Science Friday - These Artists Serve Up Environmental Crises Through Food

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Would you be interested in a cookie infused with smog from your favorite city? Maybe a loaf of sourdough made from wheat tainted by wildfires?Those are just a few of the projects from the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, based in Amsterdam and Portugal, where artists use innovative ingredients to represent environmental crises and imagine what the future of food could look like.Ira talks with Zack Denfeld, co-founder of the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, about how art and food can help us envision a more sustainable food system.Read the full story about how artists and chefs are putting ecological crises on the menu.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

May I interest you in a cookie, infused with air pollution? And so our first instinct was to go out and try to capture this taste, which we did by whipping egg whites or making egg marangs in the middle of very polluted cities and picking up some of that truly disgusting air quality. It's Tuesday, September 24th, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm SciFri producer Rasha Irides. At the Center for Genomic Gastronomy in Europe, Artists are using innovative and unconventional ingredients to make things like smog cookies

and loaves of sourdough made with wheat tainted by wildfires, even mock representations of extinct animals. The goal is to help people taste environmental crises and reimagine what the future of food could look like. Ira Flato talks with the center's co-founder Zach Denfeld. Zach, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Good to be here.

First of all, can you define for us what is genomic astronomy? Yeah, I mean, a slightly technical definition is we study the organisms and environments that are manipulated by human food cultures. But maybe more plain spoken way is we're interested in how we grow and eat food and how that relates to the life sciences. And the goal of the center is what? We want to have people think more deeply about what they themselves choose to eat and then at a larger scale, what our agro ecosystems look like, what kind of plants or animals we're raising and how those relate to environmental crises, both locally and globally. And how do you decide what kind of gastronomical delight you're going to create?

Yeah, usually when we start a project, we think about an unusual ingredient or a landscape and transition and start to visit farms or chefs and think about what is facing them, what their challenges are. And then we're often reading scientific papers or collaborating with scientific labs to sort of understand how these worlds that don't always talk to each other could. So where the bridge, yeah, kind of between a chef or a farmer and then a scientist. All right. Let's get into this because I want to know more about these air pollution.

cookies. How would you make such a thing? And why? Yeah, so smog tasting is a project we started back in 2011, actually in Bangalore India. And we were working with students thinking about do-it-yourself air pollution sensing. And we kind of realized that a few more numbers on a screen weren't going to, you know, change anyone's behavior. So we started paying close attention to the smell of smog and realized that there's different types of smog based on the chemicals that are in the pollution. So there's even a lab at the University of California, which we visited. That's a smog synthesis lab. And so our first instinct was to go out and try to capture this taste, which we did by whipping egg whites or making egg marangs in the middle of very polluted cities and picking up some of that truly disgusting

air quality. And as we did this in different cities around the world, we really realized that there were different recipes for understanding smog. There were different constituent chemicals, and those gave really different smells and tastes. And when people tasted them, they were choosing to taste. It wasn't breathing. Some people don't want to taste a smog meringue, but other people want to taste it and understand how their local taste of place in the air compares to, let's say, Beijing or Houston, Texas, or Bangalore. Do you have a city that has the tastiest smog or the worst smog?

I have a surprising one, which is we were in Bergen, Norway, which is a truly beautiful city and you would think has amazing air quality. But because of the seven mountains, pollution gets trapped and then large boats come in the summer and a lot of bunker fuel is used. So you go from kind of quite beautiful, clean air to kind of some of the most dramatic bad air in the, in Europe because of the geography. That was pretty surprising. Yeah, that would be surprising. And what do people say after they've bitten into one of your smoggy cookies? Well, they start to ask really interesting questions.

They say, oh, will I be poisoned? Will I be sick? We say, well, you're breathing it every day, and your digestive system and your respiratory system process these chemicals quite differently. And they start to say, well, why does it taste like that? Or why am I scared of it? So then we kind of open up a conversation that gets beyond just sort of quantitative. measures of how bad things are to precise things about which chemicals and from where.

Is it from coal-fired power plants? Is it from automobiles? Is it from, you know, mercury processing? So kind of some of that specificity comes out. But they also then think back to like as they're walking through a city or their town, what the smell is. They become, yeah, more cognizant of their day-to-day kind of smell experience. Now we've been talking about cookies here. Do you have a favorite other food that the center created? I think the cobalt 60 sauce is pretty interesting. Wait, wait, the cobalt 60 sauce? Can to tell me about that?

We got pretty interested in the history of radiation breeding. So kind of before our contemporary techniques of CRISPR or transgenesis, the U.S., but lots of other countries thought about could we expose seeds or plants to radiation and mutate them to get new agricultural varieties. So that research still continues, even though it's wound down. And we wanted to go out and find some of the successes from that research and make a sauce out of it. So we made Cobalt 60 sauce, which was plants and seeds that were exposed to cobalt 60 in order to mutate them. And then we're grown out.

So, you know, a lot of watermelon varieties and barley and a lot of the peppermint. So having that kind of palette of ingredients kind of directed what the sauce could be. So we have this kind of quite fruity, minty barbecue sauce that we've served on many occasions. And the people who eat this are not fearful that they're eating radiation. They've confused the two things. Right. And that's an important conversation we can begin, is one is just kind of laying out the facts, but also talk about how this history of science of radiation breeding compares to like GMOs,

what the fears are and what maybe the possibilities are. and where that can open up people's imagination, because we kind of already have done some odd research, even almost 100 years ago now. Yeah. And that's the thing you've got a conversation going, right? That's what you'd like. Yeah, for sure.

And I think the art here can open up some, you know, other ways of approaching this that aren't so rational. So they're not irrational, but they might be irrational. And what I mean by that is by using taste and flavor and preference, it brings things in like, experience and joy, but also memories of home and, you know, things that aren't quite normative in scientific research. And it doesn't reduce all food experiences to like calories or optimizing efficiency. Right. That is really fascinating. I know you've got a new project in the works,

one involving AI, of course, and an ancient farming practice. Tell us about that. Yeah. So we've been kind of researching food forests and agroforestry here in Europe and to a certain extent in North America and Asia for the last three years. And so food forest is kind of this movement to either relearn about or to reinvent really biodiverse ways of doing agriculture. So it's using a lot of perennial plants rather than field crops. And the idea is that it's very biodiverse and you're building towards these really resilient trees over 10, 20 or 30 years. So this is kind of food forest farming does a lot of ecological. good, but it has some constraints, which is it's extremely complex. You might have 100 species

that you're picking in a week. Our farmer last week dropped off 24 different varieties here at the end of the season. And it doesn't have a lot of protein. So what we've done is we've kind of combined these really biodiverse food forest ingredients with some of the alternative proteins that are coming out of food design labs and research labs. And so that might be everything from legumes to sort of of artificial shrimp and artificial chicken to even lab-grown meat. And so we've been using AI to combine these really two different visions of the future of food, which are not usually put next to each other, but could actually be complementary in terms of what they offer to the kitchen. And you know, people are experimenting with new sources of protein because we're like running

out of protein. Is AI good at finding those substitutes? You know, I think it's, I wouldn't put this on AI, but I think the focus here on recipes and culture is what's good because a lot of the obsession around protein is like how do you reduce, you know, some of the animal consumption and then how do you get people to eat more plants and vegetables? And then the solutions often is like goop, gray goo, you know, fake chicken, but actually getting really good at making beautiful, healthy plant-based foods that are desirable, happens in the kitchen or in the family or in the cafeteria of a hospital, let's say. And so for that, you do need a lot of culinary knowledge. And I think AI

doesn't hurt. Yeah. Yeah. And so what can you do through art that scientists may not be able to do? We collaborate with lots of scientists, and I think they're excited to work with us because it gives them a chance to change both their perspective and the way they can talk about what they do. So it's not always the case that you can bring in things like beauty or joy or even conviviality into a scientific paper or even trying to reinvent a food system. And so I think being able to talk about a new, let's say, intercropping method that's being tested in the fields and actually can transform that not only into a recipe that uses these diverse plants,

but then create a moment where people can experience that, not as something abstract, but as something real that they're putting into their body and they're spending time tasting, is just a really different pace and approach to food. And I think most scientists who work on food or the environment care deeply and love those moments in life, but they don't always get to shine in the research. And so like foregrounding that makes that part of the inquiry about the world or our experience in the world as essential as measuring the world or optimizing the world, you know, really enjoying the world that we're creating. Last question for you. How can folks at home practice this kind of art in their own kitchens?

Any advice for them? Yeah, I think just taking a bit more time. If you have it on a weekend, then you're not rushing to just try to get some delicious, nutritious food to your family in your very busy schedule. And just gather a bunch of unusual stuff. Maybe you go to the farmer's market. Maybe you go to the supermarket and you buy something you've always been curious about, but kind of never taken a chance on.

And then sit with it for a minute. maybe read about it online or read a Wikipedia post about its history. And when you focus on even any one ingredients, an entire world opens up. So if you get an apple, pay attention to what variety it is. And there's a whole history of how that apple got to you today in terms of breeding and transport and recipes around it. And let that kind of be a moment of being steeped in those cultural as well as potentially scientific histories, and then see what you can do with that with other ingredients in your kitchen.

Fascinating, Zach. Good luck to you and your food folks. Thank you very much. Great to talk to you. You too. Zach Denfeld is a co-founder of the Center for Genomic Astronomy in Amsterdam. And if you want to read more about this fantasy foodie future, head to our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash food future. Lots of folks help make this show happen, including Annie Niro, Emma Gomez. Charles Bergquist. Danielle Johnson. On tomorrow's episode, how AI chatbots are changing scientific publishing.

Join us. I'm Zafri producer, Rasha Iridi.