The Center for Genomic Gastronomy

We are down to three “BioHacker” posters of our original 100 prints. Time for a trip back to Bangalore to make a second print run?

Reviewing the final copy for our new cookbook (being released as part of DA4GA on June 7th) I ran across this little menu note made in our Planetary Sculpture Supper Club Bangalore menu, when we first prepared our “Seed Savers Delight” dish:

It has been said that technology is the most human thing about us. Seed saving is a one of the oldest and most resilient human technologies. Seed saving is an environmental interface between humans and the plant world we are constantly co-evoloving with.

One of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.

This dish is a celebration of the great work by countless experimenters and aesthetes whose contribution to our sculpted planet and agri-eco-culinary system is rarely acknowledged. It should remind us that “We Have Always Been Biohackers”

I am still pretty happy with that description.

There is a review of EDIBLE in nature here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7390/full/483404a.html

Here is a .pdf

The Center showed a version of DOOMER FOOD as part of the “Collections” show at Fictilis Gallery in Seattle, WA, USA. The show is up until March 29th.

SEAWEED WALL by The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, an exhibit at the EDIBLE exhibition at SCIENCE GALLERY, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland in 2012

Feeding Times Special: Vegan Ortolan

The Center for Genomic Gastronomy curated the current exhibition at the Science Gallery, EDIBLE. We were really excited about getting visitors to experience parts of the exhibition through taste – one of the senses that is often disregarded in exhibitions.

To bring this component to life we commissioned culinary extraordinaire Heather K. Julius (who also runs the Special Snowflake Studio) to develop recipes, challenging her to create dishes such as the Vegan Ortolan. It was an inspiring collaboration and you can find all of Heather’s recipes for edible, as well as recipes from other foodies, chefs and scientists on the Science Gallery website.

The feeding times will run twice daily for the duration of the exhibition, serving a new recipe every three days. Today was the first day for Vegan Ortolan.

ABOUT VEGAN ORTOLAN

The traditional preparation of the ortolan bird in France demands that they are captured alive, force-fed, drowned in Armagnac and eaten whole. Although it is illegal to prepare and eat, the dish retains a forbidden attraction for some adventurous eaters. What better way to challenge the skills of a chef than to create a vegan recipe which simulates the experience of crunching through the skin, guts and bones of a small bird, without using any animal products? This dish is intended to be consumed in the traditional way with a large napkin covering the head and the face to keep the flavours in, and to hide one’s shame from God.

Tasting notes for traditionally prepared ortolan emphasize the rich foie gras like taste of the flesh, the crunch of the many tiny bones and the bitterness of the guts.

The feeding time specials change every three days for the duration of the exhibition. Here is Conor updating the times for today.

The nests are ready and the Eaters are taking their seats.

Enguerran, head chef for the exhibition is plating the vegan ortolan.

The dish is traditionally eaten with a cloth over your head – to keep the aromas in and to hide your shame from God.

The Fig symbolises the head and beak, while the body is represented by a tofu pocket.

Q&A with the Edible Curators: Cat Kramer & Zack Denfeld

Why make an exhibition about food?

Every Eater has a stake in the future of food so it’s encouraging that people are increasingly interested in what kinds of food they eat. This awareness of food issues is driven by various motivating factors; from personal health to concerns about global resource depletion. Creating an exhibition about food can be quite challenging because of the number of voices and perspectives that deserve to be included. There are many strong, and often conflicting, opinions about this universal requirement for survival. However, we find this widespread engagement inspiring and hope the exhibition captures some of this energy.

How does EDIBLE respond to such a broad topic?

There have been a number of exceptional exhibitions on agriculture, urban farming and imagining the ways we are going to feed the 7 billion+ humans on planet Earth in the last few years. However, early on in the process of developing EDIBLE, we decided to narrow the scope and focus on the experience of eating under the maxim: ‘Eaters are agents of selection’. We wanted to make a more explicit connection between the kitchen and the biosphere, and the way individual chefs and Eaters serve as a bridge between these two domains. It was really important to us that visitors to the exhibition get to eat foods (and readers of this catalogue get to use the recipes printed). We are excited to see how the possibility of eating the exhibits, rather than just looking or touching, invites discussion and debate.

What do you mean by ‘Eaters are agents of selection’?

Most Eaters accept that animal and plant breeders have steered evolution for thousands of years. However, Eaters and chefs also exert selection pressures on the kinds of life forms & ingredients that are propagated within the eco-agro-culinary system. Every human Eater slowly reformulates the planet as they consume it.

The daily choice we make about what to eat for dinner, whether it’s a Big Mac meal or a homegrown salad, impacts the diversity, abundance and distribution of life on the planet. As such, you are an agent of selection.

We have assembled a collection of artefacts, recipes and stories that we think typify some of the ways humans unconsciously sculpt the planet’s biosphere through eating habits, flavour preferences and food technologies. We hope this exhibition is an opportunity to explore the co-evolution of gastronomy and larger ecological, technological and political systems.

You mention ingredient selection as one vector for change within the food system. Can you tell us about some of the interesting ingredients featured in EDIBLE?

Within this catalog and in the show EDIBLE you will find that many of the artists, scientists and chefs have a very particular relationship to the life forms they prepare and serve. Some are interested in the nutritional or ecological implications of the ingredients they serve, while others have chosen foods that have an important or hidden history.

In terms of genetic diversity, Oliver Moore recommends 3 different varieties of beetroot (Boltardy, Cylindra & Chioggia) for his community-farm-inspired juice recipe (page xxx). We have also selected 12 varieties of potatoes cultivated and maintained by Irish Seed Savers as a way of acknowledging all of the largely uncelebrated work on selective breeding that farmers and breeders have done for centuries.

We also feature a number of edible plants that remain under-explored, despite the insatiable appetite of humans. Dr. Prannie Rhatigan has been making the case for incorporating more seaweed in the Irish diet through writing, speaking and serving delicious recipes (see page xxx for an example). In this show we feature eight varieties of edible seaweeds that may be new to most eaters, and will also be serving one of her dishes.

This exhibition also includes examples of culinary trends, such as invasivorism (eating invasive species – page xxx) and entomophagy (eating insects – page xxx). Do these practices raise concerns? Are they simply fads, or compelling enough to propagate into kitchens and restaurants more broadly? Our own work includes a radiation-bred variety of mint (page xxx) and glowing sushi, which calls for a transgenic fish usually sold as a pet (page xxx). The line of what we consider a food and edible is constantly fluctuating.

What do you believe is the taste of things to come?

The future of food is much more complex than we can predict. But we are sure that it will look nothing like the techno-utopic image of life-extending pill food eaten in outerspace or the return to a neo-feudal agricultural economy imagined by doomers within the peak oil and climate change communities. However, we do expect that there will be a major change in the kinds of ingredients we use, and hope that food systems will increasingly privilege resilience over efficiency.

If one takes a long view of history, it is incredible that ingredients like potato, tomato, chili peppers, corn and chocolate have only recently gone global. Before the 16th century none of these five ingredients were known outside of the Americas, and now they play a central role in human diets in many places on the planet. Today, ingredients like Quinoa and pomegranate are increasingly cultivated as Eaters demand them, and we think that there are a number of edible plants out there that will become dominant over the next 100 years because of their medicinal, nutritional or gastronomic properties. This new set of dominate genomes will probably come out of left field. New food technologies and recipes will build on and reinforce this new genomic regime, and in a perfect world, the ingredients Eaters prefer will run in parallel with an increasingly sustainable food system.

We are excited about hearing what visitors to the exhibition believe will be the taste of things to come, and hopefully some of the foods they taste will serve as inspiration.

As we begin our research for our DA4GA project, Edible Time Machine, we are putting the finishing touches on the EDIBLE exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland. Three of the projects we are exhibiting in the show should give some indication of the direction we will be heading in over the next few months:

SMOG TASTING

DOOMER FOOD: BEANS, BULLETS & BULLION

DISASTER PHARMING

The Edible Time Machine project will seek out interesting ingredients and develop 5 recipes, providing five different ways to think through the future of food systems. Our research process runs concurrent with NCHA‘s Growing Older Together study, and will draw on the food preferences, memories and narratives of research participants as one source of inspiration.

One of the things we hope to contribute through this process to our collaborators and colleauges in the Life Sciences and Healthy Ageing research is a much more diverse, critical and nuanced way of imaging the future of food, and healthy ageing. Especially when employing the lens of Biotechnology and Genomics.

Most of the timelines and narratives we have run into that imagine the future of food and health through the lens of emerging technologies seem to return to the same top-down and techo-deterministic themes of:

* nutraceuticals
* genetic modification (transgenesis & cisgenesis)
* in-vitro meat
* vertical farms
* gene therapy
* personalized medicine
* entomophagy (eating insects) because it is “efficient”…etc.

Here are just two timelines of the future of technology (including food) that we have run into in the last this week:

Envisioning Emergent Technology popped up in our blog feed today and includes these predictions for the near future:

* In-vitro meat
* vertical farming
* Smart Drugs
* Personalized Medicine
* Anti Ageing Drugs

Here is the timeline of Biotechnology from Naturalis:

It includes the following predictions for the future:

* “The last farm is closing down. Our food is increasingly being produced from algae grown in huge tanks.” (((That didn’t work out so well in Windup Girl. However, we ARE intrigued by the idea of a currency based on calories, instead of gold or fiat.)))

* “We have solved all of the mysteries of DNA, but have still not managed to eradicate diseases and death.”

* “Cloning humans is by now medically safe, and the ethical objections are diminishing.”

* “Barren areas, such as deserts, are now used for agriculture. Genetically engineered crops have made these areas fertile.”

* “People live even longer; hence the age of retirement rises to eighty years.” (((Is Greece getting a jump start on this one?)))

There are many well written critiques of technologically-deterministic-futurism including the recently penned The Future Isn’t What it Used To Be from a futurist insider, and the more academic Meals to Come (“accuracy is only one of many reasons why people make predictions.”), so we won’t rehash those arguments in this short space.

The Naturalis Biotechnology timeline exhibit is only one floor down from where our piece will be installed. We are hoping that our artwork serves as a counterpoint by explicitly including ethical, social, cultural and flavor aspects that don’t seem to be factored into much forecasting that uses Science & Technology as its lens.

Here is just a rough list of possible topics that we hope to pursue in the coming months:

* Culinary Eugenics / Biodiversity of the Kitchen / Resistance to Fungible Ingredients
* 2012 Paranoia / End of Empire / Doomer Food / Stockpiling / Hoarding
* Junk Science/ Fad diets / Fast Food Forecasting driving consumer & eater behavior
* Individuals doing things with food technology that were not intended
* The Culinary Innovations of Peak Oil / Economic Contraction / Energy Shortages / Climate Change