Becoming CLIMAVORE, Cooking Sections
Image courtesy Cooking Sections and Climavore, see websites for credits.
What if we planned recipes and meals in cycles of months and years?
We‘ve noticed a growing number of art institutions collaborating with @weareclimavore’s The Becoming CLIMAVORE Project to retool their cafe and restaurant menus around climate. The project by artist duo @cookingsections caught our attention for its reframe of eating as an embodied act to restore flourishing food systems.
The reality of our global industrial food system is often hidden on the plate - we extract from and alter landscapes to satiate human appetite, yet often without consideration for the costs. The Becoming CLIMAVORE Project works with local chefs to create CLIMAVORE menus that contribute to nature rather than degrade it. Recipes include regenerative local ingredients such as legumes that improve soil fertility, mussels that filter excess nitrogen in ocean waters, adaptive harvests based on drought levels and crop pairings that support local biomes.
Image courtesy Cooking Sections and Climavore, see websites for credits.
Stirring Our Senses
Playing with our palette, The Becoming CLIMAVORE Project harnesses our felt sense to help us viscerally perceive how we belong in balance with the land we depend on. Every dish starts and ends with a taste of interconnection. Recipes immerse us in the intelligences of living organisms and invite our own intuition to find synergies of flavor and our role in feeding reciprocity.
By inviting heightened feelings of wonder for intraspecies collaboration and sensual connection to the aliveness in local biospheres, @cookingsections helps us imagine beyond our own limited perspectives and from generous feeling states. We welcome the emergence of new flavor combinations, and a new preference for climate abundance.
Image courtesy Cooking Sections and Climavore, see websites for credits.
How it Moves Us, Forward
The team has since created CLIMAVORE Station on the Isle of Skye in Scotland that brings together multiple disciplines in a test bed of co-creation. We hope they encourage more institutions to enliven culinary experiences with expansive and generative possibilities that change not only what we eat, but how we cultivate flourishing.
Image courtesy Cooking Sections and Climavore, see websites for credits.
Cooking Sections
Cooking Sections investigates the systems that shape the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological, and political legacies of extractivism. Using site-responsive installations, performances, and video, their practice confronts the overlapping boundaries of art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics. Founded in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Cooking Sections uses food as both a lens and a tool to trace the metabolic relations behind industrialised food systems. Since 2015, they run CLIMAVORE, a long-term, site-responsive project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates and how to metabolise climate breakdown.