Jack Thompson

​​Let me transport you to the future of food. The year is 2050. In some ways the worst has happened. We failed to rein in climate change and global food supply chains have broken down.

Some of us have survived, but the global food system, as we knew it, has not. 

If you're listening to this, we convene you to a secret bunker as the new Ministry of Food. We need you, the great food thinkers of our time, to design the future of food. To help you in your mission, we are going to serve you in this bunker three courses of food, each representing a different possibility of food provision. We hope it will both inspire and confuse you. But remember, we don't have the answers, only you do. 

OK, so let's back up. I'm Jack Thompson, your occasional host, and this is the Feed Podcast by Table. To explain this, this was a dinner that me and three colleagues organised in Berlin in September. It was part of a residency on the future of food hosted by the Humboldt Foundation. They brought together 12 people from all over the world, the Philippines, Nigeria, India, the USA and me from the UK. We're from all different disciplines. We had a professor of agronomy, a chef and butcher, researchers in social science, a designer and two journalists like me. Over six weeks in Germany, we came up with different projects on the future of food. Our team of four did an experiential dinner, as you might guess from my introduction. We invited 35 people from policy, parliament, professors, activists and NGOs. We designed the room to put guests in the mood. We served delicious and at times uncomfortable food. And we invited them to imagine different future scenarios. 

But before all of that, there was a lot of thinking. And here's a conversation between me and my three collaborators to show what we want to guests to take away. I hope you enjoy.

Bryant Simon

Soft layer of yogurt.

Lily Saporta

I didn't and I'm hungry. 

Annie Faye Cheng

My name is Annie Faye Cheng. I am a cook and a writer based in New York City and I currently work as a whole animal butcher. 

Bryant

Hi I'm Bryant Simon. I'm a history professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and I do food studies and toilet studies. Toilet studies. 

Lily Consuelo Saporta Taguiri

Hi I'm Lily Consuelo Saporta Taguiri and I'm a designer and eco-futurist and educator based in Paris.

Jack

And my name is Jack. I'm the occasional host of Feed and yeah you know my voice. So I think yeah now we can just start like a really informal chat about kind of the experience of like designing it and thinking about it and that kind of messy process of doing it. That was fun but it wasn't obvious. Like we know we knew that we wanted to use food in some way but how did we even end up at a dining experience? It was called an immersive dining experience but why did we do that? 

Bryant

Does anyone remember the actual origin of the idea? We were playing around with some ideas. We were playing around with seeds. We were playing around with strawberries.

Annie

I think it was always there from the start. Like even coming into the residency I was like well I don't really know what else I have to offer but this. I think tangibly logistically and I think Lily and I both came from a background of having cooked and hosted dinners before.

Jack

I remember Lily saying how can we talk about the future of food without feeding people? 

Bryant 

I mean it's funny you said it's the easiest way and to me that was part of what was fun right because that would not ever strike me as the easiest way. 

Jack 

You know to talk about these big ideas about the future of food is kind of abstract, it's kind of like far away so like the nice thing was to make it really tangible. 

So each day, we met up at a cafe, to plan this three course meal. Each course would tell a different story and in a way provoke the guests, based on a question, like: “What if all food were local?"

Annie

I first like came to this idea of maybe local is not always morally superior, logistically superior, environmentally superior in having a conversation with another one of our fellow participants, Nandini, who is from Delhi but now lives here and we were bonding over this idea of our cultural touchstones here. I'm eating Asian vegetables that are flown in from thousands of miles away and it became very clear that our global diets are a product of migration and that to deny the realities of migration and of cultural connectivity would be in some ways socially exclusionary even if there is an ethos towards local that we might want to move towards and certainly there are a lot of folks in the food and agriculture space that are very slowly diversifying given all the barriers that exist for farmers of color and young farmers and those who do not inherit land. But there are people who are doing seed breeding to say, OK, how can we take diaspora vegetables and bring them here? But in the meantime, it is part of the conversation and the gray scale in between the black and white of global export, import export culture is always bad versus local food is always the best. And that oftentimes there is a tension there financially, culturally. And when we brought out the currywurst dish. 

Jack

So do you want to quickly say, like, how do we make the what if food were all local? How do we make that a reality? How do we kind of translate that into food? 

Annie

Sure. So our group was playing with the idea of what if there was a government mandate that because of fossil fuel limitations or some sort of environmental disaster, which is not too far beyond our imaginable horizons, and we all had to have all of our food grown within a bike ride. And we realized that in the context of Berlin, one of the most iconic dishes, the currywurst, would lack a very important component, which is the curry. And that brought to light a conversation around spices and sugars and trade in coffee and all of these items that exist in our day to day, but are perhaps not as central to our definition of local, but certainly still part of this greater extractive agricultural system. 

Jack

And what do you think was interesting about playing with that concept? 

Lily

I think challenging the ideal of local and the concept that it would be a better diet. And what does that actually look like in practice? I mean, here, their argument for locals about reducing mileage that food is traveling to reduce the emissions, which are only about five percent of the total emissions that are baked into a food item. But I think that within the context of Berlin, it's culturally instigating. And I think that people felt distraught that they were getting these meals without all these items that they were used to seeing. They thought maybe we had forgotten and we had messed up their local cuisine. And then when there was the grand reveal that, in fact, we did have these different items and they've been smuggled in, in this future scenario, there was real delight and relief. And I think that was the intended impact. 

Annie

What was their reaction? Because I didn't get to witness that. How did people experience that course from beginning to end? 

Bryant

So I played the role of the smuggler and it worked great, actually. I mean, I think this is why this course kind of worked, because we were able to marry food, message and staging, to kind of really lean into it being an immersive event. And so I just held it back, Jack hammed it up a little bit and said, well, if it's local, you're not going to get these spices. And the plates looked a little bland, right? They were kind of colorless, right? The curry doesn't have much color. The potatoes don't have much color. it just allowed me to kind of yell and ham it up. We smuggled this in because also we had talked about thinking about the analogy to World War II and the way that rationing created black markets. And so we had like a little bit of a kind of precedent that allowed us to play off of that. And then I even said that you would have to pay for it until people laughed. I think it just worked kind of timing wise and staging wise. 

Jack

And I liked what you said in the in the lead up when I was kind of planning what to say. It was like, you know, we want to slightly confuse people, you know, to like to complicate these narratives that are a bit easier, you know, local food is best and to actually maybe poke holes in these like utopias in a way. 

So another course was we served three tostados. And in this scenario, we had said that all land was rationed. So every individual would have 2200 square meters of land to allocate as they wish. But all food had to come from that plot and no exceptions. But it was up to them how they use that quota. And so in this scenario, we gave them three options of how they might use their land. And so, Annie, do you want to talk about what the actual food looked like? 

Annie

Yeah. So first off, we had three different options and they were randomly assigned. We were respecting of people's individual dietary restrictions. But other than that, we had many omnivores who got the one of the two vegan options, which were a plant based meat alternative and a black bean option. The third omnivore option was with steak. And we played a lot with visual proportions and the additions of different toppings that would showcase the kind of diversity you could get with a plant based diet that you wouldn't necessarily be able to get on an omnivore diet. Based on the same amount of land use. And it was really interesting to speak especially to omnivores at the conclusion of the event. And we did hear an anecdote about a distinguished guest who is an omnivore and received a plant based meat alternative dish. And his first reaction was, “Ugh, what is this? This is not real food.” And then upon eating the dish together, he said, oh, this is actually really enjoyable. And I think what we tried to do is agitate the default of you get the same amount, you eat the same way, no matter what your choices are. But to really visually see on the plate what that kind of ecological balance could look like. And maybe some days your plate looks more like one version than the other. But the idea that there is a visual difference, there is perhaps a nutritional difference as well that is worth considering in your day to day food choices. But in a way that wasn't necessarily didactic, I think all of them were meant to be delicious, but that they had different types of deliciousness to offer. And for a meat based person, you know, I'm a butcher, so I eat meat all the time, but I often eat really vegetable and really fruit forward dishes because it also just makes me feel better to have a more ecologically balanced diet. And it was cool to see people interact with that. 

Jack

Lily, you had some quite interesting feedback when you spent time with someone at the dinner the following day and he critiqued the meal. What did he say? 

Lily

I think he was under the impression that these were futures that we desired, not ones that we were playing for as provocations. This wasn't prescriptive. This was a provocation. And that was really important to our team from the get go that we weren't telling people how to be, how to eat, and what the future would look like, but asking them to imagine what they would actually desire. And he was disturbed by that course because he felt it was really individualistic, that each person got their own separate meal and that it felt like it was dividing land for your own use and not thinking about the general system. And in conversation with him, I was talking about how, well, when you're allocated land, it's in this context, we were thinking about, okay, the land is being allocated for the greater good. And maybe your interaction with your personal plot is more intimate and it's more individualistic in some ways. But actually, the ultimate instigator for that division is for the greater good. So it did its job in that it became provocative and got him to sort of think through, would that be an ideal future? And he felt really against the idea of individual plots of land as ways of allocating growing space. 

Jack

And that's like one of the interesting things about kind of serving food. And, you know, we've thought a lot about the concept, but actually, you know, once you put it out there, it's people's to receive and people receive it in really different ways. Like, I really enjoyed kind of listening to people's conversations that actually the same guy was talking about, like, the water use from avocados. I think, there were lots of missing bits from that, you know, how is land used? There are lots of other ways that interconnects with things. And that's kind of the idea that you get people to talk about these things as well. 

Lily

Yeah, food is really an invitation to the conversation because you have a captive audience that isn't only just like watching something happen happening. They're integrating into their bodies. And so, yeah, I mean, Annie and I both work a lot with food and feeding people as a way of having conversations that aren't always, you know, this sort of complex. I think this was a lot of theories that then we visualized in the form of three courses and we created this whole speculative future in which people were being invited to this dining experience. And so it was kind of theatrical, but it is an extension of sort of generosity into the conversation so that people can come up with their own questions themselves. And also, we had talked so much that we couldn't possibly put it all in each dish. And these things were things that were considered. You know, Annie did consider that avocado cream does, which was on one of the tostadas, it does require land and water and it's very resource heavy. And so the meat dish didn't get any of it because it would have been completely unrealistic to imagine that you could have both land enough to have meat and to have avocados. And so there are a lot of considerations that weren't sort of made or spelled out for the audience that were, you know, details that were important to us because we had the time and the capacity to be that specific. But an audience might not have the sort of bandwidth to take in all of the information that went into this determination of the final menu. 

Jack

I also imagine that, you know, when we're, especially with the currywurst meal where you're making it, it's like provocative in the way that there's something missing. And, you know, as a chef, Annie, is that, you know, kind of like that's not the aim is to, like, you want to turn it into a complete dish. 

Annie

Yeah, I think it was a really fun exercise because: One is I knew that the goal wasn't for every dish to be beautiful and taste good. The goal was for people to really think. And I think the really beautiful thing about food is that compared to the context of an academic conference or a presentation where there is a sense of hierarchy and, oh, this person is a full professor, this person is a Ph.D. student, this person is a maybe a think tank researcher, there's a very clear sense of, oh, this person is more experienced than I am in some ways, at least in their field of specialty. And that's reflected in the social dynamics. What I think is really special about a dinner is that in some ways, sure, there's some people who have eaten maybe more widely than others, but everybody's eaten. And so in that way, everybody is an expert for their own dining experience. Everybody is an expert for how they eat food and how they enjoy food. And so the way that they dialogue with our presentation is really up to them. And we also have to relinquish control in. OK, so, you know, if my ego gets in here, like, it's not really about, oh, my ego of thinking that's them thinking my food is good. That was never part of the story. The goal was how can we as a team with our interdisciplinary backgrounds create a dining experience that allows people who might not ever be in the same room to feel like experts amongst each other in that they're all novices to this story, at least. Even if they came in with different degrees of food knowledge. So we have someone from the German parliament sitting next to somebody who's a community activist. And while in their individual day to day lives, they might be experts in different things here, they're all being spoon fed this story and this menu by us and asked to think about it. And I think, like Lily said, like this is an invitation and that's what makes the dining experience so special. And that's what made this also a really cool working experience for all of us. 

Lily

I think the other thing to add to that is that some of the feedback I got was, “that that was so much fun.” And we're talking about these things that are kind of dark if you play them forward and you really imagine what would the world be like with these different possible scenarios. But it was joyful and people were laughing and having a good time. And that's really that is also important for the capacity for bigger conversation. I think if you start from a place of fear and anxiety, there's not as much room for discussion. 

Jack

Well, I think that was one of our initial aims is that we knew we were playing with we were like going to be presenting and feeding people with a lot of knowledge. We weren't necessarily going to be presenting new information to everyone. But actually it was like, how do we, I guess, like share information and knowledge about how to apply this knowledge in different ways, how to tell stories, how to like make the translate these big heavy topics into tangible fun engaging and they could use and it was really speaking to one of the professors at the end and who has a master's program. She said, I'm going to use one of these concepts and like do it with my kids and get them to make it an experiment. And that's like, that's really like an amazing result of it. 

Bryant

I think that that was part of all of our contributions. We mentioned it once, but I think it's worth underlining again is we thought really hard about our audience. And that was really productive for our conversations. And we also thought  we didn't want to be prescriptive. We wanted like every course had questions, but they were questions. And I think that came through. But I also want to like set Lily up. One thing we haven't talked about it all yet is the staging. And you thought a lot about that. It was a really important part of the evening from what people would see from the moment they came in and what they ate off of.  You were trying to use the actual setting to fuel those same questions. 

Lily

Yeah, I mean, we did. I think we started with the questions that we started with each course and the questions that were sort of pressing enough to turn into a course. And we did a lot of editing. And then we went into content, which drove the ingredients for the menu. And I felt like that was a really collaborative process. And then we got to the design and the visuals. You were like, go for it. Make it futuristic. I was like, but what future? You know, we've been able to discuss and describe futures with words and theory and many things that are maybe more familiar to us as individuals. And so I felt this moment where I was like, oh, no, you all don't get to opt out of this part because I participated in all the other parts. But then I recognize that, you know, we are all coming from really different backgrounds. And so I tried to create a mood board to just land on the same idea of what future we were discussing. But I think as we got the content down, it was increasingly clear sort of what the staging was for the world we're building and the name of the dinner was “Out of the rubble.” So thinking about what is the rubble of Berlin? What would be growing out of it? What would it what would it feel like? So the actual space was, you know, decorated or staged with rubble and different edible plants and pollinator plants that would be able to grow in this environment, bursting through this rubble that was down the tables. 

Jack

You even put a huge apple tree on one of the tables. 

Lily

It's true. So there's apple trees, there are different berries, there were some herbs and there were some different plants that we think of as weeds but are also edible and plants that were more for the non-human species in the city. And then, so that was all deliberate, but we didn't describe that to the diners. You would only know that if you knew the plants and if you asked about it. But it's important for creating the ambiance and also just the storytelling. You know, we could have just served a meal on basic white plates. But I think we needed to create a world because we were creating a narrative that was asking a lot of imagination from the audience. So we gave each diner a sort of manual instead of a menu when they sat down that allowed them to follow along with the different courses and read the story that we had developed as a way of understanding sort of the framing the context for that particular plate. And so that was important, sort of like design item. I think we didn't, we couldn't say everything with just words. We couldn't say everything was just food. I think we also needed something that they could take home with them but also that they could use as the map of the evening. And then with each course we thought through the plating that was relevant to the message that we were trying to communicate. So the first course of the Tostadas that was all about land plot, we had little frames that were filled with fake dirt, which was just you know ground flax seed that looked like dirt with the Tostada placed on top. Each person was given the same size little, you know, representative block of land as their plate. The second course.

Bryant

Expertly painted brown I might add. 

Lily

Yes, Bryant. I will say that everyone participated in the creation and Bryant was really the best studio mate ever. And yeah, we had a lot of fun just making all the kind of hands on elements. The second course was served on the typical Currywurst plates with measuring tape on the side of them so just imagining what it would look like if you change the distance and it was more just sort of representative of the conversation we're having about increasing distance as a way of increasing flavor diversity, especially within the context of Berlin where you're not growing everything delicious, so close by, all the spices. And then the third course was played on a silver brush piece of aluminum and with an aluminum skewer and we haven't talked about that course yet. 

Jack

Actually, I was going to ask Bryant if you wanted to introduce the third course because you came up with this great visual scene of how this scenario took place. 

Bryant

Well, about halfway through the residency. We got a booklet. And I was just leafing through one day and I stumbled on pages 24 and 25. And there was a graph there that talked about the planetary diet, the kind of diet that would help sustain the planet would be more biodiverse and could be a way that individual choices might contribute to sustaining the environment. And I just thought it was an interesting representation. The explanation was really good. And early on in our conversations, Lily said something that the dishes should be edible graphs or that was a way that we could think about them. And I was like, oh, could we do that graph as a course? 

Jack

For context, this is the EAT Lancet planetary health diet. And like, could you just describe what you saw in the graph? 

Bryant

That that graph was a pie chart. And on the pie chart, it suggested what again, a sustainable diet would be if we had a more equitable distribution of land. And I think on that one, that was maybe 18 percent meat based protein. I can't remember the breakdown, but it was a kind of thoughtful and interesting breakdown about how we could eat again to sort of create a more sustainable planet. And then and so then when Lily made that suggestion about the idea of like food as graph, well, I thought about the graph and could we take the graph and turn it into something we ate? And here maybe just like a little process, like at one point we thought about maybe having almost a school tray with the little divisions in it, with each thing you could have from it as a kind of representation of it. And then I think you, Annie, sort of zeroed in on the skewer as a way to kind of visually represent what that graph said. And so like for me, a lot clicked with this course because it was taking a kind of more scholarly numbers based thing and translating into food. And I was excited that that we could possibly do that. 

Annie

So the skewer tried to follow the proportions of the planetary health diet and involved tempeh as the vegetable protein for omnivores. A little bit of pork belly. So the tempeh was seasoned in tomato gochujang. And there was some eggplant that used black bean based doubanjiang paste. And there was grilled pear and a surprisingly large block of Scamorze Italian cheese as the planetary health diet. I don't think this message was as visibly clear as the other things. But the idea that there are so many different kinds of the planetary health diet and the idea of universalizing a global eating culture kind of doesn't make any sense, in the sense that what might be good for your section of the world's planetary health might be different from what mine is. And to be honest, I don't know that skewer in the execution, and I don't know if it was as successful in piercing through the myth and agitating the conversation as much as the tostada and the currywurst, because those two were very visible, very obvious things. Here, our goal was kind of towards sterility and this idea of universalization. But I think maybe because people are used to that as a dining experience, maybe it wasn't as challenging or provocative as the other two. So if I were to look back, I would say I think it did what it needed to do in some ways. But also the thing that it was trying to do was perhaps not that much of pushing the envelope. 

Lily

What if we had done two skewers? So we had one that's the current sort of use of land and allocation of food resources. And one is this idealistic version.

Jack

Yeah, I guess like what did you personally, what did everyone take away from that? 

Bryant

I would say that course looked really good. 

Annie

I did feel excited about that. I know, I was so excited from a culinary perspective. Just visually. Like setting up that currywurst hurt me. Maybe that was worth it because... With the little rice ball, I forgot to mention. Yeah, it looked really good. The whole grain ball with like 11 grains and seaweed. I didn't get to tell the story of seaweed either. Again, we only had so much time to tell so many stories. 

Lily

But the thing that's the beautiful part of working in this collaborative setting is that we had a lot more bandwidth for research. And each person could go and do their part and then bring it together. So it was much more developed than I think was evident in the meal. Not that it didn't present as polished, but that we had so much more we could have said. And there were so many little details. We had incense burning that had different smells in the space. So it was a little smoke going through the space. We had at the end, we didn't even talk about the little chocolate packets that people got to take with them. The cacao bean packets to imagine the futures that they would like to see. 

Bryant

The shards of chocolate from the rubble.  

Lily

Yeah, I think there were so many different stories that we played with and we had nods to. 

Bryant

But I'd say one thing, one of the fun things about being a storyteller are there elements of the story that are just for you. Yeah. And so, I mean, for the four of us there were details. And then that's part of the, right, it hits at different iterations. And so when you explained to me the shards, I loved the shards idea that you were carrying it through. And so just our joy in it is part of what's worth it. It's like having a really beautifully crafted sentence that might not be the most impactful, but you really enjoyed writing it. That paid off in that sort of way. 

Lily

And I think that if people were to get curious about any of the details, we would have had so much to say about them. So if someone did ask you about the grain balls that you had thought through it, it was a very, it was full out in terms of the intention that went into the pieces. 

Jack

I think personally it's a shame that we don't get to take the show on the road and do it again and again, because I think even just in the first iteration we learned a lot and I think we'd, and it was amazingly well executed for the fact that we only did it once.

It turned out really well in the end, it was like a lot of fun to collaborate with you all and see your different kind of perspectives of what you all bring and how that came together in a sort of alchemy. 

I think I'm going to leave it there. And thank you all for firstly like speaking to me and to Feed listeners, but also thank you for a wonderful six weeks.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please do tell a friend who might enjoy it, rate and review wherever you listen and subscribe to our newsletter fodder for expert analysis, food systems research, events and jobs. 

Table is a collaboration between the University of Oxford, Wageningen University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, University of los Andes, and National Autonomous University of Mexico. 

This episode was produced by Jack Thompson, edited by Matthew Kessler, special thanks to reviewers Mirjam Schoonhaven and Amanda Woods, and the Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation that hosted me for 6 weeks in Germany for a fantastic residency. Music by Blue Dot sessions, talk soon.