An Education

After once coming across a poster in the London Underground, I learnt of a exhibition called ‘FOOD: Bigger than the Plate’ that is currently taking place in the V&A Museum. After reading a bit more about it online, I was very interested by its premise so I decided to visit it a few days ago.

The exhibition was split into four sections discussing the composting, farming, trading and eating of food, and really questioned the sustainability of the current food culture. Being completely honest, while I had always been passionate about food, I never quite thought deeply about the many environmental and ethical aspects surrounding it, but this had really invoked my feelings towards it. I was also impressed by some of the artworks on display there, so here are some more snapshots from the exhibition:

The agricultural growing calendar in Hong Kong. The exhibition discussed the difficulties of growing crops in Hong Kong due to its lack of open spaces, something I knew too well having lived there. Still a nostalgic feeling though…

Project Florence: an interface that makes conversation between plants and humans possible (?) I couldn’t get any coherent answers from it though no matter what I asked… 😅

Free samples to try! Though I don’t think I am a huge fan of the floral flavours though…

Obviously I needed to take a picture of this lol! 😂

The power of Instagram in food marketing nowadays (as we all knew too well haha!)

Cheeses cultured from human bacteria taken from ears, toes and armpits of these celebrities that include Heston and Ruby from Bake Off… Not sure how I feel about this lol…. 😅

Moving on to the last section of the exhibition, I was very intrigued by this interactive stall from the LOCI Food Lab. Basically, a small taster menu will be created according to your selection of answers to the big question of ‘A great food system should be…’ I chose ‘cutting-edge’, ‘zero waste’ and ‘delicious’. What would you have picked?

The small sample actually tasted not bad. I personally quite enjoyed the cucumber crisp, though I am not entirely sure what the rest of the stuff was.😂 (I couldn’t taste the powdered anchovy at all until I looked at the receipt!) It turned out that ‘delicious’, ‘nutritious’ and ‘zero waste’ were the popular answers (in that order) chosen by the 26,254 visitors that had visited so far. (I guess I am not a healthy person after all lol…) ‘Profitable’ was the least popular answer. Do you agree with this result?🤔