Food Futures

Maja Kuzmanović & Nik Gaffney

Featuring three tasting menus exploring the relationships between food, health, and the environment through Four Archetypal Futures. Situated, served, and savoured in Scotland, Malta, and Belgium.

The menus were co-created with Maja Kuzmanović, Nik Gaffney, Rasa Alksnyte, Tim Boykett, Tina Auer, Johannes Buch, Natalie Debono, Ginny Hunter, Michka Mélo, Kurt Micallef, Greta Muscat Azzopardi, Letta Shtohryn, and Pieter de Wel. Including notes on Foodscapes, Foodprints, Food, Futures and Food Futures for the Late Lab, Future Fictions, and Tasting Tomorrow.

To the continued intensification of taste!

Exotic foods, delicate and exaggerated presentation, lively colours, re-localised tastes, enhanced foods, and the importance of branding. Sampling a world enthralled by scale and spectacle, where organic agriculture is industrialised, the “free market” reigns, and tastebud stimulation is big business.

"Continued growth" is the "official" view of the future of all modern governments, educational systems, and organizations. The purpose of government, education, and all aspects of life in the present and recent past, is to build a vibrant economy, and to develop the people, institutions, and technologies to keep the economy growing and changing, forever.
Jim Dator Confident and self-congratulatory, here’s a toast to the continued growth of food and food systems, possibly situated in an EcoIkeaWorld Canteen.

Edinburgh, Scotland

Cold & coloured. Beetroot and blue cheese tart paired with peaty Scotch whisky.

Valetta, Malta

Rejuvenation. Water, water, water, water
Antioxidants. Crisp with microgreens, faux snail eggs, chia, and stracchino
Eternal youth. Nori chips with green tea quail eggs
Superjuice. Water flavoured with wheat grass, barley grass, alfa alfa, spirulina, chlorella and moringa
Cardiac jelly. Water, red wine, agar agar, stevia
Broad spectrum antidepressant. Dark chocolate, milk chocolate, currants, red wine
Botox serum. Coconut chocolate, coconut milk

Hasselt, Limburg

Golden fruit & veg. Banana, parsley, vegetable crisps
Limburg sushi. Blue potato, asparagus
Vegetable jello. Sweet corn, peas, pepper
Rainbow pasta salad. Spirelli, food colouring, orange, okra
“Green” tea. Lemongrass, lemon, stevia

May you understand your limits and eat within them!

Wholesome foods focused on nutritional value, food as medicine, certification bureaucracy, short supply chains, C2C, and wild foods. Tastes from a world where humanity has begun enforcing a culture of managed descent.

"Discipline", or a "Disciplined Society" […] often arises when people feel that "continued economic growth" is either undesirable or unsustainable […] as we run out of cheap and easily available energy resources and/or because of the choking contamination of our planet by the wastes of our industrial processes.
Jim Dator Here’s a speech calling for a more disciplined approach to food, health and the environment, as illustrated in the Wake for the Rain.

Edinburgh, Scotland

Warm & liquid. Wild garlic soup paired with water and Prosecco
Familiar & nourishing. Seasonal vegetable shepherd’s pie paired with Leann Fraoch (Heather Ale)

Valetta, Malta

Sacramental spirit. Mezcal, wild fennel, pomegranate
Botanical offering. Aloe vera, coconut water
Saliva invocation. Goat yoghurt, cucumber, sumac, coriander, rosemary, dehydrated olives
Desert rain. Freeze-dried broccoli, popped amaranth
Water wafer. Nopal, lime

Hasselt, Limburg

Wholesome bite. Witlof, potatoes, cheese
Autumn velouté. Pumpkin, sweet potato, smoked paprika
Spoonful of fertility. Grains, seeds, chanterelles
Whole Earth Sandwich. Bread, beetroot, celeriac, chickpeas

To survival! Let’s go down partying...

Waste as food, fermentation and preservation, antibiotic resistance, starvation and decadence, mock meat, insects, pre-modern hunter-gathering, and nose-to-tail diets. A whiff of collapse from a world decimated by resource wars, where industrial food systems broke down, agribusiness failed, and humanity must live with unintended consequences.

There may be many and different reasons that people fear (or hope for?) collapse: economic, environmental, resource, moral, ideological, or a failure of will or imagination."Collapse" from some cause or another (or their combination) and either to extinction or to a "lower" stage of "development" than it currently is.
Jim Dator For example: Collapse of industrial agriculture does not have to be the end of the world. In a Pirate Potluck new tastes are discovered in the most unexpected places.

Edinburgh, Scotland

Intense & strange. Potato skins and Shony seaweed, sprayed with tomato chutney and some pungent, salty, and umami dust, paired with BrewDog’s Cocoa Psycho beer.

Valetta, Malta

Smoked butter. Hazelnuts, pine nuts, almonds, feral cow butter, wild rye bread
Pirate mapo. Tofu, harissa, olives, dried apricots, wild garlic and onion, dry bread
Fish-slime congee. Rice, dulse, shiso, sesame, soy, vegetable skins
Black snack. Dehydrated black bananas, apricots
Clandestine sweets. Dates, coffee, cardamom, carob (Leila)

Hasselt, Limburg

Potato peel chips. Potato peel, truffle oil, seaweed
Fermented mushrooms. Button mushrooms, herbs
Smoked fungus juice. Fermentation liquid, root vegetables, honey, smoke
Mock worms in seaweed salt. Baby anchovy, seaweed
Food supplement. Spirulina

To food, well-being, the environment, and your health, nazdravlje!

Disruptive innovation of food systems, playfulness, DIY, flavour pairing, food science, food forests, micro-supply chains, feral trade, ultra-boutique products, “astro-gastro”. Bite-sized taste scintillations from a world living in urban food forests and “bucolicities”, thriving amid cradle-to-cradle, trans-local supply chains, delivered by sail cargo and orbital airships.

"Transformation", or the "Transformational Society" […] anticipates and welcomes the transformation of all life, including humanity from its present form into a new "posthuman" form, on an entirely artificial Earth, as part of the extension of intelligent life from Earth into the solar system and eventually beyond.
Jim Dator Transformation of food and food systems comes in many guises, including a colourful Urban Picnic.

Edinburgh, Scotland

Light & ephemeral. Caboc cheese with popping sugar, tipsy laird trifle meets tiramisu, bubblegum panna cotta, paired with absinthe truffles and an earthy beetroot cocktail.

Valetta, Malta

Asparagus. Tamari, lemon
Strawberries. Maltese honey, basil, parmesan, oat, purple corn
Bread and butter. Ftira, carrot, beetroot, pumpkin seeds
Cider vinegar. Cinnamon, sparkling water
Chocolate. Ginger, olive oil, mango

Hasselt, Limburg

Fruit elixir. Berries, rose petals, chilli, juniper
Mock oysters. Quince, port, leaves, and spices
Popping dates. Mazafati dates, tahini, popping chocolate
Carrots and violets. Carrots, violets, urban honey
Sweet basil teas. Basil seeds, hibiscus, lavender, mallow

These menus are edible instantiations of Experiential Futures, Alternate Reality Narratives, and Prehearsals and Pre-enactments

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