BREXIT BANQUET is a set of recipes and transition scenarios for pre-enacting a disrupted food system.
How can farmers, chefs, policy-makers and eaters acclimate to changing realities, flavours and new culinary landscapes?
The U.K.’s exit from the E.U. is already impacting local and global flows of ingredients—transforming how food is produced, consumed and traded. Brexit Banquet is a tool for tasting and evaluating a range of outcomes when every aspect of food culture will need to be reconsidered.
Visit brexitbanquet.com microsite to read more and explore the recipes.
For the last four years the Center for Genomic Gastronomy has deepened its research of the organisms and environments manipulated by human food cultures through a suite of projects all coming under the topic area of “Taste & Place.” We have observed how the goal of re-localizing food systems (for the purpose of sustainability & food sovereignty) has run head on into the cross currents of extreme nationalism, a retreat from globalization and rising xenophobia. “Taste & Place” became a research area that mapped the conflicts of belonging, land use and competing values—highlighting the tensions within and between localization and globalization.
In order to pre-enact a disrupted food system and preemptively explore, experience and taste these changes, we have devised 5 dishes that start to sample a future where every aspect of food culture, soil health and agricultural biodiversity will need to be reconsidered, and will be contested in real time:
- FISH IN CHICKS
- LAMB AND 4 CLOVER
- CHLORINATION CHICKEN
- DEEP FRIED LIGHTS
- NO FISH, NO CHIPS
Brexit Banquet emerged in the start of 2019 as we inquired about UKs relationship to the EU’s Geographic Indicator (GI) schemes (ie. PDO / PGI) and how they would change after Brexit. (One of us had purchased a Cornish Pasty at Heathrow airport and noticed the PGI sticker in the shop certifying it’s Cornish authenticity.) The UK has since re-protected it under the new UK GI scheme.
The first Brexit Banquet event, the Eat-A-Long, was held January 21st, and was cohosted by MU Hybrid Art House as part of the O.F.F.I.C.E. installation at the Evolutionaries Exhibition.