Counter Culture: Future of Food
As a nonprofit with a mission to offer hands-on learning experiences to the public to understand scientific and technological developments, Genspace partnered with New Harvest, International Flavors and Fragrances, and students to host an event exploring the future of food—in particular, futures around “lab-grown” meat.
Though the impacts of scientific discoveries are all around, this event aimed to give members of the public a framework to take their knowledge and experiences and apply them towards imagining and developing their own predictions for the future of food.
The session began with a dystopic dining experience in which participants were immersed in an alternate reality where they were guests at a restaurant serving an unsettling array of foods. In their dining experience, ‘servers’ detailed the backgrounds of the foods to bring up possible ethical issues surrounding their production. Guests would then approach a device to eat mysterious foods and smell fragrances of foods they were meant to replace, such as ‘dodo bird meat.’
The experience portion of the workshop acted as a model for how imaginative and creative the teams could be. Following the experience, teams were randomly paired to go through three design sprints, bringing together members of the public from various backgrounds such as scientists working with CRISPR, high school students, fiction writers, or food bloggers. Filling out several sheets that would eventually piece together like a puzzle, participants completed the following steps:
1. Extrapolation:
Teams create a database of future possibilities by sharing their current knowledge and research they have done around altered or cultured foods.
2. Expand:
Each team is given 4 prompts, ranging from hypothetical products, policies, to weather forecasts to consider new perspectives and implications of the research.
3. Experience:
Teams prototype and create objects to share their idea of a possible future with the broader group.
The experience overall created space for unusual connections and the crosspollination of perspectives to, hopefully, see more than one possible future and ask more questions about the implications of a technology.
