The purpose of the tour was for a group of experts to witness the large-scale infrastructure projects that are in development, while discussing alternative Egyptian food futures that are more biodiverse, just & beautiful. Speculative recipes were served throughout the tour, guiding us in asking “what if” questions about tomorrow, while we view the vast development projects that are happening today.
The Attendees on the trip had diverse expertise and interests relating to food systems from academia, activism, the arts and journalism.
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Post (1/3) identified the DESTINATIONS. In Post (2/3) we describe the RECIPES. —
MOCK WILD PICNIC: EGYPT was a catered bus tour for tasting divergent food futures and visiting the engineered arable landscapes emerging around the New Delta megaproject in the desert west of Cairo, Egypt.
It builds on MOCK WILD: EGYPT (ver. 1.0) presented @Cairotronica in May, 2025. —
SNACK 1: SNACK BOX Chickpea breadsticks, Millet crackers, Barley Flatbread Matrouh Olive oil & Mahlab Dukkah Pumpkin Laseemah Hibiscus-cured Tilapia Canape with Capers and Nori Goat Cheese and Fig Tart with Almonds Marinated Olives
LUNCH Buffalo Bresaola Sandwich in Tigernut Foccacia, with pickled painted serpent cucumbers, purslane, and Mallawi Cheese Potato Chips with leaves, celery and split chickpeas
We ate three courses which offered alternative flavours and ingredients that imagine other ways of growing and eating: a near future where disparate greening projects, historic land-use and ecological farming approaches overlap, forming layered landscapes of intensive human and non-human activity.
The project uses databases of taste and data-driven dreaming to map, cook and depict a near-future regional food system that consists of hybrid approaches to food sovereignty and land use.
Blog Post (1/3) identified the DESTINATIONS. In Blog Post (3/3) we meet the ATTENDEES. —
MOCK WILD PICNIC: EGYPT was a catered bus tour for tasting divergent food futures and visiting the engineered arable landscapes emerging around the New Delta megaproject in the desert west of Cairo, Egypt.
MOCK WILD PICNIC: EGYPT was a catered bus tour for tasting divergent food futures and visiting the engineered arable landscapes emerging around the New Delta megaproject in the desert west of Cairo, Egypt.
The stated aims of the New Delta mega project are to reclaim desert land for agriculture, improve food security and create new communities outside the densely populated Nile Valley. While one can identify this infrastructure from satellite images, access on the ground is limited. We designed & hosted an unofficial tour to explore the ground truth and discover what was publicly visible and accessible. Leaving Cairo heading west we spotted greenhouses, pivot irrigation fields, grain silos and other agricultural projects along the highway.
We drove (past but could not enter) the New Delta Irrigation Water Treatment Plant. According to the Guinness World Records (GWR) this is “the world’s largest water treatment facility, the most capacious and operationally robust water treatment plant, the largest area for epoxy coating in structures, and the biggest sludge treatment plant globally.” Although it describes itself as “One of the most significant sustainability initiatives worldwide,” it does not currently give tours or allow visitors.
However, we WERE able to stop by the side of the road and take a self-guided tour of محطه 12 النهر الصناعي / Pumping Station No. 12 (Capacity 6 million cubic meters a day) which is part of the Wastewater Collection and Transfer Project.
Blog Post (2/3) will describe the RECIPES. In Blog Post (3/3) we will meet the ATTENDEES.
Over the past ten years, many food forests have been planted in the Netherlands. They are often mostly viewed through an ecological lens, focusing on soil health and biodiversity, while their potential to bring food forest ingredients to the market and into our everyday kitchens remains under-explored. A true forest food culinary culture has yet to emerge.
With the Food Forest Taste Test project, we set out to explore what such a culture could look like, connecting farmers, chefs and other early adopters, and prototyping cultural approaches. In this blog post, we share some of our findings.
Imagining food forest chains
On Monday, the 8th of November, over 40 curious eaters, makers and growers came together at MidWest to dream up futures for food forests. Two themes kept bubbling up: helping consumers and chefs recognise these flavours, and building the chains to get them onto our plates. The event started off with presentations, then round table discussions and ending with a presentation of goods from three food forests.
Manon Botha from Voedselboswinkel reminded us that new tastes need to be introduced in a familiar way, for example, turning rosehips into ketchup or pickles makes them less intimidating and easier to use. Saskia Bronts, who forages wild ingredients for Restaurant Rotonde in Rotterdam, swings by the kitchen every Tuesday morning with her finds, sparking curiosity and giving chefs a gentle nudge toward new flavours. Besides recognition, Marieke from Boslekker also talked about creating a strong supply chain so these ingredients can move from niche to mainstream. Boslekker tries to tackle this by coordinating harvests and developing shelf-stable products. Some wild ideas that came up through the round table discussions were: creating a local food hub dedicated to processing and distributing food forest ingredients, proposing a food forest edition of Heel Holland Bakt and creating Food Forest Junk Food to meet consumers where they are at.
Tasting the harvest of the season
On Friday, September 12, we hosted the ‘Streek Smaken Diner’at Thuishaven in Flevoland, introducing the neighbouring farmers and local policymakers to the concept of a food forest. Chefs Tess and Tessa transformed the season’s harvest into playful hybrid recipes, blending food forest ingredients with regional agricultural products. Together, we explored how food forests could weave themselves into regional agriculture, growing from one-off experiments into a living, connected Flevoland food system.
The Food Forest Taste Test project was generously supported by the Fresh Perspectives funding stream of the Stimuleringsfonds.
We were tasked with imagining a solo show that would bring together a set of our projects in order to create a larger and resonant story about food systems, taste, place & change. Our projects are usually created in relation to a specific site and audience, and some amount of work is necessary to draw together the different geographies and communities represented in the works to create a synthesized and coherent narrative.
We Wrote:
The exhibition theme “DATABASES OF TASTE” explores the ways that computers and the internet have impacted our work in creative food futuring. How can data driven systems and recombinatorial approaches to food culture open up new possibilities or ignite unexpected food futures that are grounded in material reality?
Genomic Gastronomy is an art collective based in Amsterdam & Porto that has created work about food, ecology & technology for the last 15 years. We would like to prepare for a solo exhibition called DATABASES OF TASTE.
This is a chance to assemble and refine a set of artworks and archival materials with shared themes, completed during the last decade, in preparation for a gallery exhibition. We will use our studio time to make connections between the work through reflective writing, reprinting materials, updating our website and refurbishing the artworks.
In addition to the work within our studio in Amsterdam, we will invite one critic and one curator for studio visits to gather feedback and insights on how this set of works can be brought together to be more than the sum of its parts.
Anyone have the resources to liberate our work week to do this work, or the space to host an exhibition? 🙂 Get in touch: info@genomicgastronomy.com
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Our previous projects that we would include in this process are:
MOCK WILD (2023-ongoing) EYES ON THE FIELD (2024-ongoing) TERROIR THAT TRAVELS (2023-2025) NEW NATIONAL DISH (2016-2023) LOCI FOOD LAB (2014-2019) SPICE MIX SUPER COMPUTER (2012-2015)
A manifesto for flavor-heads, biodiversity junkies, and edible flower bros.
Bro. Seriously. WHY AREN’T YOU BIO-MAXXING?
Do you even edible flowers, bro? Do your smoothies contain anything other than banana and sad imported strawberries? When was the last time your stir fry featured a vegetable that wasn’t a bell pepper or “baby” spinach? (What is that baby even doing in your wok?)
We live in a golden age of food mediocrity. And it shows. According to the FAO, 75% of the world’s food comes from just 12 plants and 5 animal species. That’s not a menu — that’s a death drive. Meanwhile, the average grocery store carrot tastes like wet cardboard that’s been emotionally neglected since 1993.
It’s time to BIO-MAXX. That means maximum flavor, maximum nutrients, maximum ecological intelligence. It means stuffing your life (and your face) with as many species, cultivars, landraces, and foraged weirdos as your foodshed can handle.
Eat like a forest, not like a factory.
Here’s how you start:
1. Cook like a chaotic botanist. Start counting. Literally. How many species are in your pantry right now? If your “variety” means 3 kinds of pasta and two types of tomato sauce, you’re doing it wrong. Cook with color and chaos. Use ancestral grains, bitter greens, overlooked tubers, legumes that come in colors you didn’t know nature invented. Make ferments from wild brassicas. Throw in an amaranth leaf just to flex.
2. Source like your supply chain depends on it (because it does). Build relationships with seed savers, rogue farmers, and that one guy at the farmers’ market selling purple peas and celtuce. Choose foods that aren’t monoculture-mafia staples. Push your grocery store to stock varietals you can’t pronounce. Ask restaurants where they get their ingredients — then ask why they’re not serving huitlacoche dumplings or dandelion pesto. Press the issue. Be annoying. Your gut microbiome will thank you.
3. Winter? Pickle it, dry it, cellar it, don’t despair it. Local biodiversity doesn’t die in December. It transforms. Stockpile fermented garlic scapes, freezer-dried alpine strawberries, jars of pickled purslane. “…people’s current desire for food that is ‘never out of season’ creates a fragile agricultural system; it fosters monocultures (…) and takes away the rich abundance of flavours, textures and ways of living that used to accompany the wide variety of local foods.” Translation? Eat your sour plums and chill.
But why tho?
Because your flavor palette is a political act. Because monoculture kills the planet and your vibe. Because eating 20 plant species a week isn’t radical — it’s normal (or was, until global agribusiness erased it). “No matter where you live, you have the memory of something you used to eat that is no longer a part of your diet – something your grandmother used to make, something a small shop used to carry. Something we have lost.” wrote food scholar Simran Sethi in Bread, Wine, Chocolate. “This extinction is a process; it happens one meal at a time.” You want to be part of that gray goo future? Or you wanna crunch on crimson sunchokes and weep with joy?
Biodiverse diets are tied to better health outcomes too. More species = more nutrients = more ways to NOT get scurvy in your 30s, Chad.
Oh, and let’s not forget flavor. Dan Saladino (a.k.a. the David Attenborough of obscure foods) wrote in Eating to Extinction that:
Over millennia, food, cooking and eating became the most powerful expression of the human imagination. So, when a food becomes endangered, another seed lost, another skill forgotten, it is worth remembering the epic story of how they got here.” Every time you choose a purple daikon over a bland cucumber, you’re saving a narrative from extinction. Bite by bite.
At-home bio-hacks
Color quota challenge – seven colors a day, no excuses.
Ingredient roulette – spin a wheel and land on sorrel, sea buckthorn, or salsify. Cook it. Eat it. Brag.
Micro-microgreens – sprout six species at once. Your windowsill is now a rainforest understory.
Do you even edible flowers, bro? Nasturtium deadlifts your salad aromatics; dianthus adds vanity-mirror vibes.
Supply-chain side quests
Ask your grocer for “the weird stuff.” Purple yam, pigeon pea, African spider plant—whatever isn’t already cash-cropped into oblivion.
Signal-boost polyculture producers—share their CSA boxes like you share cat memes.
So here’s your final wake-up bite:
If your plate looks like a cornfield, you’ve already lost. If it looks like a forest floor, you’re BIO-MAXXING.
Eat aggressively. Eat diversely. Eat like the future of flavor depends on it — because it absolutely does. Now go out there and ask your barista for tulsi and sea buckthorn oat milk. Be the chaos you want to taste in the world.
In 2025 we are building on our work of Food Forest Taste Test with a new round of Food Forest Taste Test events (FFTT). We want to refine and expand our experiments to engage a broader range of eaters.
The food forest movement has been gaining momentum in recent years, both internationally and here in the Netherlands, as a response to the urgent question: how can we grow food sustainably? This movement has been lead by activists and farmers. While a great deal of work has been done on the side of designing, planting and maintaining a food forest, less people are exploring how to integrate these new and novel ingredients into daily cooking.
Food forests offer a wide range of benefits: increased biodiversity, greater resilience to drought and flooding, and long-term soil health. But they also present unique challenges. The ingredients in food forests are uncommon and diverse. The experts at haute cuisine restaurants can creatively incorporate these ingredients, but what would you do with a cola plant? Or with ‘Hemelsleutel’ or ‘Lievevrouwebedstro’? While the fine dining resturant De Nieuwe Winkel has done amazing things with food forest ingredients and produced a beautiful cookbook, everyday eaters have little knowledge around using these ingredients in their kitchens, at home or commercially.
Food Forest Taste Test is a project that develops the rituals, rhythms, and recipes needed to bring micro-seasonal, food forest produce into daily life.
By optimizing for flavour we hope to contribute to growing a larger network of people who engage with and care about eating from resilient agro-ecosystems.
FRESH PERSPECTIVE: PHASE 2
We have received a Fresh Perspectives grant from the Creative Industries fund to work with innovative food forest producers to prototype desirable food futures. The aesthetic and cultural components of cuisine, flavour, and social conviviality must be considered when imagining a more just, biodiverse & beautiful food system. For Phase 2, we aim to address climate issues by prototyping aesthetic and cultural approaches to boosting food forest ingredient uptake.
To kick off phase 2 or this project, we traveled to Flevoland to meet with Anje Portman on April 1, 2025, and visit three different food forest sites that she has designed, initiated and/or helped to develop:
Each site was at a different scale, and had very different for plans for how it was to be managed, maintained and harvested in the future.
SITE 1: THUISHAVEN (2 Hectare + Additional Hectare )
In 2024 our studio visited Thuishaven and cooked with ingredients at multiple points in the growing season.
Within the Thuishaven site there are three areas:
— The romantic food forest (planted in 2018) of 2 hectare. — The production food forest (planted in 2021/2022) of an additional hectare. — A wild edible garden.
We have previously written about this site during our 2024 visit, but as a reminder, the surrounding landscape consists of neighboring conventional farms laid down in rows, and power-producing wind farms (also laid down in rows).
One quote from today’s visit: “Every day I discover new plants and animals. You’d wish for people to connect like that too — connection takes time, just like a food forest takes ten years to grow.” – Iris.
Field Notes: The interesting interplay between the romantic forest and the productive forest — that they are informing each other. For example, in the ‘romantic forest’ they discovered a delicious pear, which led them to cultivate more of it in the productive forest. So food production is also led by taste.
The importance of Art and Symbolism: There is a small hill in the center of the romantic food forest and at the top of it is a boat, indicating sea level. Seeing the boat sculpture above your head helped orient you to the sea level, and remind you that this land is underwater.
SITE 2: Het Lydia Waterreus Voedselbos (1 Hectare)
“The Lydia Waterreus Food Forest is an educational, novel food forest, open to all residents of Zeewolde. The food forest is on land owned by the municipality of Zeewolde and is managed by a regular group of volunteers from IVN Zeewolde.” (link)
Field Notes: Some sections of the site were well-established and very beautiful to walk through. Other sections were starting to be overgrown with volunteer plants and needed some more active maintenance. A great community asset that is hopefully continued and cared for by large(r) section of residents.
Q: If we wanted to harvest and serve some produce from this food forest (in order to contribute to the culinary possibilities of the site) who would we talk to, who would we serve? Is there a way to make the harvesting and (especially) the preparation, presentation and serving of the food into something?
SITE 3: Voedeselbos Eemvallei Zuid (30 Hectares)
“A unique combination of a food forest, herb-rich meadows and recreation Eemvallei Zuid is a joint initiative of the Food Forestry Foundation , the Buytenwold Foundation , the Vliervelden Nature Farm and the State Forestry Service within the framework of the New Nature programme of the province of Flevoland. In June 2017, they signed the agreement for the realisation of an innovative nature reserve (50 hectares) with a unique combination of a food forest (30 hectares), herb-rich meadows and various recreational opportunities for children and adults.” [link]
Field Notes: There were some innovative management plans on how potential buyers of the produce can pay to have access during the season, and then come harvest one or more kinds of produce.
BONUS – SITE X: The Green Cathedral
At the end of our visit we had the chance to visit the artwork De Groene Kathedraal (1996) by Marinus Boezem. (Small side note: our studio originally learned about this artwork while browsing the bookshelves in Stavanger, Norway’s public library, where an entire book dedicated to Flevoland’s abundant and unique history of land art commisions. The power of libraries, printed books and serendipity offline! But, also the awesome work of Land Art Felvoland). There was some small controversy in the Netherlands in 2025 because MVRDV also proposed building an artwork / installation with the name Green Cathedral.
This project has been selected for a development contribution as part of the Open Call: Fresh Perspectives by the Creative Industries Fund NL 2025.
Early in 2025 we were asked to participate in the Wild, Untamed and Spontaneous at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, curated by Paisanaje (a collective based in Madrid that combines curatorial work with artistic practice, and aims to address the growing ecosocial crises facing the world today).
Paisanaje have been invited to curate the part of the exhibition that will focus and reflect on “weeds” and on their potential from different perspectives. In this edition, they have proposed a study of contemporary artistic and landscape practices which imagine community gardens as spaces for learning, experimentation and cohabitation with other spaces.
This was a great moment to take stock of our own garden practice at Amstel Park (with Zone2Source) and reflect on our activities and what organisms are present. Three questions Paisanaje asked us were:
A. A SIGNIFICANT SPECIES: We’d love for you to tell us about a plant in the garden that you find characteristic or emotionally significant.
B. CULTIVATED PLANTS: What plants have you cultivated in your garden?
C. OBSERVED ORGANISMS: What organism have you observed in your garden?
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Luckily we are currently co-developing a biodiversity accounting tool with NiceTrails as part of a MUSAE project, and we have had a chance to put that into action with two recent workshops called “Agroecology Accounting in the Garden (AAG)”.
One workshop was held for the BioArt meet-up Group from HKU led by Martijn van Gessel and the other was for the Green Office VU sustainability platform at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Here are responses to the curators questions. The third list is from the Biodiversity Accounting that the workshop participants have been helping with.
A. A SIGNIFICANT PLANT:
We recently planted a sea buckthorn (Hippophae rham) as part of our foray into edible perennial species. This is not a taste I grew up with, and was first introduced to it while we were collaborating with the scientist Dr. Wendy Russel in Scotland a decade ago. Now, whenever I taste this unique berry it brings me back to a moment not so long ago when the delight and pleasure of agricultural biodiversity started to resonate at a sensual and not only intellectual level.
