Food for the Future: The Harvest of the Past, That Awaits My Hunger

 

Armina Pilav & Jamie Allen

Culinary Processional Guides & Resource Researchers

 

The food that we eat is always bygone, although it sustains into the future. We work for this sustenance, to survive, to think, to create and thrive. It is our culinary cosmopolitics that creates and limits the very possibility of our life on Earth. Whenever and wherever necessary, we capture the energies and matter of the air, the forests, soil, rivers, lakes and oceans. Some foods grow ‘wild’ and ‘free’, others are cultivated in tilled fields, greenhouses, basements, along windows and terraces, on the facade and roofs of architectures. The relations we have with these productive spaces vary in terms of geography, infrastructure and distance, ownership issues, but also importantly with time — metabolic times of transport, time of labour, time of harvest, time of life.

 

Food – worlds -- Earth

 

it matters what food forage the worlds

it matters how food form the worlds

it matters  where is the food for future worlds

it matters how worlds feed the Earth

 

it ends when Earth eat worlds

 

Current  geopolitical constellations, past and current wars, and other breakdowns of infrastructure have produced lags, shortages and wastes, culminating in current and future food shortages that affect everyone on Earth, in very different ways. No matter your privilege, the landscape of sustainable provisions are changing  as climates, economies and environments change. Meanwhile, local movements and scientific developments provide directions both hopeful (e.g.: precision fermentation) and disconcerting (e.g.: petro-synthetic, chemical). There are individual and collective initiatives exploring new foodways that promise to upgrade the food chain while allowing for metabolic situatedness, in the wake of the industrial catastrophe that is the 20th Century ‘food system’. There is great need to alter nutrition habits across the Earth, as much as we must revise the food nationalisms, fascism and traditional diets that keep us locked into these systems.

 

 

What is Food for the Future? 

Nobody really knows!

Food is a matter of survival. Foods cause interactions between our brains, stomachs, body fluids, blood sugar levels, minerals and proteins. Hunger and satiation is different for everyone, obviously, as the metabolic processes and physiological capacities of the singular body are different. Hunger and satiation are political contexts relating to the unequal access to food on Earth, the land to grow it, the technology to produce it. 

One of the great powers that has been granted to, and grants, the elaboration of the ambiguous developments we call ‘civilisation’ is the ability to make food now and eat it later. Storage, buffering, and keeping allow for a ‘futurity’ of food that has given way to speculative anthropologies — why certain empires have thrived, and others not. Current, essential and commodity food item cultivation worldwide is conditioned by given climatic zones, earth quality, landscape formation, anthropogenic toxic materialities, chosen or available agro technologies and available, economical labour forms. War interrupts food cultivation and transport, as the current case of Ukraine, one of the most important producers of wheat for the whole world, has made readily apparent. 

“Food for the Future” is the practical provisioning of food for the Entangled Milieus un-disciplined conference. It is , as a real, material cooking exercise as well as a set of provocation into the temporality of world food, and the metabolic processes of thinking and doing that take place at the conference. Through daily evening meal/workshop/exercises in the field throughout the event, participants will work together to entangle their individual metabolic needs with their situated environment. 

Besides the transdisciplinary field research about the multiple ecologies of the river ecologies, we are proposing to undertake the “Food for the Future” culinary procession exploration organised by Armina Pilav, Jamie Allen and other participants of the conference. The working process evolves between 22-29 October, and involves both cooking and thinking about food production and consumption, on local and planetary scales.