FoodScapes

Food is a lens and a medium to the question ‘how do we want to live’. Often in our contemporary world of ‘busy’, food becomes almost invisible, almost an obstacle standing between ourselves and all the things we want to do, almost a waste of time. Food as a life sustaining process, that shapes us and our worlds, becomes taken for granted. We rarely ask ourselves the questions of where does our food come from, how and where did it grow up, who took care of it, how did it travel to our plates, how will it affect our bodies, and so on. We rarely ask for food transparency.

So what if we put food back into the centre of our thinking? What if we follow the food journey from the land, down the road, into the markets, into the kitchens, onto the tables, into the bodies and imaginations, into the waste bin, back into the land? Thinking about food transparency we are actually thinking about what really matters. Eating is an ecological and political act. Each time we take a meal, we act in the world, we support certain ways of being and doing things, we support certain systems of belief and production. That’s more or less 3 times a day, 21 times a week, 90 times a month, 1095 times a year, year after year. Food is a huge power.

Food is also poetry, friendship, memory, ceremony, energy, medicine. Food is a conversation — between people and other species, seasons and landscape. Food is a tribute to the passing of time and shifting cycles, to attention and listening, to regeneration and care. Food is a relationship: agricultural, economical, cultural, multispecies; a relationship between arts, crafts and technology, meeting in all the tools we use when planting, harvesting, eating and interacting with ingredients. Food is connection — between those who grow, those who are being grown and those who receive, between societies economically and culturally, between human generations spoken through stories and ancestral recipes, between those eating together, and a connection to ourselves, to our own senses, and embodied experiences.

Food is an expression of multispecies creativity and Earth’s biodiversity. It’s a path towards renewal of local economies and conviviality of place-based communities. Food is already an inherent part of our work (within Woods in the City and Seasonal Academy), and in this exploration we invite visionary food practitioners to engage into a collective practice of reflection around various aspects of human interactions with landscapes of food. Upcoming conversations with Emile van der Staak (Restaurant de Nieuwe Winkel), Mette Helbæk (Stedsans in the Woods), and many others will be shared through Woods in the Sound. Stay tuned!

Pictures by Toms Lucans (from students’ work at MAD summer school of design 2018)