Saint-Étienne edition 🇫🇷: Difference between revisions

So what does a resilient diet mean?

Broadly speaking, resilience means the capacity for an organism to overcome a crisis, to go back to its former state, as well as remembering how it came to overcome this very crisis in order to be able to intelligently deal with it in the case it would happen again.  

A forest, for example can come close to having a resilient system. By gathering a multitude of plants and organisms, a forest forms an ecology which can work together to overcome crises. To give one example: the mycelium mushrooms which are connected to the roots of trees will, in case of drought for instance, tell the tree to develop its roots in a specific direction in order for it to find water.

So how can a diet be environmentally resilient?

The current food system we are in is too demanding on the environment, that is a given. By buying exclusively organic products we can therefore have a sustainable approach to the environment, have a minimum impact, even a 0% impact. We believe however that having a sustainable approach is not enough in a time when climate change is in a state of exponential crisis. Indeed, we believe that we have to approach food in a resilient manner, meaning that by the choices we make of the ingredients we buy and use we can not only have a 0% impact on the environment but a lasting positive impact on it. Having an environmentally resilient diet means therefore put our efforts on guaranteeing the health of the earth rather than to focus on our own health. But we strongly believe that whatever might be good for the earth is, by extension, good for humans.   

We are not working alone however, farmers are too. We have the power, as consumers, to support and influence what local farmers produce, and will produce as well as the ecosystems they work on. We have seen successful examples of this in the nordic region. Therefore, in order to see this change happen in our regions, we need to do our research collectively, build and share knowledge, so that we can have a strong and lasting impact on the current systems.

Now we have established that an environmentally resilient choice of ingredients may be conceivable, now we need to think of it in terms of a diet. To follow a resilient diet means that we need to be able to eat resiliently, throughout time.  

Take a burger made only with only resilient ingredients. If this burger was delicious, beautiful and advertised as a environmentally friendly burger, this burger could today become a fashionable street food item. This sounds pretty great but what will happen to this dish if the burger trend ends? Burgers are everywhere nowadays, but say in twenty years, what if burgers are not seen as cool anymore? Our burger may well disappear! And its benefits on the environment too.  

The idea of this dish was to swap the bad quality meat used in the famous dutch Kroket for a more resilient ingredient. After much research the ingredient we chose was the cauliflower. However, for the dutch to seriously consider going for a cauliflower kroket, rather than the traditional meat one, we needed a good reason. We thus decided to make the dutch believe that our cauliflower kroket was as traditional as the meat one.  

We therefore invented its story drawing our inspiration from the “cauliflower neighborhood” which was an urban experiment tried out by the dutch in the 70s, before spreading accros many cities. It was built in the shape of the curved florets of the cauliflower. Turning fact into fiction, we narrated the made up story of the cauliflower kroket which would have been served as a promotional gift to public of the opening of the first cauliflower neighborhood, in the town of Lunetten.  

So these are examples on how to questions the traditional ingredients currently used in regional dishes and how to re-design their stories. What we will demonstrate now is the process and the negotiation involved in the creation of a resilient dish. For this demonstration we have chosen to inspire ourselves from a typical dish from Saint-Étienne: the Pâté chaud. It involves: A liver cake (often placed in a vol-au-vent made out of puff pastry) and quenelles bathing in a tomato sauce made out of concentrated tomatoes and olives.