The Anthropocene Cookbook
Recipes and Opportunities for Future Catastrophes
By Zane Cerpina and Stahl Stenslie
Forthcoming at MIT Press, October 18, 2022
Pre-order now
Amazon | Penguin Random House | Barnes and Noble |
Bookshop.org | Indiebound | Indigo | Books a Million
The Anthropocene Cookbook is by far the most comprehensive collection of ideas about future food from the perspective of art, design, and science. The book is unique in the way it connects food, art, thinking, and science. It talks to the new generation of aesthetically aware environmentalists. It promotes ecological thinking from a radically different perspective: what happens if we embrace the coming environmental catastrophes as an opportunity and not as doom?
The book speaks to the large, worldwide, and international audience concerned about current environmental catastrophes.
It is a thought-provoking book about the connections between art, food, and eating in the Anthropocene –The Age of Man– and the age of catastrophes. The book investigates humanity's future cuisine from an artistic perspective in a time when humankind shapes, models, and engineers the Earth beyond recognition. In our age of constant environmental upheaval, the book poses the following question about our menu to be: how can we survive and thrive in the future?
Although food is the topic, the content is as much about how to think and act differently through the arts. Presenting more than 60 artistic and explorative projects, it is mapping out ways we can and will feed ourselves on a planet changed beyond repair by human activity.
The Anthropocene Cookbook explores a wide range of artistic ideas and projects such as: modifying the human body to digest cellulose, turning plastic into food, tasting smog, extracting spices and medicines from sewage, growing meat, fish, and even human flesh in the lab, making cheese using human bacterias, enabling human photosynthesis through symbiosis with algae, producing liqueur from body fluids, bringing back extinct species only to eat them again, and many more.