Thinking about the world that we are in today – heavily industrialised, reeling under the Weather with a capital “W” and with a pandemic-in-progress, no less – begs a response to this question: is certainty even possible anymore? In food, people are seeing changes in the way they cook and eat due to climate change’s effect on supply chains and food systems. What then happens to a country’s traditional food culture? The Center for Genomic Gastronomy’s (CGG) New National Dish (NND) project explores how the culinary landscape might change to something new altogether, or revert to something ancient and now-forgotten.

The concept of a single dish for a whole country is an idea fraught with uncertainties: how can any dish represent all of a country’s diverse communities and distinct food practices? Food is as much an emotion as it is sustenance. Coupled with how severely climate change affects agriculture and migration, the question of a singular national dish is a thorny one. For the artists behind the project, forecasting is not an act of predictions, but rather a set of stories, recipes, scenarios, and “edible futures” that consumers, farmers, policy makers and other actors in the food cycle are invited to imagine and react to. CGG started with the idea that human beings shape the planet through everyday choices they make in what to grow, trade, and eat as well as through the food memories and stories that are celebrated, shared, and passed on. Through this project, CGG recognises that the food supply chains these countries rely on will inevitably change due to climate change, and as a result, traditional recipes will have to evolve. The artists came up with different futures, keeping in mind that any new dish needed to be highly resilient to such weirding conditions.