Critical food practices across art and design

In recent years, critical food practices in art and design have been increasingly used as vehicles to explore systemic issues of our civilisations. Food serves as a potent medium for transdisciplinary explorations in facing such problems, offering inherent complexity, cultural significance, and scientific diversity while remaining approachable and relatable. In this chapter, we demonstrate how such critical, transdisciplinary food-based practices can be implemented in cycles of education and research and examine the significance of these practices in contributing to the pluriversality of food-based practices. We conduct a review of the literature on the development of food-based education and critical food practices in art and design. Further, we reframe and examine such cases in non-Western and trans-local contexts. Following this, we share a series of food-based modules developed and implemented in the BioFoodLab, integrated within a design school in Japan. Through this, we explore how art and design can address these challenges. Specifically, through the three educational modules organised around the concepts of fermentation, geopolitics, and norms, we illustrate the contextual contribution of the food lab situated in Asia. We unpack the lab as an essential place for embodied practice and argue for the importance of diverse pluriversal cases to explore the food medium for transformative education. Through such transdisciplinary spaces, learners may be empowered to engage with critical planetary issues rooted in the confluence of identity and the experience of living.