Tasting Tomorrow

Angelabelle Abarientos, Erin Riorden, Jonathon Keats, Matt Fitzpatrick

Within this century, climate is expected to change so dramatically that future conditions will be unfamiliar to those previously experienced by generations past. In order to deal with these changes and the inhospitable environments that may result, we will need to learn from each other in new ways and at accelerated speeds. This includes learning how to adapt and live with extremes, but also learning to embrace new, climatically appropriate foods. Tasting Tomorrow is an interactive online platform designed to facilitate adaptation to climate change through food and cuisine.

Check out the prototype here.

Concept

Tasting Tomorrow uses climate analog mapping to envision the future climate of a particular geographic location, and the magnitude of expected climate change impact on sense of place from the perspective of food and associated cultural traditions. This powerful statistical tool quantifies the similarity of a location’s climate relative to the climate of another place and/or time. By forecasting future climates in terms of geographically-based climate analogs, we can search for substitute ingredients that will be locally sustainable in the future, and learn how to use them in ways that retain heritage flavors. Even if these ingredients are not used, the diversification of options and degrees of freedom in the kitchen will increase resilience.

In broad terms, we’ve been working on climate-adapted heritage cuisine for several years. C/Change has provided us with the means to accelerate the work, leveraging Matt Fitzpatrick’s climate modeling in ways that can have practical impact.

The underlying motivation is simple: How do we adapt so we can be resilient in the face of climate change? We’re looking at this question from a cultural standpoint. Food is embedded in people’s sense of identity across many different cultures. And if you look at food and food traditions, they aren’t static. They’re dynamic. They’ve changed through time. So there’s a real opportunity to help people prepare for the future.

Communicating climate change is really difficult. It’s hard to get a sense of what our world is going to feel like in a tangible way. If someone simply says that the temperature is going to increase by two degrees Celsius, what does that mean? Instead we’re asking people to look at the globe. We’re asking: Which place on the globe today has the climate that you’re going to experience in 50 years? How different is it? And how different is it from a food standpoint? Putting climate change in these concrete terms, we can motivate people to act. And because food is universal, there’s a great opportunity to build connections, and through those connections to develop a network of know-how that will ultimately be needed to cope with whatever we aren’t able to mitigate.

Process

From the start, we recognized that the success of our initiative would depend on sharing of cultural knowledge required to cultivate and process unfamiliar food plants. And we realized that interpersonal relationships built through a network of shared know-how might provide important linkages for future migration of peoples. More broadly, we believe that the global cooperative effort required to create an atlas of climate-adapted heritage cuisine may provide a platform for political cooperation to mitigate climate change.

We’ve been supporting this cooperative effort not only through the development of practical online tools but also through high-visibility public events. By guiding people through the process of making cookbooks for the next generation at Gray Area or by serving climate-adapted heritage cuisines before the climate has radically changed in places such as Mérida, the initiative provokes discussion about root causes of existential threats, generates new insights about socio-political priorities, and motivates people to act more responsibly to sustain the environment we have today.

The long-term survival of communities threatened by extreme weather and resource scarcity will depend on cooperation within and between groups living in close proximity. Cooperation will become increasingly difficult under the increased stress induced by climate change. Preparation for the worst can bring out the best in us. Practicing generosity by freely offering the fruits of our past experience to those who may someday be in need, and cultivating the grace to learn from what others have to teach, we may even find the wherewithal to flourish.

The process of building a website has exposed us to some of the complexities underlying any substantive exchange of information about culinary traditions and traditional foods. Food traditions tend to be highly localized, and to depend on a lot of implicit knowledge. A website needs somehow to operate at a global scale and to make implicit knowledge explicit.

With each iteration, we’ve learned more about the implicit knowledge we were oblivious to at the beginning. We’ve discovered ways to prompt people to share what they know, including what they don’t realize they know, so that their knowledge is useful to people half a world away.

We initially thought that our biggest challenge would be to make climate modeling accessible to people. We thought that the difficulty would be with the management of big data. Although there were real challenges in that realm, the shift in focus to user experience was an important change, resulting in a stronger end product.

Lessons

The C/Change program gave us the opportunity to make our abstract ideas concrete. So many ideas that sound good in conversation turn out to need reconsideration and refinement when put into practice.

We already had some experience with the nuances of culinary adaptation from several events with UNESCO Cities of Gastronomy. In both Tucson and Mérida, we worked with the James Beard Award-winning chef Janos Wilder on adapting the recipe for olla podrida, a traditional dish of Burgos, Spain, using ingredients found in Tucson (which currently has the climate that Burgos is expected to have in half a century).

But having to facilitate culinary adaptation remotely through a website presents different problems. We had to learn how to encapsulate what we did in person, and then we had to learn how to let go, allowing other people to make of the process what they will without our intervention.

Beyond the technical challenges, we’ve had to address the challenge of getting people to participate in a meaningful way. Enlisting the social sciences, we’ve been investigating a whole range of important questions: How flexible is somebody’s identity? What aspects of culture are plastic? What are the leverage points that can motivate adaptation?

We’re still in the early stages of finding answers. To collect data, our app includes a user survey. What we learn from the survey and direct observation of interactions on the website will be essential for the next iteration – and for increasing the impact of our initiative as a whole.

Future

A digital platform is useful as a means of helping people in the present, but is not an end in and of itself. What is important is to increase the scale and scope and speed of exchange between people so that we can all help each other. We foresee a social network initially developing through online exchange of ingredients and culinary know-how. But ultimately we would like to see the network move offline, into the world.

In a sense, we’re trying to build a scaffold for the interactions that will be essential as the climate changes and people migrate. This scaffold can be used to prototype new practices and develop new relationships that people can take with them wherever they go.

Tasting Tomorrow will succeed in the long term if the platform becomes obsolete.