Description of chapter

"Last meal on earth" installation suggests an exercise in "landing" on the current situation of the landscapes, systems and practices that support our alimentation in Barcelona, Catalonia and the world.

In an attempt to flee from catastrophic defeatism, an exercise of radical imagination is posed at a time when we have already passed several “tipping points” in key indicators such as biodiversity, water eutrophication or soil quality.

Recognising, recovering and honouring the intelligence accumulated in the territory, both historically (indigenous knowledge) and in the set of species that constitute it (post-human perspective) represents one of our potential “lines of flight”.

The installation orbits around legumes and low-energy collective cooking practices as two axes of a post-growth world:

• Beans are a family of the plant kingdom (Fabaceae) which, in their diversity (they are present in most of the world's food cultures), are a perfect example of a regenerative diet. Their high protein content and low carbon intensity position them as a flagship of a sustainable and healthy diet. In addition, beans have been used in traditional agriculture as a soil-regenerating crop due to their natural ability to capture and fix nitrogen in the soil.

• Collective cooking, whether in commercial or communal spaces, is one of the most efficient ways of eating. Given limited natural resources and little evidence of radical technological solutions to cope, we find low-energy lifestyles the most rational choice for a liveable and equitable world.

In the face of escapist fantasies and colonial projects of exploration and terraformation of other planets, let's bet on a “down to earth” political project.The Meal

Beans (Fabaceae family) are present in world’s most food cultures and present interesting characteristics:

• Beans grow in a symbiotic relationship with soil-dwelling bacteria. The bacteria take gaseous nitrogen from the air in the soil and feed this nitrogen to the legumes; in exchange the plant provides carbohydrates to bacteria, establishing a symbiotic relationship that translates and nitrogen fixing at an ecosystem level. Beans help regenerate soil.

• Beans present a rich protein content, being one of the most straightforward alternative to animal protein.

• Beans are present in many convivial practices around earth’s human cultures.

• Beans can help us dive into subterranean ecologies, understanding the role that bacteria, fungus, insects and microscopic life in general are essential to life on earth.

• Beans serve as a reminder of the voluptuous, gift oriented and reciprocal economies that nature-culture can produce. 

food system problems to be considered

• The end of the known and collectively habitable world will come from the deep sea. Marine diversity as a "tipping point" for polycrisis.

• The end of the collectively habitable known world will come from our soils. Soil quality and microdiversity as "slippery slope" in food chains.

• Global chains, homogeneous and impoverished diets. We eat fewer and fewer varieties and species. The center of the diet is the combination of nutrients from different sources.

• A machinic vision of diet and food as an input-output system is much more complex than that. Why does a country like France with a high daily consumption of alcohol and cheese have a lower rate of obesity or coronary heart disease than the United States?

• There are no simple patches for specific problems. Here a paper that ran in 2018 in the UK analyzing causes of obesity.

• The class issue crosses, as in other areas, also to food.

• Centralization offers, a priori, more accessible prices at the cost of less resilience.

• We continue to have a problem of equal access to healthier and more sustainable products and diets. Small-scale but massively productive modes of production must be part of the answer (e.g. permaculture).

• The logistical problem is at the heart of the food Gordian knot. The current system proposes massiveness (marginal efficiency) and global networks fed by fossil fuels. At the opposite extreme is the local model of capillary networks, much more resilient but less marginally efficient. Typically small suppliers are highly inefficient in their logistical operation and their reach is very limited.