TED Talks Daily - What does poverty look like on a plate? | Huiyi Lin

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

TED Fellow and economic policy researcher Huiyi Lin is cocreator of "The Poverty Line," an art project examining poverty through the lens of food. By photographing the daily food choices of people living at the poverty line in 38 countries and territories around the world, Lin shines a light on the problem of poverty in a way no policy report ever could. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet-black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. In case nobody's told you,

weight loss goes beyond the old just eat less and move more narrative, and that's where Felix comes in. Felix is redefining weight loss for Canadians with a smarter, more personalized approach to help you crush your health goals this year. Losing weight is about more than diet and exercise. It can also be about our genetics, hormones, metabolism. Felix connects you with online licensed health care practitioners who understand that everybody

is different and compare your healthy lifestyle with the right support to reach your goals. Start your visit today at Felix.caca. That's felix.ca. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hulme. Today's talk is from our brand new batch of 2024 Ted Fellows films adapted for podcasts just for our TED Talks daily listeners. Ted's fellowship supports a network of global innovators and we're so excited to share their work with you. Today, we'd like you to meet visual artist and poverty researcher Hui Lin. Hui found a way to show what poverty looks like in a provocative way that then

led to global responses. She sheds light on how she showed what it means to be poor and the huge conversation it generated about the way we live and the way we see each other. After we hear from her, stick around for her conversation with TED Fellows program director Lily James Olds. It's all coming up. Poverty is really linked to so many things in life. Because it is not just an economic phenomena, it's not just a social phenomena. It's an individual and a family. It's at the base of really what it means to be human

and how we think about human rights. My name is Huiyi Lin. I'm an artist with Chao and Lin. I've been creating a project called The Poverty Line for the past 14 years with my partner, Stefan Chao. I calculated the per person per day rate of the national poverty line in China.

We then went to the local markets to purchase food items with that amount of money. Stefan photographed the food on local newspapers, showing what poverty looks like on a plate. The poverty line tries to understand and look at a very simple question. What does it mean to be poor? We're looking at it from the angle of food choices, which would be available for somebody living at the poverty line of a country. When we talk about choices, we also need to understand the scope in which we are able to make choices. And that really

changes the way that we can behave, the way that we relate to each other, the way that we see each other, and the way that we can work together. When we first created the project, we didn't even know what it was. It was kind of just a way of communicating between the two of us, a way of extending that discussion about what poverty means. But when we started releasing the photographs online and we saw reactions coming from people in the US, from people in Europe and people in Russia,

and then later on, only much later on, people in China themselves, whether it was right, whether it was too little, whether it looks good, whether it looks fresh, whether it wasn't as what they expected. We found that different people had different responses to the same set of photographs, and it was very strange, it was really unexpected.

There is no policy report I could have ever written that would have generated this kind of response. For me, that was supposed to be a very objective way of looking at poverty, but yet, it became very subjective in the way that people connected and felt emotional or very deeply personal about the food they were presenting. We all had reactions basically to food because it is a daily unifying human ritual.

That kind of very visceral, instinctive reaction was something that surprised me but later on became a very meaningful part of how their work engages people. So we expanded the concept to different places. We photographed what daily food choices at the poverty line looks like all over the world and we ultimately covered 38 countries and territories across its continents. Poverty is at the base of many issues that we see today and it will also be affected by many of the trends that we see in climate change, in conflict, in migration and many crises whether man-made or natural. Our photographs don't change that but they do prompt conversations. The poverty line images have sparked policy

conversations and prompted new research. Working in policy or working in economic frameworks, there is a tendency to look at the broad strokes, at the macro view, but it really depends on what is the local context. And it's not something in the hands of somebody else. It really is the next person beside us, the people in our own communities. We need to understand that we are all part

of the same system and we all play a role in it. The poverty line is really about bridging the gaps in our understanding, making us very curious, also motivated to want to understand more. Because there's so many things which really bind us together and that really changes how we view the world, how we view decision making,

and how we view the world, how we view decision-making, and how we view the people around us. And now, a special conversation between TED fellow Hui Lin and TED Fellows program director Lily James Olds. Welcome, Hui Yi. Thank you very much, Thuy. So, I should explain for listeners who haven't seen your work yet that your photographs feature specific amounts of certain foods sitting against a backdrop of newspapers from the different countries you're highlighting.

How did you and Stefan come up with the idea of photographing what poverty looks like on a plate? How did you decide which foods and which locations to spotlight in this project? So, Stefan and I, we are from Singapore. We've been based in Beijing since 2008. Stefan has lived in New York, and we've both traveled to different countries and places

through different parts of our lives. And we kind of came very curious and very concerned as well about the development issues that we're seeing in different countries. And we realized that poverty and inequality is in every society, but it presents itself in very different ways. It also arises in very different conditions. And from myself, coming from an economics background, I was very curious about how it's actually defined. And I realized that it's actually very much dependent on different countries' social expectations, political inclinations, as well as economic resources. And each country, each government has a different way of defining poverty,

and therefore, after that, setting poverty alleviation policies. And we decided that we really wanted to understand for ourselves what it means to be poor. And basically we assembled like a local food basket of food choices. And that for us really translated into a very tangible understanding of what poverty means in terms of food choices. And when we first took the photographs of the food items, we placed it against the newspaper of the day because the newspaper later we realized it just gives a very factual understanding also about the time and place that we were in. And, you know, in terms of selecting countries to go to, basically for the project, we also

decided that we would try to use the same methodology and bring it to wherever we could, which was also very much a matter of opportunity on where we could go for work or for our own personal trips. And we gradually built it up over the years. Wow. And your photos are really striking in their simplicity. I'm curious why you both chose this very minimalist style to represent such a complex issue like poverty.

We found that food has a certain way of connecting people. Maybe it also has a connection with what we went through during our childhoods, when our family went through certain difficult times. And the simplicity of the visual, I think, allows us to really associate with the commonalities that we have in terms of food, in terms of the newspapers, because these are very much items that people of all strata of society will kind of recognize to a certain extent. I think that kind of builds us into a position of empathy.

And hopefully from there, then we have a way of broadening the conversation. I love that. In some ways, what you're saying is the simplicity sort of allows more people in to connect to the work in that way. What was one of the most surprising things you learned doing this project and research? We kind of often assume that poverty is visible. But as we carried out a project and as we went to different countries with different definitions of poverty, we found that it's sometimes actually really hard to tell who is living at the poverty line,

especially in high-income economies and developed countries. You may be working, you may be educated, but there is a class of working poor. At the end of the day, it's about the choices that we have in life and the limitations of who has those choices and what kind of choices we're making on a daily basis. That's really interesting. I think it's so common that we can jump to thinking of it as it's on the shoulders of an individual instead of really looking at the structural inequality. And I think there's something really fascinating about how your photographs

showcase that. You know, it's fascinating that your background is in economic policy development. As an artist myself, I'm such a proponent of the ways that the skills of an artist are applicable to so many different industries and professions. Can you talk a bit about how your art and policy perspectives and training support one another?

Yes, I do come from developing economic policies. And I think in that role, I used to be thinking of issues maybe more on a macro perspective and trying to build solutions with a multi-stakeholder setup, also kind of being exposed to working with different disciplines and agencies and so on. And I think that kind of built a good foundation. But yet in the real world, I think that as far as we try to build solutions, there are very definitely as well gaps that really impact on the ground and impact people on a day-to-day basis.

And there are issues that really statistics and policy papers cannot adequately communicate as you try to engage a wider audience to understand and develop these solutions. So I think from that perspective, the art that I seek to do is really about connecting and engaging people in a way which is trying to bridge the perspective of a macro view, but at the same time also understanding what it is like from a very human perspective and affecting change on the ground. And I think good art really connects those different points and brings us into a different way

of really looking at the issue and looking at the people who are involved and the implications and raises more questions people who are involved and the implications and raises more questions that we can try to work on. Yeah, I love that. It really gets at something personal and in terms of psychology and emotion and just beyond the data and the numbers,

which can seem very cold when looking at them. OK, so at this point, audiences from around the world have encountered this project of yours, and it's even now in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. What has been the impact of this project for you, and what do you think the impact has been in the world, on the culture?

We are still working on broadening the impact and hopefully engaging with more audiences with it. Being in a printed room collection of MoMa is really something we didn't expect, but having platforms like these really expands the outreach that we have and brings it into an institutional platform with audiences from all around the world. And what we really hope is that we are building conversations. We're building empathy through commonalities and making also people realize that we are living

within systems, systems of production, of trade, and the cultures that we live in, in a way very much seen from our own perspective of the environments that we're in, in the countries that we're from, but they are all connected. You know, it's about building a perspective that the problem is not about others.

It's not something which is far away from ourselves, but it's really within the communities that we live in. Absolutely, I love that. And what's the next topic or theme you're interested in exploring in your art? So one of the projects that we started in 2021, and that was in the midst of the pandemic, it's called The Conversation. So basically, Chow and Lin is a partnership between Stephen Chow and myself,

and we are husband and wife, we are also parents to two young children, and we are working together as an artistic duo. Certainly during a time like the pandemic, I think we reflected a lot upon ourselves, about who we are trying to be, about what the future may bring or may not. And we reflected very much about the idea of impermanence, about memories, about perceptions, also vulnerability and the imperfection of being human. And with the passing of time, certainly we are an interactive medium in which we ourselves form our viewpoints and project ourselves on the world. So we hope that this will be a long-term project for us

for the next 40 years of our lives. And that kind of brings in a certain introspection into the art and into ourselves. That's so beautiful. So finally, if someone listening is interested in diving deeper on these topics, what resources would you recommend to them? So one of our early inspirations is a book called Poor Economics. It's by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, who are professors in economics in MIT.

So their book and their lifetime research is really based on few work that they've done in poor communities and households to understand how the poor really think and make decisions. And I think in understanding more about poverty, about how solutions for poverty can be developed, the Poor Economics Book really brought together a lot of very important research and ideas on decision making about policy implications. Thank you so much, Hoi. It's been such a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you so much, Hui. It's been such a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you very much, Lily.

That was Hui Lin, a 2024 TED Fellow. To learn more about the TED Fellows program and watch all of the TED Fellows films, go to fellows.ted.com. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar.

It was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezo. I'm Elise Hue. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening. In case nobody's told you, weight loss goes beyond the old just eat less and move more narrative, and that's where Felix comes in. Felix is redefining weight loss for Canadians with a smarter, more personalized approach to help you crush your health goals this year.

Losing weight is about more than diet and exercise. It can also be about our genetics, hormones, metabolism. Felix connects you with online licensed healthcare practitioners who understand that everybody is different and compare your healthy lifestyle with the right support to reach your goals. Start your visit today at felix.ca.

That's f-e-l-i-x dot c-a. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS are later required.

Charge time and actual results will vary.