Not your Grandmother's Cookbook

Food has a calming warmth to it and provides a sense of safety and security. But it’s also a cultural channel that gives life to our most intimate moments, like dining with our loved ones, to the most joyous celebrations over a feast. Cookbooks represent an even purer form of this sensation as they are the manifestation of endless open possibilities when everything is possible.

But there’s one cookbook that’s not just about the possible, it’s about the inevitable.

“We’re cursed with living in interesting times,” says Zane Cerpina, curator at TEKS and co-author of The Anthropocene Cookbook: Recipes and Opportunities for Future Catastrophes.

“In addition to war and pandemics, we’re currently facing a huge climate crisis. In our cookbook, food is first and foremost the medium we use to talk about survival in these times — but also creativity.”

The unconventional cookbook was supported by TEKS and published by MIT press. The book draws its name from a term scientists have come up with for our current geological epoch. Anthropocene refers to the immense impact humans have had on Earth’s geology and ecosystem, with the biggest one being human-caused climate change. Zane and her co-author, artist and researcher Stahl Stenslie, explore how we might prepare for future catastrophes through the lens of art.

“Food is something we can all relate to and we all have opinions on. Even the most uncritical person might be totally set on something when it comes to food. So it's a great medium to talk through about our environment and our traditions, the past and the future,” says Zane.

However, The Anthropocene Cookbook isn’t your typical recipe book. Instead, it shows the results of Zane and Stahl’s research through a collection of over 60 investigative art and design projects and will act as a toolbox for creative action — turning the ‘inevitable’ into a fresh canvas for creation.

“Unlike recipes, you can’t provide step-by-step instructions on how to build the future because it’s full of unknowns, both known and unknown,” Zane explains. “So that's where art and these creative industries come in, because they can help you to not only come to possible solutions, they can prepare you for the situations you don't know yet.”

The projects are incredibly diverse and range from outlandish futurism, such as human photosynthesis and turning plastic into consumable food, to more attainable future visions (but still weird) like insect rearing, harvesting spices out of sewage, and cheeses made from human breast milk. But it also traces how crazy catastrophe-preventing ideas have become actual scientific pursuits.

Lab-grown meat is a tangible example of where art led the way and scientists are now catching up. Meat consumption is incredibly unsustainable and one of the biggest contributors to people’s personal carbon footprint, so it’s a worthy goal to find alternative solutions to it.

Back in 2000, artists and researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr created The Semi-living Steak, the world’s first proof-of-concept for using tissue culture exclusively for food. The result was a 1 cm in diameter ‘steak’ composed of pre-natal skeletal muscle cells that were incubated in a 3D tissue culture bioreactor. The art project investigated what the production of lab-grown tissues for food might look like, but also the ethical considerations it would raise.

13 years later, scientists made a full burger from laboratory-cultured meat, created using stem cell technology. To this day, the lab-grown meat field keeps developing and people are hopeful it’ll become a mainstream food source in the future.

It’s clear that fields that seem to have nothing in common on the surface, like arts and science, have a lot to learn and offer each other. The new cookbook isn’t Zane’s only foray into merging different disciplines. In her work as a curator for TEKS (Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre), she helps execute the centre’s goal of facilitating the production of art practices that make use of new technologies and comment on the development of technology and society today.

That’s why Zane and TEKS are taking part in the upcoming Nordic Food Forum in September, a part of the new Hyfer festival. While some might find the inclusion weird, the organisers of the forum believe it’s essential.

“Innovation is an incredibly important part of the forum and a lecture like this will stimulate us to think wider,” says Eva Falch, associate professor of biotechnology and head of the Nordic Food Forum’s organising committee.

The forum will gather researchers as well as other food actors like industries, politicians, clusters, and NGOs from all over the Nordics to work together on solving particular sustainability challenges — and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

“The focus of the program is based on our expertise at the NTNU Food Forum and the work we’ve been doing with local food actors in Trøndelag — which is the European Region of Gastronomy 2022 — to improve the sustainability in the food system,” Eva explains. “What’s interesting is that when we reached out to colleagues around the Nordics, we heard these are exactly the same topics they want to work on!”

Around 26% of greenhouse gas emissions come from food, and food waste alone is responsible for 6%. Climate change also affects food security and resources are getting used up which has a harmful impact on countries’ self-sufficiency, which is already very low in the Nordics. So there’s a lot to gain from tackling this issue, but its solution won’t be found by individuals digging deep into one corner of the problem on their own — it can only be solved through a holistic approach to the future.

Just like a complex symphony can’t be performed by talented individual musicians, the key to solving our impending food and climate crisis is gathering people with different skill sets to work in unison. “My personal area of expertise might be narrow, but that’s why we gather people. Because we need the whole orchestra of disciplines.”

So whether it’s unconventional cookbooks or great new collaboration platforms, it’s all a step towards a better sustainable future.