How to reverse the global food crisis: listen to your grandmother – eat better, waste less, drink water and cut the sugar
- There is more food on the planet than ever before, but diets are becoming more impoverished, dominated by sugar and junk food.
- Eating better and wasting less are the first steps to equilibrium
If you land in London as a tourist in torrid midsummer, you will see the global food crisis first-hand: obese bodies exposed to the sun, fad diets alongside the most exotic arrays of junk food, the sense of plenty disguising an impoverished “global standard diet” based on a dwindling range of ingredients; obsessions with unhealthy food pursued alongside unhealthy obsessions with food.
The exhibition puts the grim and ugly reality of modern mass food production alongside the multitude of ideas aimed at eating better and wasting less. Here is orange fibre being spun into high-fashion fabrics and ‘leather’ made from pineapple leaves, bioplastics made from potato peelings and veneers from corn husks, urban mushrooms grown in coffee grounds and cow dung baked into bricks, floor tiles and even table pottery.
You emerge from the exhibition encouraged and impressed by the ingenuity of so many small companies — like the Skipping Rocks Lab which makes Ooho! biodegradable edible packaging from seaweed — but gloomily aware that this is a minority sport played on the margins of a game dominated by the global food juggernauts. It is a minority sport that is mostly unprofitable.