Planetary Sculpture Supper Clubs explore the ways planetary patterns change in response to how and what humans eat.
Our 2nd Planetary Sculpture Supper Club convened in Bangalore, India on November 13th, 2011. The Center for Genomic Gastronomy invited diners to experience their research through seven delicious and provocative courses, from re-combinatorial chaat to counterfactual cuisine.
The Planetary Sculpture Supper Club presents a collection of foods, recipes and stories that point to the varied ways that humans sculpt the planet’s biosphere. In agriculture, sculpting the biosphere and scripting evolution is commonplace. Animal and plant breeders have steered evolution for thousands of years. With a dramatic increase in the human population over the last century, the sum total of decisions that eaters make on a daily basis means that eaters exert increasingly intense selection pressures on the diversity, abundance and distribution of life on the planet.
Every time a food-secure eater chooses to eat one kind of food over another they make a small, downstream, but not insignificant selection pressure that privileges certain genomes to propagate on the planet.
WITHIN OUR GLOBAL CIVILIZATION AND GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM:
EATERS ARE AGENTS OF SELECTION.
What preferences, constraints, biases or assumptions determine the genomes that comprise our food system? Which food system? How big is it?
What role should individuals, communities, governments or businesses have in determining the genomes that make up our food systems and ecological-systems?
The ideas and recipes for the event grew out of research the Center conducted with 7 student researchers from our Bangalore Food Lab course which took place at the Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology. The event was only possible as a result of the creativity, energy and commitment these students brought to the project. Thank you: Anchana Kota, Koshy Brahmatmaj, Kamini Rao, Indrajeet Deshmukh, Meghna Saha, Tanushree Agarwal, Vibhuti Kanitkar.
Our head chef was the talented Varun Pereira sous-chef at Bangalore’s Olive Beach. Varun and Heather Julius contributed to the development and refinement of the recipes that we served.