Future Food at Adelaide’s Open State Festival

Future Food, at Adelaide’s Open State Festival from 28 Sept – 8 Oct 2017, explores a diverse range of aspects around the future of our food.

If there’s one thing we know how to do really well here in South Australia it’s celebrate – hardly a month goes by without some form of festival. Later this month we look to our future when we host Open State, a festival of collaboration, innovation, ideas and enterprise. With a central hub in Victoria Square, but with events all around town and throughout the state, Open State has a program of more than 100 events – including Future Food.

South Australia has a reputation for producing premium food in a clean environment and also as a leader in food innovation. To stay ahead in this field we need to be continually thinking of the challenges we face in this role – how economic factors will shape the food of the future, how to cater to growing demands for products, deciding just what we will be eating in the future, looking at ways to reduce food waste and ensuring that our food enhances, rather than compromises, our health.

Future Food aims to address these issues through an interesting and diverse range of discussions open to anyone who cares about the future of our food, and many of the sessions are free to attend. Future Food events include –

• Are You Bug Curious? Taste a range of insects and insect-based products and meet Australia’s passionate bug eaters, farmers and enthusiasts. Even learn about matching insects with wine.
• Is your diet making you dumb? Is social eating not just about ‘good manners’ but also about ‘best practice’? Dr Fiona Kerr and Chef Simon Bryant examine whether our surroundings and emotional engagement with food also affect how our body and mind process the benefit of food. Could it be how and with whom we eat is just as important as what we eat?
• Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu. A free event featuring Bruce Pascoe, an award-winning Australian writer, editor and anthologist who puts forward a compelling argument for a reconsideration of the hunter-gatherer label for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians. The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing.
• Future Food Sampler, an afternoon of speakers exploring big-picture questions around food. At this free event they’ll address questions such as how our planet can sustain 9 billion people on a nutritionally balanced daily diet. How can we justify the application of water on crops that return less than the cost of the water used to produce them? How do we ensure biosecurity and traceability in supply-chains?

Check out the full Future Food program here.