Food Exhibition

Planting “seeds of thought”:

A Review of the V&A’s
“Food: Bigger than the Plate” Exhibition

Fruits from the Garden and the Field (Purple and Yellow). © Fallen Fruit, 2019

Open to the public since the 18th of May and running until the 20th of October, the V&A’s summer exhibition Food: Bigger than the Plate, offers a bold and pioneering investigation into our food system. The exhibition brings together artists, designers, and farmers with the aim of showcasing what our current food system looks like and what we can do to improve it in order to ensure a more sustainable food future.

Audience watching film by Marissa Keating; music design by Joe Farley and Freddie Webb of Father.

Overall the exhibition is highly engaging; upon walking in the audience is immediately met with a film by Melissa Keating that brings together varying scenes from the food industry - how it is grown, harvested, transported and eaten; setting the tone for all the topics that the exhibition aims to explore further. The exhibition itself is then laid out into four sections, all looking at the different stages of the food cycle: Composting, Farming, Trading and Eating.

Urban Mushroom Farm © GroCycle

By beginning the exhibition with the Composting section the audience is immediately flung into dealing with the often uncomfortable topic of waste (including human waste). The exhibition’s narrative thus begins with how we can breathe new life into materials that under different circumstances we may consider completely obsolete. In this section, the first exhibit that stands out is the Loowatt, a no water toilet system that seals waste in biodegradable bags to be converted into fertiliser and energy. The Loowatt stands out both for being a great solution for areas without plumbing systems as well as the shock factor of an exhibition beginning with a toilet. The composting compartment of the exhibition then continues to look at a variety of interesting materials and how they can be repurposed, including Ludovica Cantarelli’s Wine Matters, in which a wine bottle and label are made from discarded grape skins and vine branches, highlighting the idea of a circular design that considers the full life of a material. Notable is also the Urban Mushroom exhibit by GroCycle which grows oyster mushrooms on a bed that includes used coffee grounds from the V&A cafe. The mushrooms, once grown and harvested will be reinserted to the cafe’s ingredient list, thus closing the nutrient loop and allowing the museum’s visitors the opportunity to sample a product grown in a more sustainable way.

Non Flower for a Hoverfly by Thomas Pausz (artist and designer), Dr Shannon Olsson (Chemical ecologist), and Vikram Pradhan (3D artist).

The audience leaves the composting section with a feeling of awe and hope at all the possibilities that exist in reusing waste materials, and encounters the Farming section of the exhibition which offers solutions on more sustainable farming methods whilst highlighting the disconnect between consumer and how food is grown. In a shielded compartment of the exhibition (likely because some scenes may be unsettling for younger viewers), the audience has the opportunity to view a 13-minute documentary by Nikolaus Geyrhalter and Wolfgang Widerhofer named Our Daily Bread, illustrating what European industrial food production looks like. The result is an unflinching representation that depicts how the process of industrial production is in many ways completely sanitised and devoid of any emotion. On the other end of the spectrum Non-Flower for a Hoverfly by Thomas Pausz, Dr Shannon Olsson and Vikram Pradhan is a beautiful design for a pollen container created in accordance to how hoverflies perceive food. This design could eventually be used as an aid to attract hoverflies to crops that they would not normally visit; as hoverflies are an important pollinator and are unfortunately in global decline, solutions such as these could be the answer to helping such insects increase in numbers again.

Supernatural, Uli Westphal, 2019, commissioned by the V&A

Moving forward to the Trading section, the audience is faced with the very real issue of the fact that the average consumer knows next to nothing about where food comes from, highlighting the ever-increasing distance between producer and consumer, as the result of the secrecy of a small number of huge corporations that control the food industry and how food is transported. Some thought-provoking pieces that challenge this mystery include Johanna Seelemann, Björn Steinar Blumenstein and Magnús Ingvar Ágústsson’s Banana Story that follows the full 8800km journey of a banana from a tree in Ecuador to a supermarket in Iceland, challenging the simplicity of the ‘made in’ label that provides the product’s place of origin but hides the complex truths of international food transport. Notable here is also Uli Westphal’s Supernatural which repurposes scenes of picturesque wonder often depicted on food packaging in order to create an oversaturated landscape that is simultaneously perfect and unsettling. Westphal’s piece highlights how food marketing is geared toward making the consumer feel as though what they are buying comes from somewhere wholesome, whilst distracting from the less attractive realities of industrialised farming. Interestingly, the imagery Westphal has used have been taken from Asda, Morrisons and Waitrose.

The concluding section, Eating, brings together all the processes of the food system that the exhibition has explored. Eating is undoubtedly one of the most ritualised of human actions, and a passion for food permeates all cultures in one way or another. As such, concluding the exhibition with the topic of eating, something that everyone can relate to, provides the audience with an opportunity to explore ideas of what it is that makes food delicious, and how sustainability is an important consideration for this everyday action. Unsurprisingly, one exhibit is focused on how Instagram has altered the way people interact with food, and how such immediate visual experiences have provided individuals and business with the tools to reach more people and experiment with more culinary ideas. Other exhibits in this section include a table full of innovative tableware designed to enhance the eating experience, the Ooho! by Skipping Rocks Lab that is a fully edible and biodegradable alternative to plastic bottles made from algae, and the Loci Food Lab by the Centre for Genomic Gastronomy which invites the audience to taste their own food values by choosing three out of fifteen options of what they would like food to be like in the future - once the three values have been chosen, the people behind the lab put together a tiny canapé and invite the participant to taste their choice.

'Food: Bigger than the Plate' successfully explores the processes of the food industry, offering a wide range of ideas and solutions on how something everyone depends on can be made more sustainable. In the current climate, where the media increasingly focuses on issues such as the climate crisis and people are becoming more aware of how humans are affecting the environment, this exhibition is an important addition to the discussion, offering the public the opportunity not only to learn more, but also ideas on how they can be part of the change for a sustainable future.

https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/food-bigger-than-the-plate

Words by Arietta Chandris