City staff that are actively collaborating with community members and researchers in this way.
VFR: Is it possible for food businesses to get involved with CFIL? If yes, what can they expect and where can they learn more?
LK: Information about the Circular Food Innovation Lab can be found on the City of Vancouver’s website. We now have a full roster of businesses participating in this round, but are planning a number of events in 2025 where businesses that are interested in taking part will be able to join.
The project team can also be contacted any time by email at solving-food-waste@vancouver.ca.
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