Rima Sabina Aouf | dezeen | 12 October 2022

Read more here: https://www.dezeen.com/2022/10/12/ten-designs-food-challenges-anthropocene-era/

Zane Cerpina and Stahl Stenslie’s have collected experimental food designs, including whisky made from urine and cows that harness energy, for their Anthropocene Cookbook. The authors chose 10 of their favourites for Dezeen.

Published by MIT Press, Cerpina and Stenslie’s anthology confronts the idea that the Anthropocene era — the time during which humans have had a substantial impact on the Earth’s environment — entails a radical reassessment of what we eat, and how.

The Anthropocene Cookbook‘s chapters traverse topics such as alternative approaches to food security, new potentially edible ingredients and the culinary possibilities offered by the human body.

Cookbook aims to provoke creative thinking around future crises

The book features art and design projects involving ideas such as 3D-printing endangered animal parts to enable the preservation of cultural traditions, genetically engineering the human body so it has its own algae population, and incorporating plastic into the food chain.

Cerpina and Stenslie — who independently are both artists, curators and researchers — embarked on the book to try to provoke creative thinking about the existential challenges facing humanity.

“One of the main goals of the book was to advance thinking in and about the Anthropocene,” Cerpina told Dezeen. “We were questioning, what is the best medium to think about our futures? Food concerns us all every day, and it is, therefore, a raw material well suited for cultural commentaries.”

“Mixing it through art and design we get very powerful ingredients that provide us with new ethics and aesthetics — and ultimately thinking — fit for this transitory and liminal time.”