Reach 2025: Beyond the Dinner Plate
Future Flourishing researchers use food as a tool to address global extractivism and inequality
By Liz Do
For more than a decade, researchers Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Fellows in the Future Flourishing program, have collaborated on their project, Cooking Sections. Their work investigates the systems that shape the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological and political legacies of extractivism – the large-scale extraction of raw and natural resources for export.
Cooking Sections has taken them to northern Istanbul to explore fragile wetland ecologies through the lives of semi-wild water buffalo and to Kivalian, an Iñupiaq village in Arctic Alaska to document local voices in their fight for relocation and climate justice.
Since 2016, they have been working in the islands of Skye and Raasay, Scotland. There, seashells discarded from restaurants are given new life as a new building material and art installation. Bivalve Murals offers an artistic and ecological process to address the environmental harm caused by salmon farming.
“Decades of intensive salmon farming has led to pollution and dead zones that are destroying the marine environment – not only in Scotland – but in many other places in the world, including Canada,” said Fernández Pascual, a Principal Investigator at CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in the United Kingdom.
As an alternative to salmon, bivalves – aquatic mollusks such as clams, mussels and oysters – offer a low-impact approach to aquaculture. Unlike salmon, they don't require antibiotics or synthetic inputs and even actively filter and clean the water around them.
“We’ve been calling for divestment from salmon farming and investment into other forms of aquaculture that are more regenerative and to work together with residents to think of cultural tradition transitions to do that,” explains Schwabe, who is also a Principal Investigator at CLIMAVORE x Jameel at the RCA.
Fernández Pascual and Schwabe worked with restaurants to remove salmon from the menu, and with local schools to develop apprenticeship programs to train the next generation of cooks to incorporate bivalves.
To mitigate food waste, they're using the bivalve shells collected and discarded from local restaurants to create a terrazzo-like material that offers a sustainable alternative to cement. They’ve used the compacted material to create artistic murals, created in two parts, “twins,” as they call them. One is installed in a local community space; its counterpart will enter a museum collection at the MSU Broad Museum and the University of Edinburgh. Sales of these works will help fund a local production facility for the material.
Beyond material innovation, the project represents a long-term model for ecological and cultural repair.
“For us, success means figuring out how to extend these processes – not just for three years, but for 100 years,” said Fernández Pascual. “What would it mean if there is this localized action and research, brought together in one place, for a very long period of time?”
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