I had a meal on the shores of Crete that reshaped the way I think about food and, ultimately, how I make my art.
It was a morning in 2004, the summer before I started graduate school, and I was walking to the beach for a swim. I spotted a hand-painted wooden sign in Aegean blue with thick strokes of white paint outlining the profile of a fish. It pointed to a few small tables nestled under a tamarisk tree not far from the sea. An older man in a black hat waved me over and pulled out a chair.
Once I sat down, dishes began to appear—no menu. A slab of cool feta cheese drizzled in green olive oil flecked with salt and oregano. Charred whole sardines with lemons and salt. Mounds of warm red tomato slices tasting of the sun. I washed it all down with a licorice flavored liquor called raki.
I later learned that the sheep’s milk had been sourced weeks earlier from a flock owned by the family that ran the taverna. They had harvested the tomatoes and oregano from the garden in the back. The sardines came from the morning’s haul. And the raki came from the distillery run by the owner’s elderly uncle.
The food was simple, but that afternoon seared into my memory one of the freshest, cleanest, and most delicious meals I’ve ever had. It solidified how important it is to eat seasonally, to know the provenance of my foods, and to see how biodiversity influences not just planetary health but flavor as well.
Along with that meal in Crete, readings about physics contributed to my artistic approach as it relates to food. The Quark and the Jaguar by Nobel Laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann convinced me that food and science have a coiled relationship that reaches beyond just flavor molecules and taste receptors. Gell-Mann suggests that our understanding of the fundamental laws of physics is not as exact, universal, or immutable as we may have been taught. The complexity and diversity found in the natural world is not innate but actually a result of adaptive behaviors, like the evolution of a strain of bacteria or an artist finding a creative spark. These examples demonstrate a physics where complexity emerges from its laws rather than the clockwork of determinism [1].
In my own work, I began to explore how phenomena in physics could act as a metaphor for how food systems unfold in surprising ways. Food is after all an emergent system, and its future and present are inextricably tied. A tiny change in a food trend now might have massive impacts on food in the future. For me it echoes an occurrence in particle physics called quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement happens when two particles somehow remain connected (entangled), even when separated over large distances. When an action is performed on one particle, the second particle performs a complimentary reaction. For example, one particle might be spun in a clockwise direction the second particle spins in an equal anti-clockwise direction. Quantum entanglement has been detectable at distances as great as from Earth to space satellites—approximately 745 miles [2]. The same effect might be imagined across time—a change made here and now can have an effect on a food system in a distant future. My current body of work takes its name from Albert Einstein’s epithet for quantum entanglement—he called it Spooky Action at a Distance.
My series Spooky Action at a Distance takes a long lens on the impact that human behavior today has on ecosystems in the future. My work attempts to show how changes made now can lead to alternative, and sometimes counterintuitive futures. A simple case might be how crop rotation—temporarily removing crops from a growing season—actually improves agricultural output over the long-term; or how industrial farming may improve yields in the short-term, but depletes land and reduces yields in the long-term.
In a culture weaned on instant gratification, people often struggle to understand the predictive tools used to forecast the future of food. Using food and playfulness as a conduit to explore people’s relationships to the past, present, and future of food systems is the only way I know how to communicate sometimes uncomfortable, often inaccessible, and hard to fathom concepts.
Our connections to food are part of the emotional, cultural, and environmental landscape necessary for survival. The future is dependent on a symbiotic relationship with science and the natural world where flavor and health are the apotheosis, and science is not just spooky but a synergetic collaborator.
You’re standing on the top floor of a museum surrounded by the New York City skyline. You walk up to a pedestal with a glass bowl of nickels next to a 1950s wooden and brass gumball machine [3].
Insert a nickel into the slot and turn the handle. Listen to the cranking gears, and then the pop. Slide your hand under the silver door, and feel for the clear capsule it has dispensed. You crack it open and find inside is a bite-sized morsel. It looks like a caramel candy crusted with seeds. It tastes faintly of the sea, milky sugar, with a slight crunch. It’s delicious.
Each of these bites is designed by a different chef and draws attention to the future of food systems by highlighting a food source that’s either a climate change “winner” or “loser” [4, 5]. It comes with a message about the future of food’s environmental impact and alarming statistics about the effects of global warming.
This caramel bite was realized in collaboration with owner and chef of the award-winning NYC restaurants Estela and Café Altro Paradiso Ignacio Mattos. He and chef Sam Lawrence made the bite with seaweed, coconut palm sugar, and chia seeds, ingredients chosen from the winners list.
Left behind in the capsule is a folded fortune. It says:
The sustainable future you seek is not on Mars but on Earth, and it contains seaweed.
—Ignacio Mattos + Stefani Bardin
[1] Gell-Mann, Murray. The Quark and the Jaguar. Abacus, 1995.
[2] Gent, Edd. “New Quantum-Entanglement Record Could Spur Hack-Proof Communications.” LiveScience. Accessed 5 March, 2021.
[3] The project debuted in the New Museum’s Sky Room as part of Demo Day at NEW INC, the museum’s technology incubator, in February 2019. It then traveled to Dessau, Germany for the 100th Anniversary celebration of the Bauhaus.
[4] “Knorr, WWF Suggest 50 Future Foods to Fix Our Food System.” SustainableBrands.com, 20 February, 2019.
[5] Willett, Walter and Johan Rockström. Summary Report of the EAT-Lancet Commission. Wellcome Trust.
[6] The second project in the Spooky Action at a Distance series, The Future is Not What It Used to be Before, is a collaboration with food artist Jen Monroe commissioned by NEW INC. Climate winners included, kohakutou sea glass “fun dip” with prickly pear dipping sugar (left to right); and BBQ mushroom chips with sunchoke dip and salt crystal oyster shell. Climate losers included, onion grass and herb-infused edible butter candles with sourdough bread; and synthesized corn pudding with ginger, coconut whipped cream, and almond brittle.
Stefani Bardin is an artist whose work is split between food and climate change projects and initiatives. Based in New York City, she is a member at the New Museum’s cultural incubator NEW INC. She a professor of Food, Design, Technology, and Climate Change in NYU’s Food Studies and Interactive Telecommunications Graduate Programs and Parsons Interactive Design Program. Bardin has worked with notable organizations, including The James Beard Foundation, Rethink Food NYC, and Brigaid. She is also the founder of the company blixt!, a fully hosted SaaS platform for securely redacting and selectively sharing documents to multiple recipients at the same time.
Cite This Essay
Bardin, Stefani. “Edible Entaglements.” Biodesigned: Issue 6, 17 March, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].