All You Can Eat: An Interview with Artist Duo Cooking Sections

Published in Elephant Magazine, Spring/Summer issue 2021

How can one better sense, and make sense of, our present climate emergency? Its concrete effects are already felt, unevenly and unjustly, by communities around the world, struggling against rising shorelines, burning forests, extreme droughts and shortages of food. But the scale and complexity of its causes and contributing factors—entangled in industrial supply chains, material infrastructures, government policies and consumer choices—exceed easy comprehension and, in particular, embodied experience. Familiar visualisations of sweeping data curves, factory smokestacks and melting polar ice do little to help bridge this perceptual gap. The crisis is all around us, but presents a challenge to our entrenched habits and ways of living: How can we learn to better sense and—consequently—better act and live within the imperilled environment?

For the London-based research duo Cooking Sections—a collaboration between Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe—food is a critical tool for understanding contemporary transformations in the physical environment and comprehending the systems, processes and histories that propel them. “Looking at food infrastructures and their interaction with different kinds of geopolitical and environmental realities led us to create interventions that we think of like generative realities or alternative futures,” says Alon in conversation. For instance, at its mussel taco pop-up in Venice, California, directly adjacent to the iconic Muscle Beach, passers-by are prompted to conflate “mussels” for “muscles,” one part of their exploration of the site’s diverse past and present, human and non-human ecologies. For its wine tastings in France, guests are asked to describe the smell and taste of wine as it pertains to the climate (like notes of “hot July” and hints of “flowerless prairie”). And as part of a Cooking Sections performative meal, diners were served on suspended tables carved with irregular holes, an installation that performs the precarity of landmasses around the Dead Sea due to water depletion. If one is not careful, “sinkholes” on the tables might swallow up cutlery, glasses or even a dish, attuning participants to the perilous interplay between food consumption and geologic erosion. This particular project, entitled Under the Sea There is a Hole, also features a menu that explores ways of eating that make the sea more fertile — one dish called the Coastal Fortifier is made of crops that bolster coastal landscapes, presenting beets garnished with sea rosemary, sea fennel, oyster leaf and sea asparagus. For those preparing the food, the recipe instructs: “Do not season with salt; all the leaves absorb seawater and already contain the necessary amount — taste the differences between their absorption capacities!”

Back in 2013, Cooking Sections’ Daniel and Alon began collaborating while studying together at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths in London. They were first drawn to food as a guiding thematic while part of a project in Kivalina, an Iñupiaq village in Alaska facing displacement due to melting permafrost. The pair worked with the community there to understand patterns of hunting and fishing, seeking to better grasp the rapidly changing landscape and help legal efforts to pressure oil and gas corporations for accountability. “We became interested in food infrastructures as they reach all parts of the planet and all sections of society,” says Alon. “They’re extremely transgressive, also as food is something extremely class based and racialized, defining a lot of social and economic structures in society.” 

In recent years, Cooking Sections’ work has been shown at the 58th Venice Biennale, the 2019 Los Angeles Public Art Triennial, the 2019 Sharjah Architecture Triennial, as well as at the Serpentine Galleries and the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale before that—but its work does not begin or end within these gallery spaces or exhibition contexts. “Over the past years, we’ve steered towards the framework of creating long-term interventions,” says Daniel, “constructing spaces that become food networks, spaces of the production and consumption of food.” This is because, in part, cultural institutions are set up to offer exhibitions and events that last only a few months at most, whereas environmental questions — or those dealing with intricate networks of power, climate and commodity flows — take far longer to even begin to unknot.

One such ongoing project is the practice’s seminal The Empire Remains Shop, for which it initially opened a space in 2016 on Baker Street in London. The endeavour takes its name from a speculative proposal for “empire shops” in the 1920s, envisaged to familiarise British consumers with food products from colonial regions (like oranges from Palestine or Jamaican rum). The Empire Remains Shop imagines selling back the remains of the British Empire today; during one of the project’s first dining performances, Cooking Sections recreated the original recipe for Christmas Pudding by the Empire Marketing Board, which included seventeen ingredients from seventeen different places, primarily British colonies. The group attempted to source ingredients from the same regions as in the original recipe, though many were no longer available due to territorial changes. Substituting those ingredients became a way to track shifts in global food networks, becoming not just a pudding but, in their words, “an edible map” that charts the postcolonial world and estranges the historical relations of consumption and coloniality. The Empire Remains Shop is now an official franchise, allowing others to run their own shop that responds to its local geography (in June 2019, Grand Union opened the first franchise location in Birmingham). 

Ever since this project, Cooking Sections has invested its primary efforts in “multiple year investigations that just seem to be getting longer and longer.” “You really have to think of these not as proposals or a combination of research,” Daniel suggests, “but as active platforms that engage with multiple stakeholders,” explaining how the projects are neither wholly dependent on them, nor result from an artistic process. “Our projects bring together multiple constituencies.”

This is most apparent — and ambitiously realised — with the umbrella venture Climavore, initiated in 2015 from a recognition of that climate emergency necessitates a new approach to eating and cultivating food. Distinct from a carnivore, vegan or vegetarian, a “climavore” considers not only the origin of ingredients, their nutritional values, or the ethics of their consumption, but also the agency of non-human entities in providing a response to human-induced climatic events (think back to the Coastal Fortifier recipe, which buffers against coastal collapse). As one manifestation of the Climavore initiative in 2018, Cooking Sections made a take-away meal from draught-resistant ingredients in Palermo, Italy that diners could eat under the shade of single trees enclosed by stone walls; these micro-climate enclosures, equipped with sensors in collaboration with agronomists from the University of Palermo, generated and visualised data on growing instability of seasons. “We have been habituated to consume more and more, to have everything available to us all year round, making it difficult to diminish the need to change our habits,” says Daniel. “Climavore is about developing a capacity to adapt to a world that is changing rapidly.” Operating for the six-month duration of Manifesta 12, the project sought to emancipate food sources from the region’s highly politicised water infrastructure and reimagine relationships between the climate, landscape, city and audience.

These efforts have led Cooking Sections to focus many recent years of research on salmon. While working on Isle of Skye in Scotland, the pair began to examine the effects of farmed salmon on the marine environment and the island’s economy. Heavily reliant on tourism, restaurants on Skye have long turned to farmed salmon for its profit margins, but intensive production has introduced new parasites to the environment, diminished wild species and increased acidity in the waterways. Cooking Sections developed a multi-tier approach to address this situation. 

Entitled Climavore: On Tidal Zones, the project — now over three years running — started with the construction of a multispecies oyster table in an intertidal zone, emerging and receding with the daily tides; during low periods, the table becomes a site for workshops with local politicians and activists, events with school children and partnerships with local chefs. Inhabited by seaweeds and bivalves like oysters and mussels, the structure refocuses ecological attention on organisms that filter or oxygenate the water as they breath or oxygenate, reducing contaminants and pollution. In tandem with this, Cooking Sections works actively with local restaurants, convincing them to find alternatives to farmed salmon. “It was trying to revolutionize the whole food infrastructure on the island and how we think about what we grow,” says Alon. “What our work has tried to do is make the hospitality, food and beverage industry the site of responsibility, rather than putting pressure again on the consumer. At the same time, let’s look at salmon and understand it as something that completely influences the way we see, taste, smell and understand the world.” 

Most recently, Cooking Sections brought this research together in Salmon: A Red Herring, the name given to its current installation and intervention at the Tate Britain, where the group convinced the institution to permanently remove salmon from their food outlets, as well as a 2020 publication. The book — first in a series of micro-format books from publishing venture isolarii — synthesizes years of on-the-ground, academic and scientific investigation in an accessible way, underlining the absurdity of how today “customers can buy ‘authentic Scottish salmon’ from a company registered in Jersey, owned by a Swiss bank with Ukrainian and Norwegian investors, floated on the Oslo Stock Exchange and using imported Norwegian genetic material.” Reflecting the artificial colouration of farmed salmon, modified via its feed, the publication’s pages move through an industrial gradient of “salmon” hues that follow the trademarked SalmoFan colour scale. A farmed salmon is no longer salmon, the project suggests, but a genetically-modified, colour-corrected image of itself. Sensing such transformations, however subtle, becomes essential for unlearning habits and better adapting to a fragile, shifting world.