I spoke on the topic “Fiction and Food Futures” at the Tasty Future Festival on the 16th of April, 2024. This event took place at Linnaeus University and was organized by Paula Schneewind and Larissa Zeiler, two MA students on the program Design+Change. The day consisted of a series of open lectures, a workshop, a luncheon and a number of snacks (Swedish “fika”) and it was attended by some 80 students and faculty, some travelling from other universities. The purpose of the event was to raise awareness about the relationship between food/the food system and socio-ecological breakdown, to consider questions of food security, nutrition and food sustainability and also to allow participants to sample sustainable food cultures. The food eaten was vegan and vegetarian and sponsored and prepared by local restaurants and food collectives.
I think this is an excellent way of approaching food, sustainability, and socio-ecological breakdown. The combination of interdisciplinary scholarly research, presentations from NGOs, restaurant chefs and other food actors with communal meals where you are served tasty, plant-based food makes it possible to balance the imagery of a potentially very dark future with a sense of possibility and hope. In many ways, this is the opposite of the food privilege deprivation meals organised at events such as this (see also this blog post), where attendees are served the types of food that will disappear from the menu if climate change is not de-accelerated. Such dinners ultimately teach the audience to continue to desire the types of food that the existing (capitalist) food system has been designed to procure for the privileged strata. The point becomes saving that system and thus the (exotic) foods it provides access to, rather than restoring planetary ecological equilibrium.
To instead serve meals made out of ingredients that, if you turn to them rather than the old (meat-based) alternatives, will actually help restore soils and waters enables a very different relationship to food pasts and food futures. Rather than asking us to hold on to our old food desires, it provides us with doors to sustainable, and still very tasty, food futures. To not consume the type of food that accelerates climate change need not be dystopian. On the plate, these futures may not necessarily look so different from what we are used to. The two-course meal served for lunch was based on two Swedish staples: “kroppkakor” and toast Skagen, only with locally sourced ingredients and the meat edited out. It was delicious.
It is vital to add that ecologically sustainable, locally sourced food is also much more likely to be socially sustainable. When nations in the global south are not asked (or encouraged, or forced) to clear rainforests for cattle ranges or palm oil plantations, or to transform biodiverse waterways to shrimp farms, the land can be used far better by the local population. Sustainable and locally sourced food is much more likely to produce food security and food justice across the planet than the current industrialised food paradigm.
Photographs by Anton Brall