LinYee Yuan grew up in Houston, Texas, the daughter of a Chinese engineer and a dietician. In high school, she sneaked out to sit with the librarian at a local community college and read magazines. She graduated from Columbia University in 2002 with a degree in Asian American studies, bounced through a streetwear company and a magazine about Asian-American culture, then landed at Core77, an industrial design website, where she traveled the world covering design festivals. Somewhere along the way, she also opened a Texas-style brisket restaurant at a Brooklyn flea market.
It was at Core77 that Yuan discovered the emerging world of food design — refrigerators that alert you when food is about to spoil, edible packaging made from seaweed, projects that treated the food system as a set of design problems with creative solutions. In 2012, she encountered a UN statistic that stopped her in her tracks: if we continue to produce and consume food the way we do now, we will essentially run out by 2030. That terrifying prediction gave her project its organizing principle. In 2013, she launched thisismold.com — a blog about food and design that even her friends found confusing. "What is food design?" they asked. "I don't understand how this poster is food design."
Yuan decided the most effective way to explain her interpretation of food design was to create a design object. In 2017, she launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a biannual print magazine. She raised over $37,000 — most of it from strangers around the world. The art direction, by Eric Hu and Matt Tsang from the worlds of fashion and architecture, produced something that looked nothing like a food magazine and everything like a design journal: visually provocative, thematically rigorous, and organized by scale from micro to macro. Issue one covered the microbiome. Issue two, objects for the table. Issue three, food waste. Issue four, the human senses. Issue five, seeds. The sixth and final print issue will address soil.
The name itself was a manifesto. "In industrial design, a mold is an object that gives things a new form," Yuan explained. "In food production, mold is an agent for change — it's how we get things like cheese. We turn what's old into something fortifying and delicious. I think my magazine does the same thing, except with ideas." MOLD was named one of the Futures 100 Innovators by The Future Laboratory in 2022. Yuan, now an adjunct professor at Parsons, has since launched Field Meridians, a Brooklyn-based artist collective creating tools for ecological resilience in Crown Heights. The magazine that began with a UN statistic and a brisket pit has become one of the most original publications about food in the world — because it was never really about food. It was always about design, systems, and the question of whether nine billion people can be fed without destroying the planet that feeds them.
Explore MOLD at <a href="https://thisismold.com/" target="\_blank">thisismold.com