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At the boundary between East Harlem and Carnegie Hill, my class and I were challenged with creating a food pharmacy that could fuse the needs of two communities, while keeping in mind the imposing problems of gentrification in respect to novelty creation. I saw this assignment as a challenge to further what a food pharmacy could be by incorporating functional medicine. To tackle this challenge, I proposed the creation of a holistic food pharmacy: a new institution that would teach individuals about preventative and alternative medicine through collapsed programming. This would address concerns (like inflammation and high blood pressure) by providing in-depth descriptions for each supplement, along with employees who can offer additional guidance to the public. The primary objective of this component is to distribute knowledge of functional medicine to those that may not have the means to attain it otherwise. Functional medicine doctors are in a lucrative domain rarely covered by insurance, some charging upwards of $750 an hour. The hope is to reconnect people with nature and natural medicine by creating a space that facilitates education and encourages stasis in an intriguing environment that echoes this educational ambition.
The food pharmacy would accept prescriptions from doctors, which would hopefully be covered by insurance, acknowledging food as a viable option for preventative and allopathic treatment. Although preventative and more holistic approaches to health tend to not be covered by insurance, we would accept all forms of government-subsidized payments, incorporating the practices of GrowNYC, and hopefully work in tandem with them.
The design of the space is heavily informed by collapsed programming, where goods are complemented by their supplement form, along with other supplements that achieve similar outcomes. For instance, the various forms of turmeric: raw, capsule, tea, and powder would all be housed in the same area. This would allow the individual to explore all forms of the supplement, whether it comes from raw produce, a pill, powder, or whatever best suits their needs and lifestyle.
The first space, devoted to produce, is especially influenced by this collapsed programming. Further, a more traditional pharmacy will cater to the customer’s Big Pharma needs while also providing over-the-counter remedies and their natural counterparts. The customer would then file into the non-perishable area. This area would be organized by a bulk goods system that will hopefully offset the organic costs by providing wholesale items and thereby mitigating marketing surcharges. Following this, a section of fresh and frozen refrigerators will be used to hold other food groups, as well as small, fresh meals and juices. Finally, before checkout, a bar would display various supplements from throughout the space, with an emphasis on those that target prominent health concerns in East Harlem, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease.
Should one not have the time to go through the holistic food pharmacy, a food pantry will offer an array of prepped meal-boxes that target different populations with a window to the outside where people can stop by and purchase the box.
From conceptualization to production, Sarah Luna Van Arsdale engages in a multifaceted approach to design that is informed by a dual-track curriculum at Parsons School of Design and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School (BAFA).
Through Religious Studies, Art History, and Philosophy, Sarah Luna hopes to acquire an understanding of how the world thinks, understands, and communicates, allowing for the creation of environments that honor the local vernacular of the population they serve. Studying within the realm of constructed environments, she became curious as to how environments aid in the transference of wisdom and the creation of connection and belonging. This experimental approach to design seeks to better understand the evolution of human consciousness and how design molds and plays off of this evolution. The culmination of Sarah Luna’s studies at Lang will be the dissection of the tangible elements of sacred spaces, while her capstone at Parsons will be centered around the creation of non-denominational, sacred/contemplative spaces for the spiritually curious.