Ever since limes and sauerkraut were discovered as cures and preventatives for scurvy in the 18th century, food has been leveraged as a powerful tool for preventing disease and advancing health. In the 20th century, supplemented foods - adding iodine to sale, boosting milk with vitamin D, even adding fluoride to public water systems - created huge public health benefits, turning the ubiquity of mass-consumed foodstuffs to prevent common diseases.

How might we reimagine online grocery services to be healthy by design? We wanted to explore this question, so we challenged a team of graduate students from the Master of Human-Computer Interaction and Design program at the University of Washington, to create a speculative service design. The result: Social Grocer.

“The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people ‘we should get together!’ before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out,” writes Olga Khazan in her article “The Friendship Paradox” for The Atlantic. Khazan delves into a recently published study in which 6,000 American adults were surveyed about their friendships, which showed that the loneliness epidemic that we’ve all been hearing about is actually quite complex.