A manifesto for flavor-heads, biodiversity junkies, and edible flower bros.
Bro. Seriously. WHY AREN’T YOU BIO-MAXXING?
Do you even edible flowers, bro? Do your smoothies contain anything other than banana and sad imported strawberries? When was the last time your stir fry featured a vegetable that wasn’t a bell pepper or “baby” spinach? (What is that baby even doing in your wok?)
We live in a golden age of food mediocrity. And it shows. According to the FAO, 75% of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species. That’s not a menu — that’s a death drive. Meanwhile, the average grocery store carrot tastes like wet cardboard that’s been emotionally neglected since 1993.
It’s time to BIO-MAXX. That means maximum flavor, maximum nutrients, maximum ecological intelligence. It means stuffing your life (and your face) with as many species, cultivars, landraces, and foraged weirdos as your foodshed can handle.
Eat like a forest, not like a factory.
Here’s how you start:
1. Cook like a chaotic botanist. Start counting. Literally. How many species are in your pantry right now? If your “variety” means 3 kinds of pasta and two types of tomato sauce, you’re doing it wrong. Cook with color and chaos. Use ancestral grains, bitter greens, overlooked tubers, legumes that come in colors you didn’t know nature invented. Make ferments from wild brassicas. Throw in an amaranth leaf just to flex.
2. Source like your supply chain depends on it (because it does). Build relationships with seed savers, rogue farmers, and that one guy at the farmers’ market selling purple peas and celtuce. Choose foods that aren’t monoculture-mafia staples. Push your grocery store to stock varietals you can’t pronounce. Ask restaurants where they get their ingredients — then ask why they’re not serving huitlacoche dumplings or dandelion pesto. Press the issue. Be annoying. Your gut microbiome will thank you.
3. Winter? Pickle it, dry it, cellar it, don’t despair it. Local biodiversity doesn’t die in December. It transforms. Stockpile fermented garlic scapes, freezer-dried alpine strawberries, jars of pickled purslane. “…people’s current desire for food that is ‘never out of season’ creates a fragile agricultural system; it fosters monocultures (…) and takes away the rich abundance of flavours, textures and ways of living that used to accompany the wide variety of local foods.” Translation? Eat your sour plums and chill.
But why tho?
Because your flavor palette is a political act. Because monoculture kills the planet and your vibe. Because eating 20 plant species a week isn’t radical — it’s normal (or was, until global agribusiness erased it). “No matter where you live, you have the memory of something you used to eat that is no longer a part of your diet – something your grandmother used to make, something a small shop used to carry. Something we have lost.” wrote food scholar Simran Sethi in Bread, Wine, Chocolate. “This extinction is a process; it happens one meal at a time.” You want to be part of that gray goo future? Or you wanna crunch on crimson sunchokes and weep with joy?
Biodiverse diets are tied to better health outcomes too. More species = more nutrients = more ways to NOT get scurvy in your 30s, Chad.
Oh, and let’s not forget flavor. Dan Saladino (a.k.a. the David Attenborough of obscure foods) wrote in Eating to Extinction that:
Over millennia, food, cooking and eating became the most powerful expression of the human imagination. So, when a food becomes endangered, another seed lost, another skill forgotten, it is worth remembering the epic story of how they got here.” Every time you choose a purple daikon over a bland cucumber, you’re saving a narrative from extinction. Bite by bite.
At-home bio-hacks
Color quota challenge – seven colors a day, no excuses.
Ingredient roulette – spin a wheel and land on sorrel, sea buckthorn, or salsify. Cook it. Eat it. Brag.
Micro-microgreens – sprout six species at once. Your windowsill is now a rainforest understory.
Do you even edible flowers, bro? Nasturtium deadlifts your salad aromatics; dianthus adds vanity-mirror vibes.
Supply-chain side quests
Ask your grocer for “the weird stuff.” Purple yam, pigeon pea, African spider plant—whatever isn’t already cash-cropped into oblivion.
Signal-boost polyculture producers—share their CSA boxes like you share cat memes.
So here’s your final wake-up bite:
If your plate looks like a cornfield, you’ve already lost. If it looks like a forest floor, you’re BIO-MAXXING.
Eat aggressively. Eat diversely. Eat like the future of flavor depends on it — because it absolutely does. Now go out there and ask your barista for tulsi and sea buckthorn oat milk. Be the chaos you want to taste in the world.
In 2025 we are building on our work of Food Forest Taste Test with a new round of Food Forest Taste Test events (FFTT). We want to refine and expand our experiments to engage a broader range of eaters.
The food forest movement has been gaining momentum in recent years, both internationally and here in the Netherlands, as a response to the urgent question: how can we grow food sustainably? This movement has been lead by activists and farmers. While a great deal of work has been done on the side of designing, planting and maintaining a food forest, less people are exploring how to integrate these new and novel ingredients into daily cooking.
Food forests offer a wide range of benefits: increased biodiversity, greater resilience to drought and flooding, and long-term soil health. But they also present unique challenges. The ingredients in food forests are uncommon and diverse. The experts at haute cuisine restaurants can creatively incorporate these ingredients, but what would you do with a cola plant? Or with ‘Hemelsleutel’ or ‘Lievevrouwebedstro’? While the fine dining resturant De Nieuwe Winkel has done amazing things with food forest ingredients and produced a beautiful cookbook, everyday eaters have little knowledge around using these ingredients in their kitchens, at home or commercially.
Food Forest Taste Test is a project that develops the rituals, rhythms, and recipes needed to bring micro-seasonal, food forest produce into daily life.
By optimizing for flavour we hope to contribute to growing a larger network of people who engage with and care about eating from resilient agro-ecosystems.
FRESH PERSPECTIVE: PHASE 2
We have received a Fresh Perspectives grant from the Creative Industries fund to work with innovative food forest producers to prototype desirable food futures. The aesthetic and cultural components of cuisine, flavour, and social conviviality must be considered when imagining a more just, biodiverse & beautiful food system. For Phase 2, we aim to address climate issues by prototyping aesthetic and cultural approaches to boosting food forest ingredient uptake.
To kick off phase 2 or this project, we traveled to Flevoland to meet with Anje Portman on April 1, 2025, and visit three different food forest sites that she has designed, initiated and/or helped to develop:
Each site was at a different scale, and had very different for plans for how it was to be managed, maintained and harvested in the future.
SITE 1: THUISHAVEN (2 Hectare + Additional Hectare )
In 2024 our studio visited Thuishaven and cooked with ingredients at multiple points in the growing season.
Within the Thuishaven site there are three areas:
— The romantic food forest (planted in 2018) of 2 hectare. — The production food forest (planted in 2021/2022) of an additional hectare. — A wild edible garden.
We have previously written about this site during our 2024 visit, but as a reminder, the surrounding landscape consists of neighboring conventional farms laid down in rows, and power-producing wind farms (also laid down in rows).
One quote from today’s visit: “Every day I discover new plants and animals. You’d wish for people to connect like that too — connection takes time, just like a food forest takes ten years to grow.” – Iris.
Field Notes: The interesting interplay between the romantic forest and the productive forest — that they are informing each other. For example, in the ‘romantic forest’ they discovered a delicious pear, which led them to cultivate more of it in the productive forest. So food production is also led by taste.
The importance of Art and Symbolism: There is a small hill in the center of the romantic food forest and at the top of it is a boat, indicating sea level. Seeing the boat sculpture above your head helped orient you to the sea level, and remind you that this land is underwater.
SITE 2: Het Lydia Waterreus Voedselbos (1 Hectare)
“The Lydia Waterreus Food Forest is an educational, novel food forest, open to all residents of Zeewolde. The food forest is on land owned by the municipality of Zeewolde and is managed by a regular group of volunteers from IVN Zeewolde.” (link)
Field Notes: Some sections of the site were well-established and very beautiful to walk through. Other sections were starting to be overgrown with volunteer plants and needed some more active maintenance. A great community asset that is hopefully continued and cared for by large(r) section of residents.
Q: If we wanted to harvest and serve some produce from this food forest (in order to contribute to the culinary possibilities of the site) who would we talk to, who would we serve? Is there a way to make the harvesting and (especially) the preparation, presentation and serving of the food into something?
SITE 3: Voedeselbos Eemvallei Zuid (30 Hectares)
“A unique combination of a food forest, herb-rich meadows and recreation Eemvallei Zuid is a joint initiative of the Food Forestry Foundation , the Buytenwold Foundation , the Vliervelden Nature Farm and the State Forestry Service within the framework of the New Nature programme of the province of Flevoland. In June 2017, they signed the agreement for the realisation of an innovative nature reserve (50 hectares) with a unique combination of a food forest (30 hectares), herb-rich meadows and various recreational opportunities for children and adults.” [link]
Field Notes: There were some innovative management plans on how potential buyers of the produce can pay to have access during the season, and then come harvest one or more kinds of produce.
BONUS – SITE X: The Green Cathedral
At the end of our visit we had the chance to visit the artwork De Groene Kathedraal (1996) by Marinus Boezem. (Small side note: our studio originally learned about this artwork while browsing the bookshelves in Stavanger, Norway’s public library, where an entire book dedicated to Flevoland’s abundant and unique history of land art commisions. The power of libraries, printed books and serendipity offline! But, also the awesome work of Land Art Felvoland). There was some small controversy in the Netherlands in 2025 because MVRDV also proposed building an artwork / installation with the name Green Cathedral.
This project has been selected for a development contribution as part of the Open Call: Fresh Perspectives by the Creative Industries Fund NL 2025.
