ITALY - UK PARTNERSHIP

PARTNERSHIP | Autumn 2019 16 FOOD: Bigger Than the Plate A bold exhibition following food from the table to waste F ood is our life, it is the fuel that allows us to work, have fun and love, and is one of the fundamental parts of our day. When we think about food, we mainly think about something to eat, but there is much more behind this concept. FOOD: Bigger Than the Plate is the new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, that presents food as never seen before. Analysing the entire industry towards a journey that covers all the aspects of food, from the table to being waste, the exhibition allows the visitor to discover how this circle works and how it can be improved. The first section is called “Compost”, as the journey starts exactly from waste, one of the biggest problems of the industry. The urbanisation of the 20th century brought new ways of collecting waste that disrupted the relationship between men and food. In fact, since then the awareness of wasting food collapsed dramatically. The section analyses how to restore this circle with several interesting projects, such as Orange Fibre, which allows the creation of fabrics with the leftovers of oranges in Sicily, and Merdacotta, the idea of a Parmigiano maker who used the manure of its cows to produce a terracotta-like material that can be used even for tableware. The second part, “Farming”, is focused on how people can create food at home stimulating the community and urban farming, but also how new technologies will change the way we cultivate and eat food. “Trading” is the third segment, which poses questions about more transparent and diverse ways of buying, selling and transporting food. The “Banana Story” is a very interesting short video that shows the two-week journey of a banana from its tree in Ecuador to a supermarket in Iceland. An efficient way of making consumers aware of how much time and energy there is behind a simple piece of fruit. Concluding the exhibition is “Eating”, showing how cooking and eating are more than just feeding ourselves. There are projects from chefs, artists and designers who explore all the ways of eating and how the future of eating will be, sometimes in very provocative ways, such as the project, Black Market Pudding that, in 2012, tried to produce black pudding from the blood of living pigs rather than dead ones, in order to make it available for vegetarians. At the end of the exhibition, visitors are directed into the Food Lab and asked to participate to a quiz about their vision of future food. After picking three answer options from a list, the system elaborates a recipe tailored to the answers, which is immediately prepared by the staff in a canapé form. · FOOD: Bigger than the Plate, 18 May – 20 October 2019. Sponsored by BaxterStorey Photo : ‘Food | RULES | tomorrow’, 2019, film still © honey & bunny (Sonja Stummerer & Martin Hablesreiter) / Sebastian Arlamovsky