Let’s do a little thought exercise about food. Diet culture makes us isolated while the commodification of food pushes global food trends instead of regional variation. But we’re solarpunks, right? So we’re all about imagining a better future. Let’s imagine a world where we’ve healed our cultural relationship with food and are sourcing things more locally.
Think about where you live right now. Think about the kinds of things that can be raised or grown in your area. Then start to think about what recipes could be made for the following social events. We’re going to start small to make this more manageable, ok? Do as many or as few of these as you feel up to doing.
In this bright sustainable future full of local ingredients:
What snack are you bringing to game/movie night?
What soup do you make for a sick loved one?
What’s your go-to potluck recipe?
What treat do you welcome a new neighbor with?
What hot beverage do you share in fall/winter?
What cold beverage do you share in spring/summer?
How did that feel? What did you come up with?
Maybe these recipes can be worked into solarpunk stories. Maybe they can be made into a little cookbook. Maybe locally sourced ingredients are inaccessible to you right now, but are there any recipes you could start practicing anyway?
I love this idea! I’ve definitely been getting more experimental with food and drink over the pandemic. For example…
WITH LILACS!! (Very proud of my recent huge batch of simple syrup!) If you just want the recipe for lilac syrup, scroll straight to the bottom.
However I’m also going answer all the questions, since I have been planning to play around more with underused local ingredients. So in this ideal world…
1. Fresh/dried pawpaw! I recently learned these fruit trees are native to my area, though wild ones are now rare. That was a huge surprise because I’m Canadian and I thought they were more subtropical, but I’m juuuust within the northern tip of it’s range. I’ve yet to try it, but I’ve heard it compared to mango, which I love.
2. Creamy duck and mushroom soup. I already make this one, though I often have to settle for creminis, and would prefer a variety of local wild mushrooms. The couple times I’ve been able to get my hands on some it really brought it to the next level!
3. Chili with wild rice and/or corn chips. I currently use standard grocery store ingredients, but pretty much all of them can be grown locally in the summer and canned/stored dry for use in the cold seasons. I’ve never tried the rice that’s native to where I live, but it’s long been a staple of indigenous cuisine and it’s on my list of things to check out.
4. Fresh baked bread ☺️ With butter and homemade raspberry jam. Or maybe blueberry. There’s plenty of berries to choose from here!
5. I love making mulled wine and cider for my friends, and while grapes and apples grow here, it does require a bunch of imported spices. If I had to choose something without, maybe cedar tea with honey? While I haven’t tried it myself yet, I’m a big fan of evergreeny flavours, so I suspect it would be right up my alley.
6. LILAC LEMONADE. This is already my signature drink for spring/summer parties, and it’s quite easy to make. Yes I knoooow, lemons aren’t native, but you can grow them in greenhouses and in pots. My mom actually has a potted one that fruits every year! I can’t really say the same for the sugar, but hey, we said this was an ideal world, so let’s assume it’s produced ethically and sustainabily in this scenario.
But. Back to the LILACS. They’re one of my favourite flowers, the smell is heavenly, but they’re a short-lived seasonal experience. Enter simple syrup! Because it turns out, like many flowering trees, lilacs are edible! You need to be sure they haven’t been exposed to harmful pesticides, but other than that you’re good to go. Once you have the syrup, it can be safely stored in the fridge for at least a few weeks, or frozen almost indefinitely and brought out to mix with drinks whenever you like. It’s quite nice in a gin and tonic, but my go-to crowd pleaser is the lemonade.
So here’s my recipe:
1 Cup white sugar
1 Cup water
2 Cups lilac blossoms (Less precise than the other measurements. I use very generous cups)
Optional: 3-4 berries or other colourant. Left alone, the syrup is usually a light brown, with a muted tint that reflects the colour of your lilacs. I’ve successfully used blackberries, blueberries, and plum skins in small amounts to add a rich purpley-red colour without changing taste, which then dilutes to bright pink in my lemonade.
Snip off several bunches of lilacs, then rinse thoroughly to remove bugs and dirt. Gently shake the water off and lay them on a towel to dry while you prep. (It may be hard to judge how much this will yield until you’ve done it a few times, but I pile mine into an 11" mixing bowl and find this works out to roughly 8 cups of individual blossoms.)
Remove the blossoms by hand or with a small pair of scissors, leaving as little stem as you can. It’s tedious, but worth the effort to keep the bitter green bits out of the mix.
Add the water to a pot on high heat and bring to a strong simmer. You can go full boil just keep in mind it shouldn’t stay there for the next steps.
Add the sugar and lower heat to medium. Stir continuously to avoid burning any sugar at the bottom.
Once the sugar is fully dissolved, stir in the lilac florets plus whatever you add for colour, and bring heat down to low. Cover and let simmer for 10 minutes.
Remove from heat and allow to steep (like tea) for up to 8 hours, remaining covered. This is flexible, but I suggest at the very least to let it steep until it reaches room remperature, and not to go over a full day, as it can increase bitterness beyond a certain point. I like to make mine first thing in the morning and come back to it around dinner.
Pour the syrup through a fine mesh strainer and into a clean vessel. Use a spoon to aggressively squeeze out every last drop of flavour from the remaining mush.
To store, I recommend corked/capped bottles for the fridge, and sealable plastic containers for the freezer. I find old yogurt tubs perfect for this. Remember to leave room for expansion! Filling only ¾ of the way is generally enough.
And this is the rough ratio I use for the lemonade:
750 ml Lemon juice (equivalent to about 15 lemons)
1 L Lilac syrup
2 L Water
I tend to wing it on this part and adjust to taste, so you may want to play around a bit to find the balance you like.
And playing around is half the fun! This method can also be applied to pretty much any foraged edible flower, such as cherry blossoms, magnolias, violets, etc. Just make sure to do your research if you try a new plant so you know it’s safe.
I don’t know if this makes sense but one of the reasons I love solarpunk so much is that it explicitly places hope at the center of the movement and therefore kind of.. takes away this daunting task of having to find hope on my own. Like, sometimes trying to stay hopeful in the face of everything that’s happening seems impossible and can be so exhausting and isolating. But the hope that comes with solarpunk has been built up by a community of people rather than painfully and repeatedly dredged up out of some deep corner of my own mind, and it makes it that much easier to not fall into this well of dispair that seems to be constantly lurking nearby.
My insomnia makes me reflect on how a sustainable future needs to honor rest, leisure, darkness, and safe nocturnal movement for people and for animals. Here’s a couple of ideas:
-reducing light pollution so we can enjoy the stars and so migrating animals can navigate
- moon gardens for native nighttime pollinators
- reducing urban noise so that bugs and frogs can hear each other
- walkable communities and better public transportation to reduce traffic
- changing the color/temperature of street lights to be less blue/cool so human and animal circadian rhythms are less disrupted
- workers gaining more leisure time and shorter working hours
- paid sick, parental, and bereavement leave
- accommodating a wider range of sleep patterns, including biphasic sleep and daytime napping
- public spaces with plenty of places to sit and lay down
- and of course, the decriminalization of drugs, sex work, and being unhoused
I do not want to be part of the crafty underclass in a cyberpunk dystopia. I do not want to be confronted by militarized police drones or have to wear defensive AI camera camouflage. I want this:
As wild as the hills she calls home, she cuts a lone figure against the heavy grey mist, the frost-touched wind whispering around her as if ancient spirits were talking…
This past summer, Aram Bartholl installed a project called Keepalive in the woods of Neuenkirchen, Germany. Keepalive was a hollow boulder that contained “a thermoelectric generator which converts heat directly into electricity.”
Visitors are invited to make a fire next to the boulder to power up the wifi router in the stone which then reveals a large collection of PDF survival guides. The piratebox.cc-inspired router which is NOT connected to the Internet offers the users [an opportunity] to download the guides and upload any content they like to the stone database. As long as the fire produces enough heat the router will stay switched on.
You can’t escape eating (or gardening!) your vegetables, even if you’re in space. On Aug. 10, astronauts on the International Space Station sampled their first space grown salad. This freshly harvest red romaine lettuce was grown in the “Veggie” plant growth chamber that is designed to make gardens flourish in weightlessness.
In a weightless environment, there is no up and down, so roots grow in all directions. Water and soil, the materials used to anchor these plants and allow for root growth tend to float away.
How Do We Grow Plants in Space?
1. Plant Pillows
The Veggie chamber helps solve the problems of a weightless environment by using ‘plant pillows’, sounds comfy right? These pillows are bags filled with material for growing plants in space.
2. Wicks
Wicks are implanted into the bags and are used to draw water from inside the pillow to the plant.
These wicks also provide a place to glue the seeds. It’s important to orient the seeds so roots will grow ‘down’, and shoots that emerge will push out of the bag.
3. LED Lights
LED lights are used for photosynthesis and give the shoots a sense of direction so they keep growing upward. The walls of the Veggie chamber can expand to make room for the plant as it grows.
The purple/pinkish hue surrounding the plants in Veggie is the result of a combination of the red and blue lights, which is what the plants need to grow. Green LEDS were added so the plants look like edible food rather than weird purple plants.
Why are we growing plants in space?
When astronauts travel on deep space missions, like Mars, they will need to be self-sufficient for long periods of time. Having the ability to grow their own food is a big step in that direction. There is also a desire to grow flowering vegetables in space, which is why we are currently tending to zinnia flowers on orbit. Growing these flowering plants will help us understand longer duration growing plants that have to flower in space, such as tomatoes.
What’s Next? The next SpaceX delivery will include seeds for a small cabbage and additional red romaine lettuce. Upcoming experiments will use various ratios of red and blue lights and different fertilizers in attempts to improve crop yield, nutrition and flavor. The findings from these experiments can be utilized both on Earth and in space.
In addition to the nutrition benefits of growing vegetables in space, the psychological benefits are also significant. Having living plants can help with stress and increase the crews’ enjoyment. It provides the sights, smells and tastes of Earth.
To learn more about gardening in space, watch ScienceCast HERE.
“Boxes clad in steel and glass are so last century. Computers and robotics are giving architects access to levels of complexity and more sculptural forms and details we haven’t had in centuries.”
Industrial scale production of animal meat is intense in its use of resources. One third of croplands worldwide are used to produce animal feed. 80% of antibiotics are fed to animals and livestock is the single biggest factor for climate change. Livestock feed is one of the most important key factors for the environmental impact of meat production. Elaborate research into this topic revealed opportunity for a more independent, decentralized way of farming protein.
IDEA:
Farm 432 enables people to become independent from the system of current meat production by growing their own protein source at home. After 432 hours, 1 gram of black soldier fly eggs turn into 2.4 kilogram of larvae protein, larvae that self-harvest and fall clean and ready to eat into a harvest bucket. Black soldier fly adults don´t eat, therefore they don´t have any mouth parts and do not transmit any disease. The larvae can be fed on bio waste, therefore the production almost costs no water or CO2. Black soldier fly larvae are one of the most efficient protein converters in insects, containing up to 42% of protein (dried), a lot of calcium and amino acids.
Or people could go vegan? Like, are people seriously more willing to eat bugs than beans?
Depends on how sustainable beans are - certainly better than livestock farming, no arguments there, but vegetables still need an investment of land, water, biomass and time. I’d be interested to see how insect protein compares to vegetable protein in terms of resources needed per gram of protein produced.
Either way this thing’s interesting because it’s something people can run in their own homes and feed with kitchen scraps. Decentralised protein!
Industrial scale production of animal meat is intense in its use of resources. One third of croplands worldwide are used to produce animal feed. 80% of antibiotics are fed to animals and livestock is the single biggest factor for climate change. Livestock feed is one of the most important key factors for the environmental impact of meat production. Elaborate research into this topic revealed opportunity for a more independent, decentralized way of farming protein.
IDEA:
Farm 432 enables people to become independent from the system of current meat production by growing their own protein source at home. After 432 hours, 1 gram of black soldier fly eggs turn into 2.4 kilogram of larvae protein, larvae that self-harvest and fall clean and ready to eat into a harvest bucket. Black soldier fly adults don´t eat, therefore they don´t have any mouth parts and do not transmit any disease. The larvae can be fed on bio waste, therefore the production almost costs no water or CO2. Black soldier fly larvae are one of the most efficient protein converters in insects, containing up to 42% of protein (dried), a lot of calcium and amino acids.
On a sunny morning in March, Marcus Westbury brandished his iPad as if it were a window into another world. The screen depicted the street we were standing on in downtown Newcastle, Australia, circa 2008. Decades of suburban flight, a devastating 1989 earthquake, and the implosion of the city’s steel mills had left the center a ghost town. More than a hundred empty storefronts lined the commercial strip. The neoclassical post office and the Victoria—Australia’s second-oldest theater—both sat vacant. The street could have doubled as a set for The Walking Dead.
Now the sidewalks were bustling. The windows of the David Jones department store, another recent casualty, were filled with sculptors, milliners, jewelers, and stonemasons publicly plying their trades. Families sipped flat whites and leisurely ate breakfast at outdoor cafés. Compared to the desolate scenes of just a few years ago, the transformation was startling, especially considering it all stemmed from a bit of legal sleight-of-hand.
Throughout recorded history, humans have forced the evolution of select plants and animals. Now, researchers at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology’s Gates Lab are using this technique, called “assisted evolution”, to create “super coral.”
Why would researchers, led by Hollie Putnam and Ruth Gates, director of the the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, want to breed this strong, resilient coral? It comes down to the impact of climate change on oceanic ecosystems.
Tear gas burns the eyes, nose and skin. Without access to first aid, there’s not much you can do but run for cover and try to wash it out with water – or cry it out. The air was thick with the acrid gas as the global financial crisis hit Greece in 2008, which set in motion a debt crisis the country is yet to recover from. In December, young Greeks faced off with riot police in Athens’ Syntagma Square and anger towards failed economic policies came to life in billowing plumes of yellowy smoke.
While tear gas may cause temporary sensory deprivation, it can also lead to moments of clarity. Or, so it was for writer Paul Mason. As Mason watched events unfold on the streets of Greece, he cast his mind back to September that year: wandering around with a TV news crew outside the headquarters of the collapsed investment bank Lehman Brothers, as newly redundant employees put their possessions in cardboard boxes and went home for the last time. He thought too about how he’d seen the internet reshaping society since his time as a tech journalist.
Mason began to connect the dots: this crisis isn’t going away. This train of thought led him to his provocative book Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future. Mason offers a terminal diagnosis of the current order and a glimpse of what a new world might look like – and its seeds are already visible all around us.
Want to join the food revolution? Build yourself a flatpack urban farm
Forget flatpack furniture. Also forget traditional agriculture. Coming soon to a city near you – it’s the flatpack farm. At least, that’s the ambition of Mikkel Kjaer and Ronnie Markussen, a pair of young entrepreneurs who run Human Habitat, a Danish “urban design lab”.
“We wanted to make urban farming even smarter,” says Markussen over a coffee in central Copenhagen. The duo’s aim, he says, was to design a unit that would increase food security in cities, lower the ecological footprint of food production, create jobs and easily adapt to changes in the urban landscape.
What they came up with was the so-called Impact Farm – though it’s much more fun to describe it as a flatpack farm. That’s because it’s built using an assembly-kit of ready-made components that arrive in a saved-from-scrap shipping container. Put them together and you’ve got a two-storey vertical hydroponic(or soil-free) farm, which certainly beats a Billy bookcase.
Designed to be self-sufficient in water, heat and electricity, the farm requires a footprint of just 430 sq ft – though once the shipping container has been unpacked and the farm installed, the production area stretches to 538 sq ft. Crops include greens, herbs and fruiting plants.Human Habitat was born when childhood friends Kjaer and Markussen discovered they shared a similar goal. “We wanted to reconnect people to food by giving them a green space that brings nature back into our cities,” says Kjaer. As a student of development economics at Roskilde University, Kjaer had become interested in “small-scale solutions to the most fundamental of problems – providing food”. Markussen, meanwhile, had trained as a carpenter and worked on ambitious projects such Upcycle House, which was constructed using recycled and upcycled building materials.
Since curbside newspaper boxes don’t get a lot of action selling papers anymore, a new urban intervention puts them to use as something else: convenient compost bins.
“The boxes are so commonplace in the city, and I wanted to subtly tweak them to make people stop, look twice, and think about what they are seeing versus what they expect to see,” says designer Debbie Ullman, who created the New York Compost Box Project.
Placed next to community gardens, the boxes serve as a place for anyone to recycle food waste as they walk by. “The idea is to make it possible for busy New Yorkers to drop their scraps whenever it’s convenient for them, 24/7.”
This is cool! My initial question was who would use the compost, but the article says they’d be near community gardens, or alternatively could have a lock code so anyone who knows the code can take some for their own garden. My other question is who would maintain the bins? I’m no compost expert, but I understand it’s best if it has balanced food waste and dry matter (twigs etc) and is turned occasionally - would there be someone in charge of that?
