Jellyfish/food futures reading list

Spineless, Juli Berwald
book

“Jellyfish Blooms: advances and challenges”
link
As jellyfish interactions with humans increase in coastal waters, there is an urgent need to provide science-based management strategies to mitigate the negative socioeconomic impacts of jellyfish blooms and to exploit potential benefits of their ecosystem services. This Theme Section presents the latest advances in jellyfish research, from new sampling methods to food-web and life-cycle studies. The methodological advances presented will help to overcome difficulties in sampling due to the fluctuations in abundance and irregular distributions of jellyfish.

“Eating Jellyfish: safety, chemical and sensory properties”
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People’s preference for fish with a high trophic level, like Atlantic cod and tuna, leads to a large food footprint. Responsible seafood consumption should include underutilised local products; hence the culinary use of edible jellyfish can be an effective contribution. The present work focused on Catostylus tagi to contribute to the consumption of edible jellyfish in the West.

FOOD FUTURES

Agriculture, Climate Change and Food Security in the 21st Century: Our Daily Bread, Lewis H. Ziska
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This book explores the history of agriculture, and the threat that climate change imposes for all aspects of our “daily bread”. While these challenges are severe and significant, it argues that we are not without hope, and offers a wide range of solutions, from polyculture farming to feminism that can, when applied, lead to a better future for humankind.

“Moving from ‘‘matters of fact’’ to ‘‘matters of concern’’ in order to grow economic food futures in the Anthropocene,” Ann Hill
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Agrifood scholars commonly adopt ‘‘a matter of fact way of speaking’’ to talk about the extent of neoliberal rollout in the food sector and the viability of ‘‘alternatives’’ to capitalist food initiatives. Over the past few decades this matter of fact stance has resulted in heated debate in agrifood scholarship on two distinct battlegrounds namely, the corporate food regime and the alternative food regime. In this paper I identify some of the limitations of speaking in a matter of fact way and of focusing on capitalist and neoliberal economies as the yardstick by which to assess all food economy initiatives. Using stories of bananas in Australia and the Philippines I advocate for a new mode of critical inquiry in food scholarship that focuses on matters of concern. Following Bruno Latour I use the term critical inquiry to refer to research methods and thinking practices that multiply possible ways of being and acting in the world. The new mode of critical inquiry I propose centers on enacting three broad research matters of concern. These are (1) gathering and assembling economic diversity (2) human actancy and (3) nonhuman actancy. I argue that through becoming critical minds in the Latourian sense researchers can play a key role in enacting economic food futures in the Anthropocene.

“Future of Food: How We Cook,” Nicola David et al
link
Rustling up a meal becomes a whole new experience when you can print your own food, use a smart oven or have a robot do all the work for you

IFTF: Food Futures Lab

Positioned at the center of Silicon Valley, California’s agricultural powerhouses, and the Bay Area’s dynamic food culture, IFTF’s Food Futures Lab is embedded in an epicenter of food innovation and has ties to other innovation hubs in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

 

http://foodfutures.group.shef.ac.uk/

Home

The world is increasingly urban. W hat urban dwellers eat now and will eat i n the future, and how this food is brought to them, will impact the sustainability of our food systems. We therefore need to work on urban food systems – i.e.

Future Topophagies

Here are some images from a workshop I co-organized with Valentine Cadieux and Steve Dietz through the University of Minnesota and Northern Lights in Minneapolis, MN at the end of September 2014. The workshop was staged in conjunction with the show thinking making living at the Nash Gallery at the U of MN. We couldn’t have run this without the generous coordination of Christine Baeumler. And I’d have been helpless without Valentine Cadieux. It was  an exciting, fast, and very productive process. I *think* everyone had a good time and got a lot out of the experience.

We drew from a set of seven constraints, imagined future picnics based on those constraints, and at the end of day two, prototyped the food and packaging we’d use if we were to make such a public event. I will be writing up the scenarios shortly.

While these participants came from art, social science, history, ecocriticism, architecture, biology, climatology, and politics, I think you could run this workshop with a wide variety of people and publics, and turn up relevant, and resonant results.

Participants:  Stephen Sebestyen, Laura Bigger, Teréz Iacovino, Matthew Tucker, Sarah Peters, Cam Gordon, Tracey Deutsch, Karen Moss, Sandra Teitge, Aaron Dysart, Andrea Steudel, Molly Balcom Raleigh, Christine Baeumler, Kenny Blumenfeld,  Shanai Matteson, Sarah Nassif, Molly Reichert, Ryan Seibold, Bunmi Odumuye, Emily Stover, interns Andrea, Marie, and Della, and Janaki Ranpura (in spirit and email)

Images: M Zurkow, V Cadieux and Sarah Nassif.
More images by Laura Bigger here.

Not an Artichoke, Nor From Jerusalem

"Haud Nomine Tantum" (Not in Name Alone). A new seal for NYC Edibles. Marina Zurkow (2012)

 

What is local? As a challenge to currently marketed notions of ‘sustainable,” “green” and “locavore,” Michael Connor, Alex Freedman and I conceived of and created  a formal “explorer’s club” style dinner for 25 at the Artist’s Institute in New York on Jan 16th 2012. “Not an Artichoke, Nor from Jerusalem” was a dinner that rendered the local exotic, and the exotic all too local.

Click here for documentation, menu, and project description:
http://www.o-matic.com/play/food/AI/

 

 

Local Heroes

Foraging in Marine Park in early December

 

I am co-conceiving a dinner that takes a new look at the “local” (info in next post) with Michael Connor and Alex Freedman at The Artist’s Institute (Anthony Huberman/Hunter College space in the LES) on Monday Jan 16. A lot of amazing people were involved –

– Environmental artist Oliver Kellhammer helped us forage at Marine Park, thanks to good tips from Wildman Steve Brill

– Andrew Nundel, a forager in Gloucester MA , whom I met through the Forage Ahead Yahoo Group generously donated his stash of frozen Japanese knotweed

– The chefs Lauryn and Albert from Lucullan Foods are fabulous and exciting to be around, they know so much are are truly adventurers

– and Bun Lai, the owner and genius behind New Haven’s Miya’s Sushi, whom I found through this  GOOD article:  “When Life Gives You Invasive Species, Make Sushi”  that  10 different people sent me. Bun Lai is a gustatory superhero.
Here’s the text he sent Michael today:

I just finished foraging.  I caught roughly fifty Asian shore crabs, thirty wild oysters and a bunch of wild rock seaweed.   I also made you all five bottles of sake from fresh pine needles.  Native Americans used to eat the inner cambrium of pine during winter months when scurvy would be a problem because pine contains a lot of vitamin c.

Check out Bun Lai’s blog