On writing The Seed Vault - part 1
A few years ago, I was toying with the idea of writing short stories about the five senses, and things that bring us pleasure at the most instinctive level. Eating, touching, hearing, and so on.
Food was at the top of my list (I’m one of those people who lives to eat) but I had never really thought about what food is, and I wasn’t sure how to start writing about food in new and exciting ways.
Enter an online course about food and sustainability (Sustainability of Food Systems, by the University of Minnesota) and I gained a whole new perspective on food!
(Note: the course has since been archived on Coursera.org, but there is a similar one here).
Slowly, the idea of writing a sci-fi story about food emerged, and my fascination with food (what we eat, why we eat it, how we eat) coupled with my existential anxiety about our environmental footprint on the planet, led me to continue working on this idea.
Here are some of the revelations and questions I jotted down after the course, and which had a huge impact on shaping The Seed Vault:
Different people call different things ‘food’, but at a basic level, food is simply made of 4 components: water, lipids (fats), carbs and protein. This is what we need to survive, plus a few micronutrients (minerals and vitamins).
Historical decisions around what plants and animals to domesticate are key to what we eat nowadays. Why rice, wheat, and corn? Why pigs, chickens, and cows? The world might have looked very different if we had selected different species.
Foods originated, in most cases, in completely different places from where they’re now produced and/or consumed the most. Kiwis are not from New Zealand.
Food sustainability could be defined as ‘intergenerational equity’, i.e. the ability to leave to our descendants at least as much quantity and quality of food as we have now. Currently, how we facilitate the global trade and transfer of our food is at odds with what a sustainable system should look like.
For example, we waste about 1/3 (in weight) of all the food we produce, and about 24% of all our food in calories. This is food that never reaches a mouth. In poorer countries this usually happens during production, storage and distribution, while in rich countries wastage happens mostly at retail and consumer level.
Is it feasible to buy all the healthy, fresh ingredients required for a tasty and nutritional meal, and cook it from scratch every day? So far no, not at large scale. This is why Big Food multinationals have been exceptionally successful, displacing local food habits and culture.
Over 800 million of people are hungry, despite living in an age of plenty.
What might “food” look like in a few decades, after big environmental changes impact our food production system? What is a sustainable way of producing and distributing food to billions of people?
Eventually, these ideas spun into The Seed Vault. A world where New Food is the only way forward, but also where people are mourning agriculture and our “old food”, rebelling about their lack of power to change the new status quo.
