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Living The Dream?! sustainable living & a Great British conversation just begging to be had.

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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Austin Powers, Banter, brands, Castles, Cats Cradle, China Dream, Climate Change, Constituencies of Action, Consumerism, Dreams, Emerged Economies, faith, great British conversation, Identity, John Stuart Mill, JUCCCE, Lighter Living, love, M&S, Pay Day Loans, Peggy Liu, Pork Scracthings, Prosecco, Reimagining Prosperity, Smarter Living, Stenna Stairlifts, sustainable living, Transforming Desire, UK Dream

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Funny how some phrases just fall in to your lap. Funny how some just stick. Living the Dream is just such a phrase – a gift horse that was staring me in the mouth.

In the space of two days I had the polarities of Great British aspiration and disappointment writ simple and large on my storytelling wall. Our Great British M&S-stylie Prosecco & Pistachio lifestyle and its poor PaydayLoan & Pork-scratching cousin came gift-wrapped in one exquisitely simple phrase.

In a West London brasserie bar sat a woman, fashionably turned out, the odd fancy shopping bag at her killer-heeled feet, a glass of bubbles in front of her, txting furiously on her i-phone 6. Her friend appeared suddenly, looking a little bedraggled, but on seeing her shiny friend she brightly chirped,’ living the dream babes…look at you…bubbles and everything…’

And within days of the upbeat version wafting in front of me, its poor cousin appeared in North London, just beyond N1. I see a bloke, obviously far from rolling in it: a bag of DIY stuff in one hand, one child in the buggy, the other mid tantrum, on the phone to his partner/girlfriend/wife/babymamma. She is patently giving him an earful. Cue a friend of his walking past on the other side of the street who shouts ‘ Oi Tommy..Living the Dream then mate!?’. The beer-battered sarcasm of this banter simply inspired a meek self-deprecating shrug in the bedraggled bloke on the mobile. True.

As a phrase Living the Dream does what every great tenet, mantra or philosophy of any authenticity and substance should do – it easily and effortlessly embraces every extremity, turbulence, nuance, depth and not so subtle shade of the thing it seeks to define or describe – in this case the quality of life the person is leading at that very moment the phrase is deployed.

It allows enormous complexity to sit just behind it, knowingly, without ever having to say it. The back-stories of these two people were plain to see without having to set them out.

This was the power of the phrase for me.

To be fair I had been searching for one to wrap up a very UK ‘dream of better’ for a while.

We had searched for a conversation starter around a more sustainable lifestyle – one that started in the real everyday world.

In 2013 we ran 4 pilot workshops in London for the UK Dream project to that end – to find a more populist, scalable conversation to inspire a more enduring model of prosperity: a thriving vibrant life open to all, underwritten with sustainable truths.

We needed a new narrative: a new lexicon of better for people to use in their everyday lives. The old narrative was simply not working. Sustainability people speaking to themselves: impenetrable, arcane, complex, off-putting.

For most people the end of the month comes before the end of the world. They are more concerned with making ends meet than with how they might meet their end in some post-apocalyptic climate-induced catastrophe. The old narratives, rooted as they are in the activist roots of environmentalism simply do not chime with your average Joe and Jane.

So we had a chasm to cross. We needed a simple and very UK-centric or British hook that allowed us to start with simple everyday human-sized truths – What keeps you up at night? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What does good look like from where you’re standing?

In a search for this new narrative, we had already applied the 7 stage Dream-In-A-Box methodology (well, three of them at least) to try and shape what better might look like and scaling the everyday conversation around it.

We got as diverse a group of individuals as possible into a room to play with, pull down, interrogate and explore the traits, dimensions, idioms and aspirations of a prosperous life underwritten by sustainable truths. And we did it by first banishing the language of the circular economy, up-cycling, collaborative consumption (a co-created art installation project by 17th Century British poets surely) stewardship, materiality, EP&L, Net Positive and every other phrase on the trending circuit.

The most interesting and charming conversations were sparked around the old arts of thrift – smart shrewd living skills. A form of street smarts for aspirational living. people who know know…

The idea of Lighter Living. Lightening the burden on oneself (bills, cost, beyond ones means) and on the world in which we endeavour to thrive offered an overarching narrative hook that felt aspirational; breezy; cool.

So UK Dream identified Smarter lighter living represented a good beginning – positive – something one feels before one thinks it.

But we still had the tricky D word. Left to its own devices, Dream is a very divisive word, regardless of how you underwrite it; especially in Britain. On the up side everyone likes a dreamy something – we are happy to have the dream job, the dream holiday. But these are specific uses of the word that define a clear and tangible set of benefits and experiences.

Use the D word on a more rarified cultural and nationalistic level and the long shadow of John Stuart Mill enters the room at the faintest whisper of the word.

Dreams. A tyranny of pasteurized living. The death of individuality. An opiate under whose suffocating crop invention withers and spirit is anaesthetised. Dreams: the heartland of the indolent and fearful. The sharp corners and friction of individuality are what keep us alive. Not buttered populist platitudes for us to get fat on.

For the UK audience, Dream just invites the cynic and the heckler to rip it up; test its edges, even when you try and put it in a box.

Hence my search for the phrase that delivered the idea of a dream of better as part of life in the here-and-now; as measured in clear and tangible terms – a phrase that could happily ladder up or down; for better or worse; good or bad; funny or sad.

Cue Living The Dream?!

As soon as we place the ‘Living the Dream?!’ question at the top of our conversational ladder everything shifts – and becomes more human.

It allows us to engage with really simple scenarios to begin with – what keeps you up at night? the ‘mares big and small of every day life – What gets you out of bed in the morning? the dreamy stuff that makes life worth living.

This simple two pillar approach can be used to inspire conversations around identity, fashion, lifestyle, living, food & drink, education, energy, finances, technology, travel & transport, leisure & entertainment, white goods, furniture – anything. Easy conversational doors into complex nuanced stories.

It also means that we can reframe conversations that interweave multiple dimensions (usually only looked at or explored as single threads) and explore them as we find them – as slightly more chaotic jumbled buckets of conversation.

For example:

Love & Shopping

The old intrinsic nature of love and how we demonstrated it – through nurture, provision, protection, empowerment, support and belonging – has been hijacked by brands trying to inveigle their way into a lead position on our purse. We are more likely to make an active demonstration of love through a commercial transaction than we are through a personal one. The extrinsic demonstrable nature of the neu-love we now practice is making us live beyond our means.

So we find ourselves living in a culture that celebrates Saturday shopping in Westfield as an act of bonding and love. Families share in the pursuit of living the dream; even if it just loading love on a credit card for later. Every demonstration of love seems to come with a bar code: DISCUSS.

Faith & Banter

Faith has become more than just the repose of religion – faith and leaps of it are required in every corner: humanists take the leap of faith in humanity and its ability to prevail. Philosophers cross the chasm of the ontological between universals and particulars. Artists relentlessly leap from humanities to science to metaphysics to the primal with an absolute faith in the eventual ascension of something sublime. Even in brittle science, in the absence of an M Theory waiting to be revealed, they undertake a leap of faith of their own every day between the two quantum truths without a bridge to join them.

But in the UK, if you get too serious, watch your language, lighten up and Get over yourself. This is the nation of ‘taking the piss’, heckling, ribbing and anarchic banter. How does something so serious play out in a culture where to be serious is to be dangerous. DISCUSS.

Castles & Cat’s Cradle

Every man is an island and every Englishman’s home is his castle. Well, ‘ish’. Given the level of Great British personal debt, mortgage rates, the ascendence of the pay day loans, just to keep the ‘castle’ from falling down, the old securities of a fixed and stable life are fast disappearing. And as the castle walls shrink or crumble, splendid isolation gives way to dynamic connection and collaboration. We are stitching ourselves back together again in myriad different ways, finding new ties that bind. If 2008 smashed the family china and pulled down the gazebo and the politicians are fracking society who’s got the UHU?

In the gaps and cracks they leave behind new opportunities and alliances form. Run down regions and communities are regenerated. people find new purpose. Can a new more enlighted aspiration for a more enduring life rise with the cultural phoenix? DISCUSS

Wellness in an highly emerged society.

In exploring the Living The Dream conversation, we also realised that culturally, socially and systemically, the UK is so emerged it’s submerged. Simple and very meaningful topics so easily and directly dealt with in other cultures are in ours hidden inside a complex and codified landscape. Triggering conversations around these topics is a minefield: an assault course of social gaffes, trip wires, trap doors, raspberries and silences. So achieving just the right lightness of touch and integrity is critical.

The conversation around wellness and wellbeing is just such a conversation. It is not in the direct line of conversational fire. We speak indirectly of these things, usually as part of a different conversational thread. We are more likely to fall upon the topic of well-being through jokes about Stenna stairlifts, incontinence pants, supersize mother in laws, smoking in bed and Austin Power’s teeth than we are directly with a straight face.

Wellness is a supermarket trend supported by chemist brands – it is NOT a stitched in part of the great british psyche just yet. But we are getting there in our own sweet time.

This is very different to the China Dream where its emerging economy status means that health & well-being are absolutely central to the idea of what better looks like. A conversation that begins and ends with the need for something drastic to happen around air, water, food integrity and diet and their role in building a more resilient and dynamic society.

All in all, Living The Dream?! (for now at least) creates a simple conversational foundation for a bigger conversation around what good looks like and how we might get there individually, communally and collectively. Apply simple rules of smarter, lighter living at the heart of it and perhaps we might move the dial from over indexing on what keeps us up at night and start peaking again on what gets us out of bed in the morning!

All we need now is the right partners to scale the right conversation and start asking the right questions of the right people.

So any platform or brand looking for a purpose in the UK – looking for a conversation to fuel, inspire, support and celebrate – come on down. We have the beginnings of something good.

FOOTNOTES

LivingTheDream is planning to undertake 10 workshops across the UK in 2015 – simply to start asking the right questions of the right people; of what better might look like for them – in their language, in their words and from where they are standing. The curated outcomes will then be shared with the constituencies of action – local communities, councils, faith leaders, collectives, interested parties, brands, institutions and organisations – to adopt, reflect and act upon to start making better a reality.

Living The Dream & the art of smarter, lighter living is an organically developing theme rooted in the original Dream in A Box UK Dream project workshops and part of a wider DreamInABox initiative which includes the founding China Dream movement run in China through NGO JUCCCE and spearheaded by the inimitable Peggy Liu; inspiration and co-founder of all things DiaB.

Sustainable Human Existence, The D Word & Treading carefully

02 Saturday Aug 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Brian Cox, cary Grant, China Dream, D Ream, Dream catchers, Dream In A Box, Freud, gramsci, Identity, John Stuart Mill, Loveboat, Mad magazine, Martin Luther King Jnr, Morpheus, Peggy Liu, Philosophy, Science, Sustainability, The Ancients, The Civil Rights Movement, Transforming Desire, Walt Disney, Yeats

Screen Shot 2014-08-03 at 00.05.59

Funny things dreams. Profound to some – sophistry to others.
So please mind your language!

I used the word Dream in a presentation once in the UK. Won’t be doing that again in a hurry any time soon: certainly not without a lot of qualification.
Let’s just say I had not realised how ‘spooked’ grown ups can get by a word.

Equally, it served to remind me that my own slap dash use of language and bumbling naivety could do with some heavy spanner work and a healthy dose of tuning fork.

To be fair the D word popped up in very particular circumstance – a discussion about a methodology called Dream In A Box.

The methodology endeavours to reuse and recycle old wisdoms, contemporary cultural signposting, local idioms and vernaculars to write a new narrative – to re-imagine prosperity, reframe sustainability and transform desire – the consuming kind particularly – to a more enduring and sustainable model; all this in pursuit of a more sustainable human existence.

The D word was chosen for its particular resonance with and reference to ‘the American Dream’ and the staining nature of its most recent variant on our beleaguered planet. Not that it was always thus.

The American Dream was one under which all men (and, sure, yup, women, and ok, eventually, if you’re going to push it, with a civil rights movement for example, Afro-Americans) were equal.

In the heady industry-rebuilding, economy-expanding (where waists would surely follow) post-war rush to create the perfect American thriving, surviving white-picket society, that dream took a few toxic turns, until finally, it eventually settled on the perfectly trimmed lawn of the idyllic all-consuming sub Urban lifestyle that we know and love.

Cue Cary Grant movies. Loveboat. Doris Day. And the chirpy satire of Mad Magazine.

It was a dream promising the consumer citizen infinite growth, financially, spiritually, socially and collectively; all merrily based upon an apparently infinite, fecund and plentiful pool of glorious ‘Godly’ resources; material human and physical.

The patently obvious and accelerating realisation of how wrong that immaculate assumption actually was aside, the feeling in the Dream In A Box camp was that the Dream bit of the phrase was reasonably off set by the In A Box bit.

The In A Box part of it made the following particular point: unless you can find a way of containing the otherwise intangible, lofty, unreachable and mildly frustrating dimensions of a Dream and make them real in ways that are meaningful and valuable to everyday people in the everyday thread of life, you are merely peddling opiates.

Even so, for some it smacked of an over simplified homogenous hideous social chimera. A one size fits all piece of social bullying or bluff that was fundamentally anti–social in its anti-individualist bent.

But this vehemence is not a feeling reserved exclusively for the more square cornered sustainable analysts, scientists, engineers underwriting the operational truths of supply and value chains everywhere.

Dreams generally enjoy a dynamic polarity in many people’s minds.

Dreams seem to inhabit a similar place to things like religious fervor, faith and Walt Disney for many of the reason and rationality junkies out there.
To the nay-sayers and doubters, the idea of having a dream (a phrase preferably spat out or sneered through) verges on criminal self delusion and puffery.

The intangible what if nature of them seems to fill them with some form of existential dread.

There is no place for dreams in a reasonable world, especially a scientific one and certainly no place for reason in dreams  – so what if Brian ‘Mine’s Hadron Collider’ Cox’s band was called D.Ream. Doesn’t mean he ascribes to them.

The reoccurring theme seems to be that Dreams, like faith, are dangerous things – dark instruments. Dreams obfuscate the real raw nature of our human existence and all of its incumbent challenges, puzzles and conundrums.

The realm of Morpheus is a confection that far from enlightening us is seen as one that diminishes us.

Its almost as if Dreams are flawed in some evolutionary way: rendering us incapable of basic human survival; stupefied by our hazy, twinkle-filled and fantastical view of the world.
A small rummage around the point counter point arguments of, on the one hand, the evolutionary benefits set out in Anttii Revonsuo’s Threat Simulation theory, and Flannagan’s concept of Evolutionary epiphenomena (dreams as a state that lacks any form of adaptive function) on the other clearly inform us that the evolutionary jury’s out on this one.

And the case for Dreams as a scientifically proven improver of our human condition is never helped in the eyes of the scientist by the presence of Dream Catchers and other juvenile voodoo bric a brac in the windows’ of student houses and hippy retreats.

Perhaps the most virulent critics spent one long night too many at college or university pretending to give a crap as the fragile teen sitting opposite them bleated their dream stories in some desperate effort to seem windswept, deep and interesting.

Equally the phrase ‘to follow one’s dreams’ doesn’t help, in that it implies a sheep-like loyalty: a subservience in service of something intangible beyond your control. And we know how rationalists like a smidgen of control. 

Whatever it is that causes the anger and disdain; it is a powerful and quite corrosive emotion.

But, for the Dream believers, Dreams are a way of allowing people to transcend the bleak sharp cornered truths of what is and embrace the brighter potential of what could be. Dreams allow us to rise above the deterministic absolutes of any given situation and envision something better.

Martin Luther King had a dream that succeeded in helping to shift millions of black Americans from a position of sub human species needing to know its place to a powerful ethnic constituency in search of a spiritual homeland and tangible human rights and respect.
I doubt even the fiercest doubters could ridicule or set aside the power of that dream to change lives and human existence for the better in some shape or form.
There is a sense that, in the USA of the 1960s, the political power elites, intellectual tribes, state collectives, regional advocates and community activists all jostling for position on either side of the colour divide would never have convened their mighty voices into that one immutable, immoveable and deafening roar without the focus of that Dream, voiced so eloquently and publicly.

But equally, John Stuart Mill found the idea of galvanising and socialising a nation through a singular collective idyll – an idea or dream of better – was at best childish and naïve and at worst an aggressive act of hubris and societal hegemony – a social tyranny.
He believed in the axiom that ‘man should judge everything in life based upon its ability to promote the greatest individual happiness’.
“the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling is more formidable than many kinds of political oppression …leav[ing] fewer means of escape … and penetrat[ing] more deeply into the details of life. ”The “tendency of society to impose … its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and if possible, prevent the formation of individuality, not in harmony with its ways”

There is a sense in this view that an individual Dream is fine while it is held safe and unsullied in the heart and the mind of an individual. It is a beautiful and highly personal wonder, broadly uncorrupted though perhaps a little influenced by the dreams of others.

(It is worth reminding ourselves that Martin Luther King Jnr. said ‘I have a dream…’; not ‘We have a Dream’. It was his; it just had the potential to move many others within it.)

It seems that while in its unadulterated individual state, that which is most emotionally proximal to its originator, a dream is widely lauded as the profound generator of poetry, music, art and literature.

Yeat’s Cloths of Gold directs the listener to ‘tread gently for you tread on my dreams’. They are presented as the purest, most precious things he has to offer the world.
Mamma Cass’s ‘California Dreaming’ protested a desire for a sunnier brighter life far removed from the cold emotionally bleak east of Fall and Atlantic swells. It is her dream and hers alone: just one that happened to be shared by a generation.

The problem it seems is that when mobilised, industrialised and socialised at scale, a dream becomes The Dream – the Mother of Suppression of the Individual in hot pursuit of the collective good. The Dream quickly becomes the destroyer of intelligent dissent and the brutal editor of different orthodoxies and philosophies that did not quite ‘fit’ ‘The Dream’. It becomes all that John Stuart Mill berated and warned of in his view of one dimensional models of collective happiness as some conjuring trick played on the masses.

Dreams also have an ill-judged and reoccurring tendency of turning up at the very heart of large orgiastic excursions into nationalistic and hubristic megalomania.
Dreams of Empire whether by Georgian and Victorian Britain, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy or the German Third Reich always seem to bear out the truth of Mr Mill’s perception.

To use a singular Dream in this way is to squash the very diversity and healthy human tension the enables us to evolve as a species. Dreams are a recidivist and controlling mechanism that are worthy of deep suspicion.

The pollutant seems (as so often is the case) to be somewhat rooted in what man has done in the name of dreams; not in the condition of dreaming which in itself is a pretty confounding experience. They are after all an axial mechanism of our deepest mind.

Dreams at their most basic level are the powerhouse of our emotional computing.
They are the synaptic equivalent of taking the big data from every facet and corner of our existence and atomically mixing it up with the narrative skills of Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Spielberg and Plato.

Dreams are the super processor of individual human potential.

They are the transcendence mechanism in us – they are the ‘reach’ mechanism that compels us to perhaps stretch beyond what seems immediately possible or probable to test the edges of what could or might be.

Science clearly sets out the power of our sleeping computations in regards to cognitive ability and capacity.

But given their sleep hosted ‘madness’, flaky associations, the abstracted corollaries that exist within them and Freud’s rather particular take on them, it is easy to set Dreams aside as garish hyperemotional gibberish – or reinvent them as some twist of needy or proving self-identification and elevation.

Most people find the sharing of what one dreams an immature act of identity assertion; usually by those who feel there is little social or intellectual mystery or magic about them. Given that it is a habit that one usually hopes dies out with the arrival of slightly greater intellectual and spiritual surety, perhaps the mere sight of the word makes them run for the hills screaming.

There is a theory that dreams exist in the sleep-scapes of REM Rapid Eye Movement and NREM Non Rapid Eye Movement and do so with a very clear function.

It is believed that the process of sleep to encode and transfer data from the temporary memory store in the conscious mind accesses and activated in NREM sleep to the long term memory store in the subconscious mind accessed and activated in REM sleep – and the continual activation of this flow is what stimulates dreams. So in that way they are a robust and meaningful process of our body science and an enricher of our more adaptive cognition.

It is not just the science of the brain that frames the arguments and beliefs around dreams and their role.

Human history and the texts of the ancients are riddled with expansive philosophical treatise and frameworks. From the ancient Mesopotamians, Chinese, Upanishads, and Babylonians, to the Egyptians Greeks and Romans, the powerful nature of dreams have always held a deep and profound place in our collective social memory.

In some ways perhaps the truth of Dreams lies as with many things somewhere between the two; at the point at which these two distinct perspectives overlap and stitch together; neither being the predominant force but both represented as balanced and weighted in a perfect symmetry with each other. This duality might offer us a more productive way forwards.

Gramsci invites us to apply Pessimism of the Intellect and Optimism of the Will in all things. Perhaps this is the filter through which we should view Dreams and everything to do with them in regards to the ambition of transforming the more toxic desires of the average consumer.

Certainly in regards to the Dream word being used as a way to frame the spiritual social and material vision of a more sustainable form of consumption, Gramsci’s invitation would help balance the two dimensions.
The pessimistic Intellect – the science – interrogating the truths of how we engineer and support these more sustainable lifestyles while the optimistic Spirit – the philosophical – compels a more transcendent human nature be applied at every opportunity – a higher human purpose that might take everyday humanity beyond the impenetrable science and just doing enough to scrape through.
This would liberate the word and the language around it to be both rooted in the deep science that will be required to reinvent our standard forms of consumption and yet elevated by the optimism of a collective human endeavour lived in real time in the real world.

And perhaps if we liberated the word – set it free from the shackles of an Either/Or model of determinative application we might find something richer and more human again in Dreams.

If perhaps we also recognised that in regards to visionary models of human consumption, Dreams can be nuanced, shaded and culturally meaningful even at a meta level.

In the Dream In A Box initiatives undertaken so far we already have 5 Shades of Dream – Emerging; Latent; Resurgent; Extant; Evolving – starting to reveal themselves in regards to formulating desirable and enduring lifestyles of consumption.

I am certain that more will present themselves before we are finished.

So here’s to those turbulent, intangible, flaky, studenty, inspirational, nation-shaping, scientist irritating things called Dreams.

If for nothing else they should be considered eminently remarkable purely on the basis that they can elicit so much passionate debate and discourse purely by their mention.

As long as each Dream is considered on its merit – not on some preconceived concept of what it does not fulfil, or on some etymological witch hunt dressed up as rigour and realism we’ll perhaps be fine. Until then…

As Stephen Tyler sang: ‘Dream On’

Man vs. Breakfast & A New American Dream-like-Breakfast-Burrito-thing-kinda.

03 Saturday May 2014

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Bacon, Bagel & Lox, Breakfast, Burrito, Celebrity, China Dream, Christ In Concrete, Cornbread, Dr Suess, Dream In A Box, fast Food, Food As Fuel, Grapes Of Wrath, Grits, Ham, Hollywood, Identity, Immigrant nation, industrial farming, Jerry Springer, Midwest Farmers, Motor City, Native Americans, New York, Occidental College, Over Easy, Peggy Liu, people Powered Behaviour Change, Pietro Donato, Reframing the Language of Sustainability, Reimagining Prosperity, Route 66, Sam I Am, Sausage patties, Skyscrapers, Steak & Eggs, Steinbeck, Sunny Side Up, TEDx, the American Dream, The Great American Song&StoryBook, The Great Depression, The US Constitution, water stewardship

sir grapefellow

Someone was going to do it. Someone was always going to think it was a good idea to eventually bite the bullet and look the

frickinfrackinlipsmackinallbeefpattyonasesameseed

sunnysideupfried4wheeldriveovenbakedstuffedcrust

justlovinitgasandoilmeupandputmytrash

intheringerjerryspringer                                                                                      

beast of the all consuming American Dream in the eye and say Whoa buddy! No buddy. The time’s they are a changin’.

Someone was always going to go to the dark heart of what has got us all junked up on toxic fantasies of infinite everything and stick a sign on its door that simply says ‘obsolete’.

On March 29th 2014, Peggy Liu of JUCCCE and a fellowship of like minds found themselves doing just that at TEDx Occidental. They had an inaugural ‘You are Here!’moment. A first step towards pouring some cool crystal waters on the seemingly unquenchable fires of the old American Dream.

Peggy gave a deeply-felt entreat for why we might ever choose to set about re-imagining something as unwieldy as the American concept of Prosperity. It’s not just a big challenge. I’d say more planet-sized and very very defensive, aggressive and grumpy.

I understand the power of the ambition and how it could shift more paradigms towards improved human existence than we could reasonably count. But the biggest thing for me is – Where the hell would we begin?

Where do we start the journey to a more enduring aspiration for every American? Especially given how entrenched, sprawling and absolutist the old Dream has become and how resilient its ability to seduce still is.

Where do we even begin in unpacking the old one to get to the new? The Constitution? Hollywood? Skyscrapers? Motor City? Fast Food? Celebrity? Route 66? The great American Song book? Jerry Springer’s underwear drawer? the NRA?

The first stage of the Dream in a Box methodology that I developed with Peggy imagines that you will need to include all of them – the more diverse the collection of mindsets, values beliefs, ambitions, truths, myths, inspirations and provocations the better. The Frame The Dream stage actively encourages them.

The Frame The Dream stage endeavours to explore and curate the most diverse cultural levers – beliefs, insights, idioms, visualisations and language – in such a way as to identify some themes or ideas – something human and everyday – that might help can-open the topic in a productive creative and constructive manner. Because you’re going to need a super simple ‘something’ – a word, a thing, a ritual, a truth, an insight, a moment –  that helps everyone to make a very complex thing simple and engaging.

And given that the American Dream sprawls across a collision of cultures, tribes, myths, histories, lifestyles and beliefs all wrapped in a star spangled constitution, it needs to be a ‘something’ that is both broadly representative and quite singular at the same time.

Your ‘something’ will need to be representative of what is, informative of what can be, and illustrative and what might be.

Furthermore, the Dream In A Box methodology is constructed for and committed to making sure that whatever that ‘something’ might be, that it is culturally rooted and relevant – inextricable from the society it is supposed to grow out of.

So lets just cat’s paw around what that might demand of the ‘something’ that might give us a starting point in this journey.

Well, we’d need a ‘something’ that sits at the heart of every American movie, myth and icon, written into the Great American Songbook; something that builds skyscrapers; with its toes in the red-earth of the native and its fingers touching the craters on the Moon; something that stands as an inalienable right of every American and sits at the heart of the great American pioneering spirit would be great; something that feeds the soul and raises a barn; tells you you’re Home and reassures you when you’re away. And hell while we’re at it let’s expect that it has to be a something that is as much of the Corn Belt as it is of the Montana Mountaineer, New England Fisherman and the Mexican ranch worker. It’s got to be quick slow big small light n heavy. As happy on the front seat of the Caddy as it is on the Stoop.

If it is to help inspire the beginnings of re-imagination and the multiple strands that would need to fall out of that, the ‘something’ needs to be multi-talented – a prop, a firework a lever and a pulley. It has to inspire as much as it deconstructs, elevate to the same degree that it mines, and unify as much as divides.

What’s more, to do that authentically and with meaning it has to have an authentic people-powered everyday language of its own; authentically written through the cultural vernacular of the tribes and lives we are trying to inspire. It must enable us to mine insights; and help us ask the right questions by being something that people talk of without ‘side’.

Most importantly the ‘something’ must come from a happy place – be something that people engage with easily and on which they will happily venture an reasoned opinion.

It has to be something people look forwards to, love, fetishise, pore over, chill with, feel protective of, and loyal to; a powerful signature of their identity and a seamless pillar in their everyday

Only a ‘something’ like that will allow us to exit the Glass Half empty world of mitigation and reduction and allows us to enter the Glass half full world of celebration and aspiration.

So no pressure then.

With all of that in mind, my starter for ten against that small list of needs based criteria: my small suggestion for the room.

Re-imagining The Great American Breakfast

The Breakfast of champions – the Great American Breakfast – legendary output of every diner from Montana to New Mexico and Mississippi, via NYC to LA and Chicago and back.

Movies are written around it. Pictures painted of it. Love is made both before it and after it. Lives complete themselves through it. What fuels the Dream? Oil? Wheat? Gold? Nickel? Gas? Perhaps. Breakfast? Always.

Hash browns, three eggs sunny side up or over easy. Sausage patties. Hickory smoked bacon, grits, cornbread, beans, breakfast burrito, Bagel Lox and cheese, 3 egg omelette, steak and eggs. The list is endless. And it comes fast and it comes big. All in or on the side. This is the corner stone of the old pioneer/engineer/farmer America.

Railways may well have been built upon the idea that a businessman in Chicago could eat a fresh caught Maine Lobster for supper in the dining carriage on his way to San Francisco!! But the railways were forged around the great American breakfast (with an Irish & Chinese twist to be fair).

Big dreams are built on big breakfasts in the land of plenty. Scrawny beaten underfed workers don’t build dreams.

So I say if we’re going to re-imagine the American Dream and build a new one – lets start with the right breakfast.

If we’re going to show how a glass-half-full approach allows us to re-imagine something people will turn towards as opposed to away from – lets use the great American breakfast as an illustration of how we move from hectoring and depressing mitigation strategies of more sustainable living plans – relentlessly obsessing on energy and emission reduction, recycle reuse mantras, calorific intake and portion control – to one of celebration.

We love the Great American Breakfast as the foundation on which American Dreams are built. Every great American breakfast type was built and fit for calorific contextual and cultural purpose. It is deeply etched with physiological and psychological truths.

In sustainability, CSR and responsible living terms the breakfast is a road that can lead us to everything – diet; wellbeing; performance; healthcare; social cohesion; myths and rituals; provenance; water stewardship; energy consumption; land crop and livestock management; logistics; pulp, paper & card packaging; pretty much everything.

We could potentially use the popular people-powered culture of the great American breakfast to start to unpack the old dream to shape a new one based around a more enduring aspiration built of people sized values, not corporate sized imperatives. We could start to see that Green Eggs & ham Sam I Am is a far more productive and sociable lever to get everyday people into talking nutrition, ethics, provenance, traceability, consumer bullying, and the caprices of 6-foot tall Cat In a rather special hat and its role in the Great American Child’s dietary intake!

Let’s use its role in the American Dream to frame the American Breakfast as a fluid concept rooted at the very heart of an individuals concept of Prosperity

Use smart savvy storytelling to go on a journey – show why the vast expanse and sometimes behemoth portions sizes of the American breakfast have evolved; its scale and purpose fuelled both by the original immigrant poor seeking the world where they would never put an empty plate in front of their child or scratch another breakfast again – like the Italian Immigrant Construction workers building the skyscrapers of New York in Pietro Donato’s book, Christ In Concrete. Or the transient and vagrant farming poor of the Midwest walking through the flatlands of the Great depression and the pages of The Grapes Of Wrath. Lets celebrate those reasons for being, not throw stones at them.

Lets look at the breakfast culture of the German and Dutch farmers and their substantial daily foundations of steak cheese and eggs, The lox and cheese of the New York Jewish disapora and the Bear Claw pastry commute. let’s get us some of that Southern grits soul of a Cat On A Hot Breakfast Roll Baking Tin Roof and the sleepy spice of a barrio breakfast burrito signorito.

Why?

Because the Great American Breakfast could be the doorway into scaling the conversation – through stimulating the myths and storytelling of individuals and their relationships with their breakfast.

We can introduce the joy of collaborating across the social networks to co-create the Great American Breakfast of the 21st Century – what is it made up of? Who’s represented in there? Is their a hybrid? How do we socialize around it? Use it as a lever to open up the deeper insights of being belonging and thriving.

In scoping a new model for what the great American people need right now, for how they live and work – framed in terms of dietary needs (energy/nutrition/format), wellbeing, balance, speed of life, community and identity – we can start to engage in conversations around calorific intake, obesity, balanced diet, fuel vs. flavor, provenance, quality as a proxy for resilience, and the role of tribes and communities in reshaping the new dream of prosperity without starting with the don’t do this eat less of that, trash fewer of these, torch less of those and stop frackin that speech.

A chat about the Great American Breakfast as a metaphor for the joy, wellbeing, balance and thriving ecosystem of interrelatedness and mutuual respect of all things good at the heart of the New American Dream just might Switch them on and not turn them off.

DISCUSS (over breakfast perhaps?)

 

 

Dodgy Dumplings, Celebrity Mystery Shopper & a new food culture revolution.

09 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

Behaviour Change, China, China Dream, Cultural Revolution, Dumplings, F&B Supply Chain Management, Food Hygiene, Food provenance, H7N9 bird flu virus, JUCCCE, Mystery Shopper, New Ways To Eat, Peggy Liu, Pigs In The Horse Meat, Risk Mitigation, Smarter Lighter Living, Xi Jingping

Image

Having listened on many occasions to Peggy Liu (my partner in all things Dream In A Box and the powerhouse behind The China Dream) speak on the worrying nature of diet and the often questionable quality and provenance of food sold in some Chinese eateries, a small article in The Economist* last week made my heart give a little (non-ischaemic) jump.

Not only did the article report on the feel-good factor of a people-powered ‘first’: that of the president of the People’s Republic turning up unannounced in a local Beijing eatery. it may also potentially provide a playful answer to the huge challenges around regulating for better food and restaurant hygiene in China.

And that answer is? The Mystery Shopper. The one time secret-police of the Sales Promotion industry and their FMCG clients in the late ‘70s and ‘80s could just hold the key – especially if that Mystery Shopper is none other than Xi Jingping

That is an opportunity for a celebrity endorsement you wouldn’t want to screw up. A gift horse one would wish to neither look in the mouth nor find in one’s noodle soup.

The chance that you might still be peddling some old bits of shoe in batter just at the moment the esteemed leader enters your establishment would leave you with more than just Foo Yung egg slice on your face and a few apologies to make.

it would leave purveyors of such culinary delights as slow roasted ‘plucked floating from river’ foul in much the same circumstance as they found the bird in question; quite dead in the water – commercially, legally and personally. The loss of face that would accompany such an unmasking would be immeasurable in a culture that holds honour in such great esteem.

Whether the possibility of it would be enough to dissuade the many sellers of the likes of steamed dumplings stuffed with (used) newspaper soaked in a rather tasty rice vinegar; and pork buns filled with abstract species of every kind other than the porcine variety is uncertain.

But I imagine they would do more than think twice about serving up these mutant delicacies if they feared that Mr Xi might turn up in their lunch time queue unannounced any time soon.

Equally, the reverse impacts along their (loosely phrased) ‘supply chains’ would be of benefit to everyone in terms of eating experiences, food hygiene and a more regulated and heavily scrutinised food industry and culture generally.

To instil a blanket terror in every dodgy dumpling merchant would in fairness require little of the leader. He only need turn up once or twice in the four corners of the Republic: and ensure that the media cover following each appearance was massive.  After that he could simply hire 20 or so unnamed Look-a-likes who could pop up randomly in distant eateries while Xingping remained safely tucked away doing slightly more important things like running China.

There is also something quite apropos about a method once reserved for checking up on whether CTN owners, grocers and Wholesalers had put up snack and soft drink sales promotional literature potentially revolutionising food culture at a mass scale in such a high-profile culture.

That mystery Shopper could from such low beginnings rise to the challenge of solving one of the greatest food crimes ever knowingly undertaken by so few against so many, would indeed constitute a sublime example of conceptual social mobility in a culture once renowned for championing the rise of great leaders from humble beginnings.

So, here’s to the inception of Chinese Celebrity Mystery Shopper and a food revolution.

JUCCCE China Dream FOOTNOTE:

  • CLEAN & SERENE – To activate safe food, JUCCCE is working with Ecolab, a company that works in restaurant hygiene and clean water supply, and a local design firm called Impact Group to publish and distribute a guide for “Top 10 tips for Safe and Healthy Restaurants”.
  • YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT – created a New Way to Eat program – melds new nutritional guidelines with low impact foods – convening senior global coalition of nutritionalists and sustainable agricultural experts to develop new guidelines – create school curriculum in YK Pao and YCIS schools, and tasty, sustainable and nutritious school meals with Eurest.
  • JUCCE are developing a NWTE programme with WEFer David Agus (author of “End of Illness”) that is “Good for you, Good for the planet”.

* Original Economist Article – A New Flavour. Xi Jingping gets down with the people.

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