Kitchen of Fabulous Futures

Research Focus: Timescales and Emergency
Futures Thinking Tool: Temporal Mapping

Core Idea:
This session explores how time feels, stretches, collapses in relation to food. Students reflect on what lasts, what decays, and how urgency and slowness are embodied in food.

Food Activity:
A comparative tasting of three items:

something ultra-perishable (e.g. a fresh herb leaf),

something fermented or aged (e.g. a sliver of cheese or pickle),

something preserved or synthetic (e.g. a wrapped processed snack).

Prompt:

“How do these tastes express different relationships to time? To emergency? To futures?”

Learning Outcome:
By mapping these items on a timeline of imagined food futures (e.g. 2030, 2050, 2100), students begin to grasp how anticipatory timescales shape decision-making and perception. We introduce chronopolitics through their palate.

Research Focus: Bodies and Emotions
Futures Thinking Tool: Future Persona Prototyping

Core Idea:
Anticipation isn't just in the mind — it happens in the body, in sensation, in affect. This workshop teaches students how emotions and embodiment are anticipatory media.

Food Activity:
A “sensation shot”: students create or choose a mini composition (no cooking — just simple pairing or plating) intended to evoke a specific future emotion (e.g. anxiety, nostalgia, serenity, wonder). Use herbs, colour, texture — anything symbolic.

Prompt:

“If a future person felt X, what might they want to taste? How does food regulate or express emotional futures?”

Learning Outcome:
Students learn that future thinking isn’t only cognitive — it's somatic, affective, embodied. They reflect on how flavour and feeling are co-constructed.

Research Focus: Systems and Processes
Futures Thinking Tool: Causal Layered Analysis (CLA)

Core Idea:
This workshop introduces systems thinking through food. Participants learn to peel back the layers of meaning and process behind a single bite.

Food Activity:
Students choose one simple bite (e.g. a piece of bread, fruit, or cheese) and analyse it in four layers:

Litany (the obvious – what is it?)

System (how did it get here? What logistics, labour, economics?)

Worldview (what culture or values does it represent?)

Myth (what deep story or symbolism underlies it?)

Prompt:

“What futures are hidden in this bite? What if one layer changes?”

Learning Outcome:
Through a basic food item, students learn how futures are layered and systems are nested. They see how a single ingredient embodies invisible processes and narratives.

Research Focus: Authenticity and Trust
Futures Thinking Tool: Constellation Mapping

Core Idea:
Trust is a key anticipatory mode — especially in food. This session unpacks how judgements of authenticity are formed and challenged.

Food Activity:
Blind tasting of 2–3 variations of the same basic ingredient (e.g. tomato juice: one organic, one industrial, one enhanced with umami). No labels are revealed until after.

Prompt:

“Which did you trust? Why? What stories did you imagine about its origin or value?”

Students then map influences on their judgement: colour, smell, expectation, packaging, values.

Learning Outcome:
They learn how anticipatory trust is shaped by embedded narratives — and how food can be a field of contested futures (e.g. natural vs synthetic, local vs global).

Research Focus: Value and Discourse
Futures Thinking Tool: Scenario Tasting Table

Core Idea:
Futures are made in the stories we tell — and food tells stories too. This session explores how discourses shape what we think is possible or desirable.

Food Activity:
Students taste three small items or bites, each with a short scenario tag:

“Technofix Future” (lab-grown, optimised)

“Resilience Future” (scrappy, local, foraged)

“Luxury Apocalypse” (rare, decadent, final pleasures)

Use simple foods to represent these (e.g. powdered supplement vs home-pickled veg vs truffle oil).

Prompt:

“Which future do you want to live in? Which one repels you? Why?”
“What values are at stake in each?”

Learning Outcome:
Students discover that futures are discursive spaces, shaped by value conflicts. Food becomes a tool to critique narratives and power.