The Anthropocene Cookbook

More than sixty speculative art and design projects explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes. In the Age of the Anthropocene—an era characterized by human-caused climate disaster—catastrophes and dystopias loom. The Anthropocene Cookbook takes our planetary state of emergency as an opportunity to seize the moment to imagine constructive change and new ideas. How can we survive in an age of constant environmental crises? How can we thrive? The Anthropocene Cookbook answers these questions by presenting a series of investigative art and design projects that explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes. This cookbook of ideas rethinks our eating habits and traditions, challenges our food taboos, and proposes new recipes for humanity’s survival. These more than sixty projects propose new ways to think and make food, offering tools for creative action rather than traditional recipes. They imagine modifying the human body to digest cellulose, turning plastic into food, tasting smog, extracting spices and medicines from sewage, and growing meat in the lab. They investigate provocative possibilities: What if we made cheese using human bacteria, enabled human photosynthesis through symbiosis with algae, and brought back extinct species in order to eat them? The projects are diverse in their creative approaches and their agendas—multilayered, multifaceted, hybrid, and cross-pollinated. The Anthropocene Cookbook offers a survival guide for a future gone rogue, a road map to our edible futures.

More than sixty speculative art and design projects explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes. In the Age of the Anthropocene—an era characterized by human-caused climate disaster—catastrophes and dystopias loom. The Anthropocene Cookbook takes our planetary state of emergency as an opportunity to seize the moment to imagine constructive change and new ideas. How can we survive in an age of constant environmental crises? How can we thrive? The Anthropocene Cookbook answers these questions by presenting a series of investigative art and design projects that explore how art, food, and creative thinking can prepare us for future catastrophes. This cookbook of ideas rethinks our eating habits and traditions, challenges our food taboos, and proposes new recipes for humanity’s survival. These more than sixty projects propose new ways to think and make food, offering tools for creative action rather than traditional recipes. They imagine modifying the human body to digest cellulose, turning plastic into food, tasting smog, extracting spices and medicines from sewage, and growing meat in the lab. They investigate provocative possibilities: What if we made cheese using human bacteria, enabled human photosynthesis through symbiosis with algae, and brought back extinct species in order to eat them? The projects are diverse in their creative approaches and their agendas—multilayered, multifaceted, hybrid, and cross-pollinated. The Anthropocene Cookbook offers a survival guide for a future gone rogue, a road map to our edible futures.

An exploration of food, ingestion, and digestion in the emerging field of the metabolic arts. Food appears everywhere in the arts. But what happens after viewers carry food away in the intestinal networks activated by social practice art, the same way digestion turns food into a body? Exploring the emerging field of metabolic arts, After Eating claims digestion and metabolism as key cultural, creative, and political processes that demand attention. Taking an artist-centered approach to nutrition, Lindsay Kelley cultivates a neglected middle ground between the everyday and the scientific, using metabolism as a lens through which to read and write about art. Divided into two parts and full of playful chapter titles such as “Food Babies” and “Poop Circus,” After Eating investigates multiple facets of the sociocultural implications of body image and body process in body art from the 1970s to the present. By engaging the notion of “after” as an artistic homage or tribute, metabolism moves beyond the cell to transform into a method for responding to the most difficult cultural, philosophical, and political challenges of the contemporary moment. Metabolic reading rethinks feminist, queer, bioart, installation, and performance projects, providing artists, students, and teachers with new pathways into art theory.

"Welcome to the Anthropocene Age, a new epoch in the history of the earth where virtually everything you see, hear, feel, eat or drink has been shaped, directly or indirectly, by human hands and minds. Dramatic climate change is a major feature of this new age and so too is a tremendous increase in the number and speed of species going extinct on a continual basis. Extinction is being driven by climate change, pollution, habitat loss and, perhaps most importantly, by the human propensity to consume the planet's resources as though they were all infinitely renewable." -- Back cover.

Cook your “greenest” meal: Earth to Table inspires local and sustainable eating in every mouth-watering recipe. There is nothing more delicious than a tomato still warm from the sun. Though that is easy to forget when we are surrounded by food shipped to our supermarkets from around the world, the healthiest and most delicious food often comes from farmers and artisans just down the road. In Earth to Table, renowned chefs Jeff Crump and Bettina Schormann remind us of the relationship between local eating and taste, and demonstrate how you can reduce your carbon footprint without diminishing your enjoyment of food. Bringing together stories of the passage of seasons on the farm; how-to sections; stunning photographs; and, of course, creative and delectable recipes that will leave anyone wondering why they ever considered eating a tomato in February.