Eating Tomorrow

“What will we be eating in the future?”

This has been a question often put to our team and collaborators at Post Dining, ever since we started exploring themes of ‘future foods’ in our work. Post Dining is a creative production company working at the intersection of food, art, and science. Our most recent endeavour has been to adapt one of our theatre productions—Eating Tomorrow—into a suite of educational workshops exploring future foods and food security. Therefore, you might expect us to have a clearer answer to the above question - what will the future taste like? There are plenty of reasons to advocate for an increase in edible insect consumption (they’re versatile, tasty AND nutritious), or scientific feats such as lab-grown meat (ethical meat consumption, yes please!). However, since spending the last few years diving into potential future outcomes only one thing has become crystal clear, and that is that any answer to this question is always incredibly complex.

Our fascination with future foods began in 2016 when we were commissioned to design four food experiences for a conference at the South Australian Museum as part of the Open State Festival. The conference was led by futurist Kristen Alford (who has since gone on to found MOD. Museum) and focused on a project called Future Conversations - a discussion amongst scientists and researchers about what Australian society might look like by the year 2050. The result of Future Conversations was the development of four archetype scenarios which included continuous growth, scarcity of resources, disaster/collapse, and transformative thinking. At first glance, these are presented as four ultimately separate scenarios. However, we soon began to learn that in practicality these futures almost always interconnect, contradict, and push each other in a multitude of different directions. In sum, they are an infinite source of inspiration and served as the foundation for our theatrical production of Eating Tomorrow, and subsequently our Future Food Workshops.

These four scenarios serve as an incredible jumping-off point for exploring often sticky conversations around climate change that might otherwise leave people feeling disempowered and anxious about the future. As artists and educators, we can engage audiences with difficult issues in an accessible and empowering way, illuminating hopeful perspectives and pathways toward positive outcomes, while not shying away from the hard stuff. Our workshops are designed to actively engage students in imaginative thinking, using storytelling to immerse students in potential futures and actively take part in discussions and design thinking.

When you open up the (literal and metaphorical) can of worms that is the future of our food production, you begin to see how future scenarios are incapable of moving in isolation from the other. This opens up far more interesting questions beyond what we will be eating in the future, and through broadening our perspectives begins to investigate questions that are a little more specific. When exploring a growth scenario you might begin to ask questions such as: “Does a growth future for some ultimately result in a scarcity or disaster scenario for others?”, or “Can edible insect consumption actually succeed if the market doesn’t embrace it?”. Or perhaps you are fascinated with imagining the extent of high-tech food design, before realising there is an equal amount of fascination to be learned through exploring the possibilities of unconventional, resilient, and nutrient-rich foods like edible weeds, seaweed or native foods. And when we engage with the concept of a transformational future, we are forced to think deeply about the kind of future we ourselves want to be moving towards. This question in particular forces us to engage with the future food discussion from a deeply personal point of view, and involves having to ask ourselves questions about our own core values.

Since taking our Future Food Workshops into schools we are endlessly delighted by the engagement and imagination of participating students. In the final activity of our workshop, we ask students to think about what kind of future they themselves want to be moving towards. The resulting concepts for transformative design in the food production system are as varied as they are bizarre, thoughtful, and ingenuous. While we may not have a crystal ball vision of what the future holds, one thing we can be sure of is that the future will be made by the actions of those in the present and the questions we ask ourselves as we move from one day into the next, and that all sounds pretty tasty to me.