COOKING SECTIONS
Turner Prize 2021
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum
29 September 2021 - 12 January 2022
Cooking Sections address the environmental impact of intensive food production. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, their work uses food as a lens to observe landscapes in transformation, and as a tool for intervention in those very systems of food production and supply. Using site-responsive installation, performance and film, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics.
Salmon: Traces of Escapees is an audio and film installation that explores the environmental impact of salmon farms in Scotland. It reveals the gap between common perceptions of farmed salmon as an affordable luxury, and the reality of its mounting environmental costs – with excrement, drugs, synthetic colour and parasites polluting the surrounding waters.
The installation continues Cooking Sections’ questioning of the impact of food habits on climate change, and proposes CLIMAVORE (rather than herbivore or carnivore) as a form of eating that adapts to the climate. Originated and based in the Isle of Skye since 2016, the project works with communities towards ocean regeneration, promoting alternative ingredients which improve water quality and cultivate marine habitats.
Becoming CLIMAVORE is a UK-wide collective action in which museums are replacing farmed salmon with CLIMAVORE alternatives on the menus in their cafés and restaurants. A twelve-postcard mosaic has been distributed across participating institutions, where visitors can taste and, in the form of postcards, collect part of the project.
CLIMAVORE dishes can be tasted at Alfred’s Café at the Herbert.
Restaurants in museums across the UK are Becoming CLIMAVORE, a form of eating that responds to human alterations of the planet’s climate.
CLIMAVORE works to reimagine and transform food systems in response to the climate emergency by addressing ocean pollution from open-net salmon farms.
In participating restaurants, farmed salmon has been removed from the menu and replaced with ingredients that improve soil and water quality, while cultivating marine habitats.
The word ‘restaurant’ originates from Bouillon Restaurant, an establishment in 19th-century France whose name literally translates as ‘restorative soup’. In the climate emergency, the restaurant can grow to become a place not only to restore the human body, but also to care for the planet’s ecology.
