Last week we were invited by Madina Querre and Nicolas Fieulaine to bring our Café Futuresque, along with three other stations from our immersive installation, to the 10th edition of BIOTOPE FESTIVAL in Saint-Émilion. The festival’s theme this year, Vivants?!, asked what it means to stay committed to territorial transformation.
It was our first full pilot of the Café Futuresque in this format, ran across two very different days.
On Friday, we joined a day of round tables with professionals from the agricultural and wine industries: ecologists, viticulturalists, and thinkers on the future of living territories. We asked them about their images of the future and showed them our future menus, asking what food they weren’t ready to give up in 30 years. The global futures were tense: nature reclaiming power, radical bifurcation, local spaces of resistance. The personal futures were something else entirely: symbiosis, living in coherence with the nature, “zen sous un grand chêne multicentenaire devant un jardin bio”. And the food they couldn’t give up? Cherries. Apricots. Potatoes. Wine, naturally.
On Saturday, families and festival visitors joined us for a workshop around the three menus: 2054, 2124, and Vintage 2024. We asked people to look through them, imagine ordering, and tell us how they felt about the future of food.
Before the workshop, “worried” was a dominant gut feeling, focusing on prices and quality of food, followed by “curious” about future developments and “sad” about the possibility of losing foods that have personal value. After the workshop, about 71% of participants felt that their everyday food choices can contribute to shaping what food looks like in the future. When asked which dish they’d order, 3D-printed pizza and insect power tacos came out on top. The foods people weren’t ready to give up: chocolate, candy, sushi, and lasagna.
What the numbers don’t fully capture are the conversations around the table. Many were passionate and wanted to keep talking: about wanting to eat more consciously but feeling the weight of food prices, the difficulty of navigating an increasingly complex foodscape, what their children eat and what kind of food world they’re inheriting. The future of food, it turns out, is not an abstract question for most people. It’s already here, in the weekly shop and the school lunchbox.
Two days, two very different rooms, but the same underlying questions surfacing: what will we eat, who decides, and what do we lose in getting there?
We’re continuing to develop the Café Futuresque around the themes and questions surrounding food and the future. We’re looking for new contexts to bring it into. If this resonates with your work or your organisation, we’d love to hear from you.
Café Futuresque is part of the Space of Futurization, produced with the support of Fondation APRIL
