10/2022
Food — Worlds — Earth
it matters what food forage the worlds
it matters how food forms the worlds
it matters where is the food for future worlds
it matters how worlds feed the Earth
it ends when Earth eats worlds
Food for the Future: The Harvest of the Past, That Awaits My Hunger is a culinary processional; an intervention and activation of eating infrastructures for the Entangled Milieus encounter in Cyprus. A series of field trips, campfires, communal kitchens, roundtable discussions and presentations, exhibitions, and film programs in Cyprus are augmented, by Jamie Allen and Armina Pilav through direct re-conceptualising and activating of the foods that participants bring, eat, digest, and think with through their deliberations.
Amongst the great powers that have been granted to, and are granted, the elaboration of the ambiguous developments we call ‘civilization’, are abilities in make food now that can be eaten it later. Storage, energy buffering, and keeping strategies allow for a ‘futurity’ of food that has given way to speculative anthropologies — why certain civilizations have thrived, and others not. Current, essential, and commodity food item cultivation worldwide is conditioned by given climatic zones, earth quality, landscape formation, anthropogenic toxic materialities, chosen or available agro-technologies, and available, (economical) labor forms. War interrupts cultivation and transport, as the current case of Ukraine — one of the most important producers of wheat in the whole world — makes readily apparent.
As such, the food that we eat is always bygone, the death of another being, that sustains us into the future. We work for this sustenance, to survive, to think, to create, and to thrive. Our culinary cosmopolitics create and limit the very possibility of our life on Earth. Whenever and wherever necessary, we capture the energies and matter of the air, forests, soil, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Some foods grow ‘wild’ and ‘free’, others are cultivated in tilled fields, greenhouses, basements, along windows and terraces, and on the facade and roofs of architectures. The relations we have with these productive spaces vary in terms of geography, infrastructure and distance, ownership issues, but also importantly with time — metabolic times of transport, time of labor, time of harvest, and time of life.
Current geopolitical constellations, past and current wars, and other breakdowns of infrastructure have produced lags, shortages, and wastes, culminating in current and future food shortages that affect everyone on Earth, in very different ways. No matter your privilege, the landscape of sustainable provisions is changing as climates, economies, and environments change. Meanwhile, local movements and scientific developments provide directions both hopeful (e.g.: precision fermentation) and disconcerting (e.g.: petro-synthetic, chemical). We will investigate individual and collective initiatives exploring new foodways that promise to upgrade the food chain while allowing for metabolic situatedness, in the wake of the industrial catastrophe that is the 20th Century ‘food system’. There is great need to alter nutrition habits across the Earth, as much as we must revise the food nationalisms, fascism and traditional diets that keep us locked into these systems.
Food for the Future: The Harvest of the Past, That Awaits My Hunger is the practical provisioning of food for the Entangled Milieus un-disciplined conference. It is real, material cooking exercises and études, as well as a set of provocations and rituals into the temporality of world food, and the metabolic processes of thinking and doing that take place through the week of October 22-30, 2022. Through daily evening meal/workshop/movements in the field, throughout the event, participants will work together to entangle their individual metabolic needs with their locally and planetarily situated environment.