The New Diet – “Climavore”: WFTP Edible Experiences

One of the projects on display at the Slow Food WeFeedThePlanet conference in Milan was an interactive, installation-based project titled “Climavore”, put up by a london based duo called Cooking Sections.

You may have heard of the term Locavore, where a person’s diet consists only of locally produced food, from within a certain radius of their home.

Climavore is a concept that goes a step further:

“This is not fair. This is most probably not bio or vegetarian. Neither about being always local. In a world being increasingly dominated by food labels and certifications to appease our environmentally-sensitive conscience, there seems to be a need for a less market driven scenario, where climate itself induces humans to become flexible in their eating habits.”

In essence, Climavore is “the idea of a temporary diet that reacts to our climate-changing planet as a way to care about different ecologies and landscapes though food consumption.”

The project was displayed through a series of public tastings of a five-course meal; each course in the tasting was representative of a temporary diet shift in response to a certain ecological issue or climactic phenomenon.

Forever Fertile Season: Alfalfa, Peas and Clover salad -- actually very delicious!

For example, the first course was a salad of alfalfa, peas and cloverleaves. This is a diet to enable the “Forever Fertile Season”. In a world where natural resources are being exploited to produce copious amounts fertilizer, in the name of solving world hunger, could greater cultivation of naturally fertilizing plants like alfalfa and clovers be the solution? These leguminous plants are nitrogen fixers to the soil, but don’t get planted enough since they are not much in demand as food crops. Could consuming them as foods increase their demand, thus encouraging farmers to grow more natural fertilizers? This could help create a sustainable cycle in which the land is naturally “forever fertile”.

Similarly, the second course represented the diet for a drought season - “WaterStress bowls”, made of millets, lentils, pomegranate and carob syrup – all foods that grown well with very little water inputs.

Ocean Cleaning Season - Seaweed, Kelp and Muscles - supposedly all natural purifiers of the ocean

Of the three courses I sampled, two (in the photos) were actually quite tasty! The aim of this project was to create a concept that could eventually be adopted and practiced by people as a lifestyle. It is indeed a very intriguing concept, and I’m amazed at how progressively the conceptualizes were able to think!  But I am not sure the world is quite ready yet, to begin adopting the Climavore diet. I believe it may be a little ahead of its time. What do you think?