AFTER DINNER
Jan 2024 - Jan 2026
In its telling of civilization, food has become a political tool. Soft materials, blended, used to take care of living bodies. The dinner table is an inherently political space. Materials are part of their content; they have their own meanings just by existing. The food on the table can only be the result of political consequence. Yet coming together around the dinner table is still a celebration, a social event.
Every year we waste an average of 1.4 billion tons of food. According to the UNEP Food Waste Index 2021, around 931 million tonnes of food waste were generated in 2019; 61% of that waste came directly from households. In the EU, nearly 57 million tons of food waste are thrown away annually. That amounts to 127 kilos per EU citizen per year.
Our global food system is so fast and generic, it is hard to put these vast numbers into perspective. Our continuous supply chain implies that our food's final destination should always be an easy decision: if it is not our stomach, it should be the trash. This ideology transforms our leftovers into waste, completely without value. Even after local and governmental interventions, 20% of food produced in the European Union ends up in landfill sites.
Our kitchens and the products we use in them reflect our communal way of living, our relationship with nature and the urban environment, what can be dealt with individually versus communally. Valuing what we have as tools to be used rather than waste to be dealt with, can help alter human-centric extractivist perspectives and redefine our idea of consumption.
After Dinner is a research project meant to challenge our artificial idea of waste as unusable and explore bodily, domestic and communal narratives of our relationship with the products we consume; narratives of agency and interdependence in order to form new communal practices.
Themes
o Food as a living matter
o Communal knowledge and knowledge redistribution
o Contemporary culture, consumerism and food as a common
o Political aesthetics
o Non-human rights and circular economy
- Viable food is lost at each point of the production chain from seed to supermarket, however most of wasted food that ends up in landfills comes from homes.
- Food in landfills is eventually covered under other waste, it decomposes in anaerobic conditions, producing methane.
- Methane is 28 times stronger than carbon dioxide over a 100- year period. Methane contributes to 16% of global warming.
- The nutritious value of food, the energy, the proteins, will create more methane than other waste. Thus, the nutritious value of food becomes an enemy instead of an advantage. Food generates more methane than textiles, paper and wood.
- Even though carbon dioxide will last for an enormous amount of time in the atmosphere, warming up the planet, methane, even stronger, lasts only for 12 years. That means, that reducing methane is not only important for the future, but for the people that are alive now.
HOW
- Communal/ Accessible systems and spaces
- Accessible collection points and systems of processing
- Standardized ways of measuring and understanding
- New ways of understanding food waste and methane, their impact and possible usages
- Communal decision making of usage
WAYS OF MEASUREMENT (Putting it into context):
- Recreating the same amount of waste
- Standardized systems of measuring waste through objects, systems or services
- Objects/ functions running on methane
- New systems of understanding, communication methods and drawing parallels
- Measuring waste with sound/ decibel
- Creating a full waste home
The first step of After Dinner is to recreate the 127 kilos of waste that is attributed to each individual so that we can practically understand our physical impact. However, food is and should still be a celebration. So the waste will manifest on the form of 70s ugly cakes and jello prepared for a feast. Jello is a great way of communicating volume because it is transparent, so we can always see the amount of material in it. The feast is not only a celebration but also a place where food is showcased as a symbol of power and abundance.
