A LOOK BACK AT "EAT"

Tasting the future: With over 3,500 visitors, BIOTOPIA - Naturkundemuseum Bayern explored, experienced and discussed the myriad dimensions of food at the EAT Festival on May 26.

Visitors could approach topics like nutrition, food, health and sustainability with a wide variety of programmes: scientific lectures and panel discussions offered insights into our relationship and eating behaviour in relation to other living beings, possible ways to a sustainable and healthy diet for the entire planet and the influence of innovation on food waste as well as the fight against world hunger. Among others, the philosopher Richard David Precht, Brent Loken, co-author of the EAT Lancet Report, and zoologist Auguste von Bayern could be met on stage.

Listening and discussing, however, was only one aspect of the festival, where designers, scientists, innovators and culinarians came together to explore possible futures of food, to communicate the latest research and to make our relationship to food tangible. How do our senses influence our experience of taste? How can agriculture function without soil, or vice versa, what makes our soil so important? Or would you rather master fermentation, cook with wild plants collected in urban areas or try Kombucha? Special thanks are also due to the numerous scientific institutions, such as the Bavarian Natural History Collections, the Bionicum, the Max Planck Institutes and more, who have participated in the EAT Festival with their projects and objects and who have illustrated research with a hands-on approach.

Another highlight was and is certainly the exhibition "MEAT THE FUTURE" in the Museum Mensch und Natur. With 30 speculative dishes, it questions our future relationship to lab-grown meat. Free of restrictions such as the physical shape of the animal, meat is rethought as a medium at the interface of design, ethics and sustainability. The exhibition is open until 23 June 2019.

Whether it is about looking over the shoulders of scientists or becoming active in workshops, there was something for everyone's taste at EAT; for the new generation as well as for die-hard foodies and the generally curious - with a full house throughout, the Festival has succeded in offering something for everyone.

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