 especially about eating in the Anthropocene with Catherine Kramer and Sark Denfield, about a different way how to cook our meals and how to get new ideas what to cook in our kitchen. So in the end we will have around 10 minutes of a question and answer with microphones and we also have a signal angel here so if there is already somebody awake in the streams you can ask questions in the IRC and Twitter. So let's have a nice talk and welcome them with a warm applause. So thank you very much for coming we figured you're here either because you're really interested in food or because you don't speak German and if you are the latter we're okay with that. I don't speak German either she does a little. So I'm Zach and Cat and we're from the Center for Genomic Astronomy so all of the research that we're showing you today can be found on our website we'll put up a link later genomicastronomy.com slash ccc. A lot of the work that we do is in Wikipedia articles and editing them so we'd be happy if you helped us edit those and then there'll be a lot of other links there if you want to follow up. So we do various things from updating Wikipedia pages to cheese wrestling and hosting planetary sculpture supper club and these are all sort of outlets for our research and ways of getting yeah talking about things and so what is genomic gastronomy well it kind of started as an antithesis to molecular gastronomy so trying to take into account politics economics and culture and technology into how we eat and food so a systems approach to food basically and these are some of the technologies we've been looking at we have a very broad definition of technology which I think is useful to put it into kind of historical lineage and it helps put a perspective on sort of new and emerging tech so yeah so we're just starting this dual lecture things if we stand awkwardly behind each other it's okay we're not bored we'll get better at it so we think that freedom of information should apply to food and we want to work towards an open food culture and so that's why we're here today at this conference we're amateurs or hobbyists I mean we're actually artists but we have no official qualifications within food science food systems agronomy anything like that but we spent two years getting really geeky about this subject and we're looking forward to questions and hopefully getting other people in this community interested in food and we do think this is directly rates relates to computing you can think of breeding as just very slow programming and so if you're trying to copy and paste a carrot genome it can actually take a year or even two years you have to really careful about cross-pollination or your information will get corrupted and so you want to make sure you have lots of backups and you have a distributed network of different people keeping rare breeds of carrots alive that's one metaphor we could use if you're lazy like me you don't want to code you just want to hack probably you want to work in the kitchen because you can just sort of slam stuff together and do interesting stuff very quickly and even if you just eat with some intentionality it's an easy way to get involved in food and thinking more critically about approaching food and so why should we care about this well humans are reprogramming the biosphere every day our talk is called eating in the enthropocene and the enthropocene is the name that some geologists are starting to give to our current era where the activities of humans are basically disrupting the entire planet's ecosystems and biosphere and so we're also leaving increasing a lot of the decisions about the agro eco culinary system in the hands of few and part of that is because a lot of it's really boring or hard to understand and that's something that this community's done a really great job of making things that are technical or difficult to understand at least interesting or exciting and getting people involved of and then last we're losing a lot of genetic diversity even within agriculture there's a huge reduction of genetic diversity underway and a huge private privatization of the commons and a consolidation of ownership and so when we were proposing this talk in part I was inspired by attending the New York Hackers on Planet Earth conference and this is a Mark Powell who goes by Guide and runs a site I think called foodhacking.com and he's an amazing molecular gastronomist and he's making he's working with through yourself sous vide machines cooking with liquid nitrogen and I think a lot of the gateway drug for sort of the hacker maker community is to make hardware for the kitchen hack their own hardware see if you like Seattle food geek there's the book cooking for geeks so that's all really cool but what Mark Powell did that was even more interesting is he introduced the idea of seeking out less eaten foods like rare breed salaries and so that's what he was cooking here at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference 2008 so that's a big inspiration for us doing this talk so we're gonna tell you about today's ingredients we've set it out on a kind of linear time scale to make it a little bit easier so starting with orange carrots in 1600s potatoes mutagenic grapefruit fish tomato beechy brinjal glowing sushi and finely smog and if we get around to it we'll talk a little bit about the future as well so starting with the carrot so take a look at these carrots just a few different varieties and you can see that we've been hacking the hell out of this genome basically since the dawn of agriculture so they think the modern carrot arrived sometime in Europe between the 8th and 10th century and it came in colors of red yellow and orange and it actually wasn't until people started selectively breeding carrots to be less bitter that a sort of viable orange variety came out and that had a secondary purpose which was orange which was the color of the Dutch royal family and so the carrot wasn't made for them but once it was an orange carrot and sort of help things along so now that all these intellectual property regimes have been coming into place over the last 50 years realizing how many biohackers have never gotten credit for the work that they've done in the thousands and thousands of years of agriculture it's something we should really try to give credit for so how many people here eat purple carrots on a regular basis we're gonna talk after there's one guy here so that's cool oh too who's the other one so we'll talk about that but you can find purple carrots in some specialty stores and if you can't you can grow your own and I think we're gonna we try to really stay away from the word natural in these conversations because it gets sticky quickly so the diversity of shape and color and flavor the agronomic characteristics the culinary characteristics of these carrots all came from the original plant of Queen's aunt Queen Anne's lace and so we've selectively bred these vegetables to have these huge roots that are sweet and large and colorful and benefit humans and they do stuff for other animals as well good and bad so for this talk forget about nature let's be specific orange carrots dominate carrot crops the world over in supermarkets because of human preference not because of anything from nature and so what we can do to be specific is ask how the particular ubiquity of an orange of the orange carrot all over the world with our seven billion human eaters is affecting the agro eco culinary system it's a really specific question that's different than talking about something that's natural or not so most of us do our work up here population has been exploding and farmers not so much in the US as an example where I'm from less than 1% of the workforce does agriculture full time so that's not to say that we don't have a huge effect on food and what's grown as eaters we make upstream decisions every day based on our preferences farmers markets all different things downstream are affected by the choices that we make especially those of us that have some privilege and come from places with abundant choices and lots of nutritional options we can really make a difference as eaters if you want to get really geeky you can go down to the farming section we can talk more about that the end but don't feel not empowered as an eater you have a huge amount of power and so we like to say eaters are agents of selection and when we think about genomic gastronomy sort of that's our tagline a way of eating it's about the relationship between the agricultural biodiversity which is the kinds and number of organisms in the food system on the planet that feeds all humans and how that relates to things like taste and preference and texture and not only what's efficient or what you know is going to make the cheapest fast food and so all of our decisions as eaters affects things on farms which affects lots of other organisms so there's definitely a closed-loop system that we can interact in so if we're going to be eating the Anthropocene this might be the appropriate quote the choices we face are not whether or sorry the choices we face are not whether or not to modify the environment but how we're obviously affecting the environment on a planetary scale and so we should eat with some consciousness and for a lot of you I don't I'm not going to assume what you eat but I've seen a lot of kubemate bottles and Drito chips here unsurprisingly and so it may be a more difficult stretch to change your eating habits and you might change other habits okay so that's sort of the overview on the carrot really quick to keep you thinking of the color orange I'm gonna talk to you about potato which is really at the center of our story so historians call the swap of organisms after Columbus discovered America the Columbian exchange still I wish there's a better name that's what we use so it's sort of all of the stuff that went from the new world of the Americas to the old world of Europe and parts east and you can see it's a quite a few things so you know before 1500s there was no potato there was no tomato there was no corn there was no chili anywhere outside of the Americas it's really not that long ago even things like coffee or chocolate or chili peppers the thing that gives all these flavors and pleasures we might want to focus on but the potato is actually really essential to the history of food so we just pulled this data yesterday from the FAO UN data and this is just an example of a little bit of view of some of the plants that Germany eats and it's grams per capita per day apparently on average so besides wheat the next three really big things all came from the Columbian exchange potatoes corn and tomato so if this thing didn't happen you'd really swap it out they are very heavy I'll do calories in a second I have it thanks yeah this is grams per day so they're really heavy and in fact the biggest thing on this list is beer which is 410 grams per day we want to give a couple different views of data so this is this is the world one and you know as you can see they're sort of a wheat potatoes rice and corn play a huge role and a lot of corn obviously is fed to animals which is not shown here so imagine Indian food which I love I've I live a lot in India over the last five years I spent most of my time there and I'm looking at the food I'm thinking what would this food be like without tomatoes potatoes or chili pre-Columbian Indian food would be totally different so we think of cuisine as being fairly static but actually moves incredibly fast especially for talking about ecological and geological time scales five hundred years obviously nothing and now that our food is creating pressures on planetary scale ecosystems decisions like tomato or no tomato the world over are really interesting so this is what this fellow here was just before this is actually not by grams but by calories so about 50% of our calories on the planet come from just four crops rice corn wheat and potato and then 95% of our calories come from just 30 crops which means though there's a long tail that goes here all the way around the room for everything else that we eat so things have changed significantly since 1500 and one of the reasons we're seeing this long tail effects is hugely networked global food system so you're getting this concentration at the top where you used to have local cultures that would survive on barley or sorghum or sweet potato not as much as we have a huge networked economy and like any network you have a long tail effects and you all thought also have really brittle effects so if there was a blight horribly that took out all the potatoes in the world like happened in Ireland once you'd have a huge problem so the same network effects that apply to sort of computer networks are also applying to our food system and what we're seeing this sort of winner takes all phenomenon of these top crops so we were recently doing research about a month ago in Ireland and we're visiting the Irish Sheet Savers and they introduced us to this varietal of potato the butte potato so during the Irish famine a few communities and Kerry ate this potato just because they preferred the taste than the other potatoes that weren't offer and it wasn't affected by the blight and so this one community actually survived the Irish potato famine and didn't have the sort of deaths from starvation or outmigrations because they had access to this potato and Irish Sheet Savers is this awesome group that's still keeping this potato varietal alive so there's a lot of these groups around the world and I don't know how much you guys know about them but I think there's really great opportunities for collaboration between this community and seed saving communities and I know that that's already happened a bit in technology communities so you can yourself become a seed defender if you want and of course in terms of thinking about security I was at a random I was at a think tank in India and I just randomly grabbed a book off the shelf and I found I ended up with this collection of papers from Russian American workshop on high-impact terrorism and there's paper on food security and agro-terrorism and so this is from the year 2000 it's a really strange thing because the way contemporary agro-terrorism is conceived of to security experts or terrorism scenario planners directly contradicts the things that industrial agricultural companies corporations like Monsanto and Dow would want so they would like to see a further consolidation of the food chain and commodification but the security apparatus understands that that makes it really brittle so there's a cognitive dissonance in the halls of power which makes it still a really interesting and open space because it seems like you can't really figure out what to do and if you look at this list this is someone making recommendations to Russian and American security experts it reads like a wish list of the transition town movement or I don't know in Germany maybe you have them if not the Green Party it reads like a peak oil preparedness list these are all things you would want to do to prepare for agro-terrorism and yet they directly contradict the needs and desires of companies like Monsanto so it's a strange contradiction and of course you can't have a paranoid and confused military-industrial agricultural corporate complex without the dystopic literature of resistance so in terms of sort of the biopunk space I highly recommend Windup Girl it's a really interesting book and it's sort of a post climate change flood in Thailand and the entire economy has reverted to using calories as a currency and there's a lot of sort of genetic hacking of different plants so it's a really interesting book I would recommend in this space in terms of some of the things we could do about this directly as eaters is just to get really fetishistic about cultivars and to not eat just the plain white potatoes there's purple potatoes there's red potatoes just getting really kinky about what kind of potatoes you put in your mouth could be hugely effective some of the things that this does is it makes other fitness functions in the global food system other than efficiency right like big companies want really efficient potatoes that grow fast and you don't have aren't susceptible to a lot of blight and this is a way of reinforcing diversity and resilience so just being really stupidly geeky about the kinds of diversity of potatoes you eat could be a really small interesting change and you know it goes great with potatoes butter we were in Norway last week and cats mom was actually going to ask us to smuggle in butter because as you may have heard there was a massive butter crisis and Norway one of the richest Christ with richest countries on the planet was brought to its knees so this is just to say that these food systems are severely fragile or even a country like Norway can be affected overnight when butter is not available and things like the carrots which were orange and were preferred I mean they were sweet but they were also preferred as orange carrots because they had to do with politics and cultural preferences are an example of the way that things may start off as novelty items and then just spread and so we're going to talk more about the space potato and have cut a lot of it out in fact because we haven't found good English English language press on it I don't want to mislead you but from what we can tell from the few BBC articles and other documented evidence of this is there's this sweet potato actually not a potato sweet potato that the Chinese sent into space and brought back down they have sort of state sponsored celebrations on Valentine's Day because it's purple and looks like a heart and where they have cooks cook with it and so it's an interesting symbol of sort of national strength and the space the space program and so there's not that this particular sweet potato is agronomically better or better for cooking but it has this sort of message that it carries and so people might prefer it so that's just an example of how things might spread and so now we'll go behind enemy lines yeah so the next ingredient is grapefruit and the story starts with another technology the atomic bomb was a significant scientific discovery and a demonstration of innovation and engineering of in engineering and warfare but and it was detonated twice in 1945 in Japan where 200,000 people died and today it's also known as a weapon of mass destruction and is a catalyst for ongoing kind of war and conflict so you can start to ask yourself is all innovation good and what is innovation how do you classify it so post World War two nation states with atomic program started to search for peaceful applications for this for they basically started Atoms for Peace in the US and exploring potential uses within agriculture medicine and industry so this was launched in 1953 and Paige Johnson who writes the garden history girl blog has researched this extensively and here you see two gamma gardens one from 1958 in the US and this one on the right is contemporary gamma garden in Japan which is basically radiation breeding facilities so this is a quote yesterday I held in my hand the most sensational plant in Britain it's the only one of its kind nothing of its sorts has ever been seen in the country before to me it has all the romance of something from outer space it's the first atomic peanut it's a lush green plant and gives you a strange almost alarming sense of thrusting power and lusty health it holds a glittering promise in its green leaves the promise of victory over famine so this shows how some people were quite enthusiastic about this new application of atomic energy and whenever a new technology is introduced the debates tend to be polarized so you have the supporters saying that oh atomic agriculture will save us from famine and you've got the critics who are horrified that we could continue to propagate such a destructive technology and today more than 2,500 crops mutant crops have been officially registered with the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency and three-quarters of that is from gamma radiation and as you can see it's happened also on every continent except Antarctica and the most recent one that we've found is at the plant biology department at the University of California at Riverside they announced the successful creation of Kino LS and this is a sweet and seedless fruit which has been approved to be available in nurseries since June 2011 if you're interested in finding out what you can find in your neighborhood there's the the meta database IEA la la la it's a bit of a mouthful but yeah so you can look it up because you know despite wide acceptance of working with nuclear materials it's still needs some paperwork so just as a like random test we were in Portland Oregon and we went to the local supermarket and picked the three available grapefruits because we heard that grapefruits have been radiation bred for in the US and so we took the first one which was a star ruby and it showed up in the database and it was officially proved in 1970 preferred for its seedlessness the second one was Rio red and this two came up on the database and it was preferred for its deep red color and the third was called apparently a star grapefruit which didn't show on the database and it's exact origins remain slightly undiscovered for us but two of the three that we came home with came from mutagenic breeding which isn't exactly a great sample size but as a small local experiment it was you know it was interesting so it seems that when hopes and dreams and fears nightmares subside one is left with some seedless oranges and mutagenic breeding it didn't quite end starvation but and many people are eating mutagenic varietals without even knowing it so you could occur that mutations occur all the time naturally so this is speeding up a natural process but we've already talked about yeah and the relevance of this history is really striking to the GMO debate and it's time to be kind of honest about what technology can do for food because it won't single-handedly end world hunger and it's embedded in a messy tangle of politics and economics and I think it's time to sort of acknowledge that and include that in these debates about emerging tech so here's a map which maps all the current nuclear reactors in the world and it's with earthquake lines from map td.com and so considering recent events in Japan and the number of aging nuclear reactors in the world it's not really hard to imagine a future where amateur bioprospectors are sort of trolling through unintentionally radiated fields looking for surviving cultivars and we can never quite predict the exact outcomes when introducing a new technology so looking for Germany on the IAEA's database there's a hundred and seventy one matches the most recent are actually they're not the most recent but they're just various ones I picked so there's barley fava beans and common beans they've been applied for so this is applied for planting and not necessarily for commercial use maybe for experimentation and that sort of thing but yeah so one is to improve plant architecture and yeah you can find all of this information quite easily so next up is the tomato so we continue behind enemy lines from radiation breeding to genetically modified organisms for agriculture and so we're really interested in asking strange questions about GMOs that haven't been asked before so one was where do failed GMOs go to die so you make this genetically modified organism and what happens to it so we glommed on to this fish tomato and so you know when I was like a teenager to go to these punk rock shows and I remember there'd be a poster with like a banana being unpeeled and a fish inside or like you know a needle being injected into a tomato I was really struck I mean I was 13 but I these images are really powerful to me and so when we started getting geeky about this two years ago I was like yeah whatever happened to that fish tomato thing and it's a really important story because this image idea is really strong in a lot of people's heads and the idea of a fish gene being inserted into a tomato plays with a lot of cultural assumptions and brings up a lot of fears that people have about this technology and what I started doing some preliminary research and it was really strange because a lot of the histories of biotechnology that I was reading claim that it never existed the fish tomato or that they just ignored it all together and some books I read even claim that the fish tomato was a figment of activist imagination and I'm activist and I'm friends with a lot of activists and our imaginations just not that good so I couldn't I didn't buy that one so it turns out there was a fish tomato it was a tomato with an anti-freeze gene that was isolated from a winter flounder inserted and the idea was to create a frost tolerant varietal of tomato so you put the tomato in the ground a frost would come and the tomato plant would survive so this image is from a 2003 BBC article which is no longer on their website anymore it just says article needs fixing but we have a screenshot of it that we can share with you and so did the fish tomato ever exist how do we find this out this is a really funny story I was teaching a color theory painting type class in India at an art school and I didn't I don't like painting that much so I said we're gonna study the color of vegetables and my students like cool you always do weird stuff whatever so I said can you tell me what color the fish tomato is I told them the story I just told you and I said here's the internet I'll see you in half an hour and within half hour one of the students came up to me says hey I found this document is it useful and I was like this is amazing this is like the goldmine and so what it was is these type written documents from the 90s had been scanned and finally put into an archive and so you can see here this is permit number 91-079-01 tomato anti-freeze gene fancy word I can't say protein a so this was a field test application by this company DNA plant technology to the USDA and so they basically got permission to test it this this plant in California and so was the fish tomato ever grown outside of the lab we don't know because the US laws are really strange they just require companies and universities like DNA plant technology to apply for a field test permit and once the company gets permission they don't have to report back so we don't know in fact if this was ever tested outside the lab people one way to assume that it would if they went through all the process of filling out the paperwork so the trail sort of goes dead there in some ways but you may have heard about the company DNA plant technology did anyone see this movie the insider sort of famous so this is the sort of story of a tobacco industry whistleblower and DNA plant technology gets involved in this this is just like I can't even make this stuff up like I said activists are not that creative truth is so much stranger than fiction so in addition to creating the fish tomato this company also worked on why one tobacco a strain with an unusually high nicotine content that apparently the company then lied about and they were the company DNA plant technology was charged with illegally smuggling why one tobacco seeds out of the US to grow it in South and Central America because they couldn't get permission in the US and there's all other kinds of craziness at this company's involved with so like in terms of our research this is a Wikipedia article that we edit when we have some extra free time I encourage you guys to do too we like to sort of contest these ideas in the public realm because we're not formal academics in the space so we put our research and primary source documents up on Wikipedia so if you find anything else about the week about DNA plant technology or fish tomato we'd love to see you on Wikipedia and other open repositories so then we can say that people are going to do unexpected things with technology and we'll tell you some more about that but where we're doing what we're doing with this project now is we're cooking a soup called vegetarian Buya base which calls for the fish tomato if we abase is a French Provençal stew that's tomato and different kinds of fish and so we'll just put it together in one thing and it's a bit of a hokey metaphor if you're a molecular biologist sorry about that I can tell you about the subtlety later but the idea is that we have this recipe now we have to find this tomato so we're searching for we think because it was intellectual property there's some germplasm or seeds stored somewhere in the United States or perhaps there's still some plants being cultivated somewhere so one look out for and we would very much actually like to cultivate this plant in stare out conditions because it's important to science there's no data about this plant we don't happen this experiment and you know we continue to give people power by calling them scientists when they're not science scientists so if DNA plant technology is a company and the scientists working on this project do not provide data we shouldn't call them scientists and give them that credit I mean we can call them you know biohackers or criminals in some case whatever but they're not scientists so we do want to find this tomato and reenact the science experiment so we could add that data to the sort of collective knowledge so if you guys are more interested in doing some data mining for transgenics it's obviously not hard my freshman color theory student took him about 10 minutes to find a really interesting story oh sorry before I get to show you how to do some interesting database stuff I take a lot of my inspiration from this work on this work from the critical art ensemble which is really amazing group and they have a book from 2002 called molecular invasion and this is their seven point plan for cultural resistance and I think that this is a really important thing to stay focused on when we're talking about being specific earlier because a lot of times when it comes to GMOs people just don't want to talk about them or get into the sort of what could be interesting about them or get into the sort of controversies in a specific deep way and following these seven things is sort of you know informally allowed me to do that although occasionally we still get in trouble at art schools this is a group called the Center for Postnatural History this is a good example of doing some data mining of transgenics they took the US database of field test applications and mapped it over time so you can go to their website and sort of see where all the different GMOs have been grown or I should say it to be specific where all the companies universities have gotten permission to do field tests of GMOs they may or may not have we don't know so I wanted to teach my students a little bit about using a database and and writing some stories from it and just as a reality test I wanted since I was in the US I looked at the European database of GMOs and I found this really interesting genetically modified cucumber from Poland you can see the number there and it's a very sweet cucumber I was trying to imagine like what are they doing with this so I invented a recipe for hyper sweet and sour pickles I don't know if that was the plan maybe they were just growing it so that they could make sugar in the way that you make sugar beets what you find when you actually investigate primary source documents is there's huge missing holes which is why it's so important to look at these actual documents so I my students do that as well I gave them access to the US database and European database of field test permits and had them write imaginary recipes for the genetically modified organisms which have been tested but not commercialized I think this is useful because the students got their hands dirty with something they feel really strongly about and they had to either reinforce or challenge their convictions and they got to ask interesting and imaginative questions and when they asked those questions and they looked for answers from the primary source documents that companies or universities were filling out they weren't finding answers which made them more curious and they had to fill in the blanks and work through the sort of minds of these companies and universities why is the Polish University making a super sweet cucumber what's this about so the website for Europe is here and we'll provide links on the web if you want to see it later and again let's look for Germany you like to be local so here's some of the recent field test applications University of Rostock has made a smut and fungi resistant wheat that they want to test Monsanto of course has the sugar beet and BASF plant science company has a potato that has altered starch metabolism so there's 80 there's there's been 80 applications to do live field testing of GMOs in Europe according to this database oh sorry that's just for Germany so you can you can take a look at some of those and see what stories are there what the geographies are what why people are doing this kind of genetics work and who does it benefit for okay so we have three more ingredients this is the last sort of normal ingredient aubergine so our work actually kicked off in early 2010 because I teach at a university in Bangalore India and there was a huge debate in India about whether or not to allow a product that Monsanto was trying to sell on Monsanto's being a large chemical former chemical and weapons manufacturer now our cultural company and if you don't know and so that Monsanto had this product BT Brinjal that they were trying to get into the country now India already has a genetically modified cotton that they've approved but they don't have any edible plants so the huge debate you know you're different people dressing up as aubergines from the US we call them eggplants and in India they call them Brinjal so I'll use those three terms interchangeably and the product was called BT Brinjal so why was Monsanto so interested in egg plants in India and so this is again this is we're doing some primary source research is really interesting this is a map of average a regional eggplant output let's just zoom in a little bit so this is where all the action is India and China and the thing about China is they have interesting intellectual property law enforcement and they have their own state sponsored genetic modification program so they don't actually really need Monsanto's products even if they wanted them I mean in India as a country of a billion people is the second highest producer of eggplants and if you could just get this one national government to take this product you'll be golden so I think I mean as I was looking at this map that was what I assessed that's how I could understand it that there was basically a political boundary India where a ton of eggplants were grown and it only took you know lobbying one government so they sort of focused their energies there I think the thing about companies like Monsanto is they just they don't hire enough creative people and so they didn't think about the history of eggplant India which is which is great I mean I'm happy that they don't hire creative people but they didn't think about the fact that aubergine is the only nightshade species that was indigenous to the old world like I showed you before all the other nightshades that we eat potato tomato came from the new world so it's been in South Asia for a really long time again all these awesome open source biohackers i.e. farmers have been making this wonderful diversity of plants for us so there's a very strong and unified resistance for many regions of the country for many different perspectives so obviously there are people who are concerned about human and ecosystem health some of those concerns I think are totally valid others than I would actually question based on the scientific research there was concerns about intellectual property rights there's concerns about agricultural biodiversity which to my mind is an absolutely huge one these were some of the images that I took at the protest in Bangalore that was organized by a variety of people and it's everything from you can see this one poster save our biodiversity which is a sort of appeal to a modernist scientific way of understanding the diversity of life to when scientists play God the kittens die I don't know there's something at the bottom I can't read but this is sort of an anti-modernist appeal or an appeal that says scientist and religion and there's different domains that people should work in so there was a range of appeals that protesters were making and believe it or not all of these different things you see are forms of aubergine so you have these tiny like hard grape shaped ones you have these ones with these huge spikes on the stem and there's an amazing diversity so what I was really surprised about was the amount of scientists and policymakers that were very pro BT bring off I think for a variety of reasons but there were in fact a lot of molecular biologists who were like oh you know we have a bunch of anti-modernist people from the villages they don't know any better if you like iPod if you like iPhones you're gonna love BT bring all so it's a sort of curious argument that was being made and this was from a political weekly an article called BT bring all need to refocus the debate where these authors say the BT bring all debate has featured technology technological worries relating to gently modified crops which appear relatively minor in comparison to the critical issue of who controls Indian agriculture and therefore who controls food security in India and I think this is not a perfect statement I would maybe disagree with the first part but I think the who controls part of something that I could talk to molecular biologists about I could talk to farmers about everyone sort of was interested in that topic so that's where you know sort of focused our energies and thought about so along with a class of students at the school right top we just went out to the markets in Bangalore and saw what kind of aubergines were available and these were the ones we found and so you know the thing about like cooking and recipes it's actually ecological sorry it's actually a technological ecosystem so you have this kind of aubergine that's like long and thin you have to cut in a certain way and it cooks a certain way it tastes better this way so there's all of these things co-evolving together it's not just the plant genetics itself it's how the culture uses it and so we were trying to think about that and also document the process of de-diversification which is already underway because even if there's no GMO aubergine in India there are big consolidated seed companies nationally that are that are selling less kinds of seeds and selling improved varieties and so one thing we always come back to is what do things taste like and so I think I missed this in the bait in 2010 but I never heard anyone talk about what GMO aubergine was gonna taste like and while it seems like maybe a silly question if you think about it for a second that answer a huge question that didn't come up which is what varieties of genetically modified aubergine is Monsanto going to try to sell is it one is it three is a sweet a sweet of 30 that will appeal to regional flavor profiles like this just did not come up so we do come back to this question of what do things taste like even things we might not want to taste and we're starting to call this connection between ecology agriculture and cuisine the biodiversity of the kitchen so the cultivars and hybrid varieties that are inputs into the kitchen become associated with flavors and preferences and cooking styles of this whole big messy thing and there's no top-down solution for that and you know this is just some of the ways how how food systems learn it's not a straightforward oh we're place X with Y and all will be good it's you place X with Y people cook differently they maybe get more obese because now they're even more sugar so it's really complex and so it is really important to take a holistic and inclusive approach to food systems I'll get off the soapbox now because I see like eyes going but I think we have some yeah this was the last thing from that article just as a reminder who owns GM technology appears to be far more crucial an issue than its GM this again it's something we can debate and have a conversation over but I think it's a good starting point so our second to last ingredient is sushi or zebrafish more specifically so some jelly jellyfish have this magnificent property where they appear to glow green in certain lighting conditions and it's caused by a gene sequence that expresses GFP which is green fluorescent protein and this is a zebrafish which is a model species used in biology to study a whole host of phenomenon and by inserting GFP into the zebrafish's DNA scientists have created a glowing fish and so people are going to do unexpected things with technology and making yeah so building on this innovative application of biotech a company decided to make this new commodity available to the public by selling glowfish as pets and they're now available in most pet shops in the US except for in California so very innovative and the glowing sushi cooking show was created to demonstrate just how easy it is to innovate with new technologies right in your own kitchen so how can government agencies and companies predict how a new genome will be used once it's led out of the lab they can't really so the glowfish was approved as a pet but that doesn't stop us from innovating on innovation and cooking with it so the the glowfish is available through the US except for in California as I mentioned and it's illegal in California itself so this is the not in California role this is the kryptonite role which is a wasabi glowfish paste basically mashed together spread on top of a cucumber sushi roll or you might be tempted by the stopping glow sashimi roll so soon we might also have another genetically engineered fish to make sushi with the fast-growing aqua bounty salmon is currently going through FDA approval well it has been for ten years so there was you know it's not that soon but the process for release in the US is classified as a new drug for the consumption of animals and not as the creation of a new organism so if this fish were to be approved what might the unintended consequences be perhaps you know people want to raise them as pets in their backyard but you know I wouldn't particularly worry because according to aqua bounty's website the fish are sterile and can't contaminate the wild environment so you know it's probably fine so the last ingredient is smog tasting or smog and the marvelous thing about whipping egg whites is that if you do it right the foam can approach 90% air so you can make site-specific egg foams so this was with a group of students in India again we basically whipped eggs in various locations around Bangalore and then cooked morangs and when you offer someone a morang made from different locations within a city you find out pretty quickly what their perception of the air quality is so you know it's a pretty low-tech version of biosensing but it seems to do the job and as we say the tragedy of the Cummins never tasted so good yeah I don't know if we can go yeah I wish of two minutes we'll just do these quick ideas for further exploration so we gave you a bunch of databases to look at and put those up on our website I just want to mention very quickly other ways you might immediately sort of do some things that so a highly technical sort of hardware hacking thing are these raw milk vending machines that I first saw in Chihon Spain but I know available and throughout Europe they might even be available in Germany I don't know but it's a sort of interesting technical fix for farmers who otherwise have to dump their milk because of EU regulations they sort of behind the scenes can sell their milk using these machines and the plastic and glass bottles reusable so it's a sort of interesting hardware hack that's out there another really amazing thing is there's a restaurant called Motto in Chicago and they have this idea of making they've made this fake tuna out of compressed watermelon and some sort of savory chemical and they sous vide and so it's a way of doing substitution through simulation so like if you like sushi you really want to eat well and not eat over fish fish but you end up doing it anyways and I haven't tasted this yet but it apparently tastes amazingly tuna so molecular gastronomy could have some answers as well and we've been looking at utopian cuisine the history of utopian foods from the last 100 years so things like seaweed and tofu and pill food and this is some of our recipes we've been making and lots people are wanting to eat invasive species I don't know if that's actually a great idea but it's an interesting one that could be furthered and then if you've never saved a seed this is my last appeal please this year when you get some vegetable that you buy the store out of a garden save the seed just go on YouTube there's a million videos and I think you just learn an amazing amount about the history of pre-digital computing which was largely vegetables and it's sort of both more much more difficult and much more easy to do that than you could ever imagine so that's my last appeal and yeah thanks to questions thank you very much we now have an audio angel going around with a microphone for the questions and I think the IRC is quite empty at the moment but hopefully somebody will show up there so the first questions please hello and my name is Geraldine and it's not a question it's just more like a tip and about what all that stuff you said about lobbying for transgenics and and that the action is in China and India I think the hardcore action also is in Mexico like the corn I mean Monsanto owns corn destroy corn and now it's like they the government also give permits to states to make pilot growth of like pilot city seed test not the university or anything like actually states now will be available so if you want to just I don't know research I think would be very interesting because like it's it's and there's no good corn in Mexico anymore even though corn is Mexican basically so I think it's interesting to research it thanks a lot and in fact yeah that I didn't know a ton about the GM corn seen in Mexico because I've mostly been in Asia the last five years but look into it I mean one thing we're working on right now is with one of our chefs is a corn smut recipe because you know they eat the corn the fungus that grows on corn in Mexico and but it's not popular all in the US so we're sort of working on that as one of our utopian cuisine so we can let you know about that thanks okay well did you get the data for the aubergine production heat mom because I've never seen these data before that was there's the wikipedia article on aubergine the data sets in the slide notes but I can but did they have the data for all the major crops or just no it's that was cropped by crop but I'm the FAO UN data set is pretty rich it's not so it's just by country level it's not by like regional level but that's in the country level I'm just wondering where did I get that I think that was a much more specific thanks thank you for your talk and in my experience the most interesting thing is that there's a lot of stuff around so this concerns old kinds of apples old wheat and then and that the most important thing is to create an economy around it so and not don't do not leave the economy to Monsanto and other things but create economy the local mostly local economy around the variety of things and this is just starting in and the experience is very interesting so you get a lot of different tastes much fresher vegetables and my biggest surprise was that the number of vegetables in the different tastes can completely or nearly completely replace eating of meat and something like this so most people eat meat because I'm more recipes for for meat than for vegetables but this is not true if you if you go into this long tail as you said it and and explore those interesting vegetables around yeah I'm kind of excited to see how that long tail might be shifting as this trend for farmers markets and kind of locally produced food is increasing and even in in the suburbs in the US his parents are now going to farmers markets and stuff which they wouldn't have considered you know a couple years ago even there's an additional question over here when you experiment with food that is not marketed as food like the glowfish how do you find out if it's moderately safe to eat like for example I'm interested in cooking with bugs like crickets which exists in lots of countries but basically in Germany you only get them as reptile food if you buy something like that do you know any resources where I can find out well if they're edible for humans I mean I think as a metaphor it's a bit like hardware hacking you know like I was like oh I'll do a circuit bent keyboard because I won't like kill myself with electricity and then you jump into the you know glowing stuff so I mean I think you know start start small and reasonable if you look at the glowing sushi project we did we actually spent a lot of time looking at all the primary source documentation from the the legal approval of it in the US and in fact what's really interesting is that there was one dissenture in California who said you know there's a pet but there's nothing stopping like cats or children from putting their hand in eating the fish out of the bowl and his sort of thing was dismissed so that was an interesting outcome but in all of the things that we've read about you know eating GFP lots of there's been studies of people eating GFP they think it passed through the body there's some studies that say there's gene transfer you know in the gut so it is a bit complex and so it's sort of you know at your own risk so we haven't yet fed it to anyone but ourselves so we're just doing self experimentation which is one thing so those sushi have only gone in our bodies but I think also it's important to know how it's been raised for example a lot of pet fish are in water that has some nasty chemicals and that kind of thing so so it's not you know I'd say you can probably eat with disclaimer but you can probably eat you know most bugs without getting drastically sick but you can also you can look on you know you can find out what bugs people eat already and that's generally a good indicator of what you can eat and there are some I know in the UK there's a website where you can order edible bugs but I can look for that I don't remember off the top of my head this somehow leads to one question from IOC and one participant wants to know if you can tell us how legal it would be to do such an experiments like genetic modifications when you just intend to eat the results yourselves and not sell it so it's country by country we're actually working in Ireland right now to science gallery and to do certain things they have to get approval from the government and strangely Ireland and Norway are the most lax in the EU but there's a lot of sort of biohacking communities that are making GFP yogurt which there's an experiment online that looks pretty simple it's sort of an illegal gray space as far as I can tell right now so I don't have an exact answer but if you're gonna do it formally in a research university like we're doing Ireland there are very set procedures about how to do it in terms of DIY bedroom hacking there's a lot of really good communities out there you can probably tap into them but I think they're sort of discovering it as they go what that what the lies but I think even I think as soon as you say you're going to eat something you get into really murky waters because even like DIY bio guys are having problems in terms of being allowed to use their various enzymes and things so then suggesting you're gonna eat them you know is another step which you have to kind of figure out we didn't make anything ourselves so eating off the shelf stuff I guess I think you know we're not deep into this community but a lot of our friends are in terms of the DIY biotech community and I think a big debate in that community is whether sort of go the route of making everything above board working through universities and and sort of sanctioned places or just do it in the bedroom and you know there's been a sort of big shift over the last four or five years for a variety of reasons so it's you can talk to those folks and they have a lot of interesting thoughts on it you weren't completely clear on the meringue whether it was really bad or was it good tasting when he put the smog in and different locations you could well I think the sugar kind of masked most everything but we did do one test which was right in front of the exhaust pipe of a big lorry and we looked at it under the microscope and you could see very distinct black particular matter and you could test for kind of VOC's and that sort of thing I think taste-wise it doesn't make a huge difference but I think perceptually or psychologically it it makes a much greater difference another questions and actually transporting the meringue once it's whipped is quite tricky we have a question from you again yes and one chatter wants to know if there any means to do some kind of self-monitoring post consumption of GMOs so regarding the physiological effects I was gonna say you could look at your poop and see if it glows under blacklight but I think the proteins would be denatured by then I think the thing to do is to look at some of the canonical research that's done on lab animals and go from there but I don't know specifically there's also quantify self who seemed to like to look at very many things so perhaps they're better at getting those kinds of tips anymore questions I can't see any no at all okay thank you for asking thank you for the talk