LinYee Yuan is a design journalist, founder of Field Meridians, and the editor and founder of Mold magazine.

Alicia: Hi, LinYee. Thank you so much for being here.

LinYee: Hi, Alicia. I'm so thrilled to be here with you today.

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

LinYee: I grew up in Houston, Texas. I am a first generation Chinese American woman, and I basically ate all the things that kids in the ’80s ate in the United States. So Lunchables. I was obsessed with Cookie Crisps. I did the whole Pop-Tarts, all the things. But the difference is that my mother is a dietitian. And I just grew up knowing that those things were kind of foods that were just kind of special foods. So I would often go to friend’s houses to access those things. 

And because I'm Chinese American, we would typically eat some kind of Chinese-ish every night. My father is a man of ritual. And so, he's not super into being very exploratory with his kind of daily meal. So often growing up, my job when I got home from school–’cause I was a latchkey kid, ’cause it’s the ‘80s—my job was basically to make the rice. So I had to go into our chest freezer and dig out cups of rice, wash the rice, and then put it in the rice cooker. So that was very much kind of my experience growing up. 

My father was an avid gardener. And because I grew up in Houston, Texas, we had access to the water. And his other passion in life, besides gardening, is fishing. And so oftentimes, we would have fresh vegetables, fresh fruits from the garden, and fresh fish that my father had caught and then scaled and then cleaned and put them in the deep freezer. So that's basically how my parents still eat today. They do a lot of fish. They do rice at every meal. When the season is right, they eat a lot of vegetables and greens from their own garden. But we also would do at least a weekly trip to Chinatown to get Asian greens and other pantry staples that I grew up eating.

Alicia: And so, what first interested you in food? Can you give us kind of a bio, a rundown of your career?

LinYee: Well, I've always been interested in food, in the sense that food was always the centerpiece of any sort of familial gathering. As a child of immigrants, we would always make an excuse to come together over a meal. So whether that was just kind of weekend dim sum with my aunties and uncles and my grandparents, or going to my grandmother's house for a meal or something more celebratory. For example, now as adults, my family, we meet for Thanksgiving. And so, that's kind of our central purpose for meeting. Everything always revolved around what to eat. 

And so, I think that food always meant more to me than just a source of sustenance. There was always kind of a reason for celebration when it came to food. And it always meant family. And it always meant joy and connection. 

And so professionally, I have worked in magazines basically my entire career. And I was never really interested in food media and the way that we understand it today. I wrote about design. I wrote about culture. But the food media wasn't really something that seemed interesting or accessible to me. I wasn't really interested in restaurant reviews or recipe development even. 

But what I was interested in, especially in the kind of 2010s, was this culture of restaurant pop-ups. And so being from Texas, living in New New York, especially in 2010, there was no proper Texas-style barbecue here. And this was the kind of age of the Brooklyn Flea. And so basically, the moment I had access to a backyard in my personal space, I bought a smoker and started smoking brisket for friends with—over the summer. So I would host a little party at my house. And then I would just, I would smoke a brisket. 

And one of my friends who was also from Texas, who is also Asian American and first-generation was like, ‘Hey, we should just do this at the Brooklyn Flea.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I just never thought about that. But ok, I'm down to try.’ And so we launched a little Texas-style barbecue business, and started slinging brisket sandwiches at the Brooklyn Flea. And so, that was kind of my first entry into a more professional understanding of food, besides being a waitress when I was in college and that type of thing. 

But again, not really interested in the traditional modes of working in food. I wasn't interested in opening a restaurant. Food has just always been part of my understanding of who I am and how I navigate the world and why I travel it. Why I would visit certain neighborhoods in New York, or even with friends at that age. And still today, we always gather around food.

Alicia: Of course. 

And so, how did Mold come to be?

LinYee: So I was working as an editor for an industrial design resource called Core77 when I started seeing a lot of really interesting food design projects. And they were primarily from students, often, or they were speculative in nature. 

But at the time, most design websites weren't covering anything to do with food design, because their focus was really on furniture and lighting, interior objects. And so I was like, ‘I love food. I'm interested in food. I am a design journalist. I'm very well situated to actually write about this.’ So I was like, ‘Well, let me just start a little nights and weekends project’ where I would write about these interesting food design projects that I would come across that didn't really have a lot of space in other places for publication. 

So Mold was just a nights and weekends project. I reached out to a friend who connected me with a designer. And I was like, ‘Hey, can you give me an updated Blogspot template, or maybe a Tumblr template for this project I want.’ And he was like, ‘Oh, actually, I can just design a whole website for you. It'll probably take about the same amount of energy.’ And so, I worked with him on creating a kind of vessel for these content ideas. And that was basically our online presence for the first seven years of Mold. And so, it kind of immediately became something that felt real. And that was the start of all of it. 

Alicia: That's so fascinating. Well, I worked in magazines, too. But I come as a writer from writing about literature, or writing about food, specifically on restaurants and the recipe development. So this whole other side of it that is more mainstream. 

And then recently, I've been reading so much about, not just with Mold, but also these writers, usually from the Netherlands, I don't know, doing, really thinking about food systems regionally and how design fits into all of that. And how architecture is a food systems issue. And things I hadn't thought about at all, because I never thought about those things at all. They weren't in my mental wheelhouse, I suppose. 

It's been so fascinating to find these actual connections, and I—it just seems such a lost possibility to talk about them more broadly, or in a way that's more accessible. It seems a lost opportunity for food media, specifically, not to be talking about how food fits into design and fits into landscapes. 

LinYee: I mean, it's insane because design is such this, a bit of an obscure profession in a lot of ways. Because on one hand, everything is design. Literally everything in your built environment was designed by a human. Somebody made a decision about the materiality, about its shape, about the way it was going to be produced, how it was actually going to—the system that not only makes the thing, but then gets it to you in a store or in your home is also designed. The system in which we live is designed. So everything that surrounds us is designed.

Yet nobody talks about design as a lever, as a kind of invisible kind of layer into the world that we live in. I think often because design is about complexity. The way that we're educated, especially in the United States, is not about complexity. It's about creating a lot of dichotomies. It's about enforcing binaries. It's about telling stories around ways that things cannot change. And so, I think that by introducing design as this kind of wildcard within the conversation about food, it makes people nervous. Because it's hard to explain why we have apples 365 days out of the year at every single grocery store, deli, bodega, whatever. You can get an apple, or one species of banana everywhere, all the time. So why is that? It's a huge question that nobody really wants to answer.

Alicia: It is so much complexity. And you're right. That is something we're trained not to do. I think the only time people in food media talk about design is to talk about a restaurant, how it looks. And that's literally the extent of it. 

LinYee: Yeah.

Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]

And so the one fascinating thing to me about Mold, and it's something that I'm—you can find in literature, you can find in art criticism, but you don't really find in food—is that it has a global scope. It's something that food magazines based in the U.S. tend to not be open to. Whetstone, always, is an exception, of course.

LinYee: Stephen’s incredible. 

Alicia: Incredible. 

And so, you claim the phrase ‘the future of food,’ too, without it being solely about food tech. Which is something I've been thinking about so much, which is how this phrase has become, to be the synecdoche for this one way of looking at the future in food. 

And so basically, how did Mold’s point of view come about to be global in scope, to be about the future, but to be so broad, basically, in what it will look at?

LinYee: So I started just being interested in food design as this weird emerging corner of the design world. And through the work of writing about a student project that was actually a poster project, I came to learn about the coming food crisis. And so in a lot of ways, this student project by an Australian designer named Gemma Warriner really did the job of what she had set out to do, which was to tell the story around the coming food crisis to raise this flag, that the United Nations basically warned that if we continue eating the way that we do today, that we will not be able to produce enough food to feed all 9 billion people by the year 2050. 

And that fact totally just stopped me in my tracks, I had A, no idea that there was a coming food crisis. B, didn't realize that it was literally like 30 years down the line. At that point, it’s 35 years or around the corner. And I was like, ‘That's within our lifetime.’ And there was consciousness around climate change at the time. But it's not the way that we talk about it, and the urgency that we talk about it today. 

And so, that student project completely shifted the course of the editorial focus for Mold, from being kind of a general interest in food and design into being kind of a warning bell to designers that, ‘Hey, you actually have the professional tools to offer solutions at various scales for this coming crisis.’ And so, that has been our focus and our mission since. 

And I think that the global scope of that is in a lot of ways the global nature of design, where oftentimes best practices and ideas from many different disciplines influence the way that we think about design. And also design, in some ways, it's kind of a—it's more of a scaffolding in a lot of ways. So designers are A, trained to ask the right questions. B, work in this very interdisciplinary way. 

And the future of design really lives in this idea of designing with people or designing with others, whether they're living or nonliving entities. And then there's a lot of space for that conversation, where that is not a—there's not enough space for that conversation in a lot of other fields. Just kind of planting my flag in the future of food was a way of signaling that we are facing this coming food crisis, but also to say, ‘Hey, we cannot address this in a kind of techno-bro kind of way.’ 

Design has always taught us that in order for something to be successful, it needs to be aspirational. It needs to be joyful. It needs to speak to the human condition. It needs to be emotional. And I think that those things, again, are kind of woven into the fabric of what design understands the world to be. And so, it's always grounded me in the fact that our solutions cannot be merely technological, especially when it comes to food. Food is not just a source of nutrients. Food is so much more, as your audience totally understands. And so, that's why I didn't think food tech was the sole answer. 

The other thing is that, let's just be honest, that food tech being heralded as the kind of future of food is about perpetuating systems of capitalism. Who owns food technology? I'm interested in design solutions or solutions that are grounded in systems that can be owned by people that are not—You don't have to pay somebody else to participate in this thing. But you have autonomy. You have agency. You have sovereignty to determine what your food future looks like for yourself, for your community, for your family. That's not the way that technology in the way that we think about it today works. It's very much about top down control. It's very much about hierarchies of like, ‘This is what you're going to eat,’ and this is how you're going to eat it. 

I mean, at the time, people were really excited about hydroponic greens grown in warehouses. And they were like, ‘That's the future of food.’ And I was like, ‘First of all, I am a person who doesn't eat salad, period.’ I mean, I do sometimes in the summer when I'm feeling a certain kind of way. But it's not part of my typical diet. And I'm sure, because I'm Chinese American, it's not part of a lot of people's diets. Basically, most of the people in the world are not eating salad every day. So I realized very early that those technological solutions were not for me. They want to try to solve for me. And once again, just being a little bit outside of that kind of, I would say, I—the person that those technological solutions are designing for allows me to be like, ‘Well, what else is there?’ and ask more questions.