FUTUREFEST
Shoreditch Town Hall
September 2013
We presented a talk and some tasting samples at a session of FutureFest curated by Dr Morgaine Gaye, a food futurologist whose work encompasses research into food systems and politics as well as trend forecasting and collaborations with cooks and artists.
Our response to the question of contemporary food systems in a hypothetical year 2050 was to propose looking backwards to traditional food preservation using live bacterial cultures. Mike introduced the talk, speaking about the ways in which such techniques help to diversify our diets and break the emancipating shackles of the mass-processing food industry. Josh talked about the family of cultured foods, some of techniques involved in their making, and how these can be incorporated into the culinary vocabulary.
We presented a slideshow of images of recent fermented products we have been working on, and handed out tasters of lacto-fermented turnips, pickled green elderberries and a mature cherry kombucha.
Dr. Lucy Gilliam, who is currently travelling across the Atlantic in a sailboat with some 'live' foods we gave her, wrote a blog post about the event for the Journal of Wild Culture.