Dialoghi sul cibo: Food Futurings Tours at the #expo2015 / Dialogues on food: Food Futurings Tours at the #expo2015

Abstract

Food Futuring Tours is a collaborative project between two researchers from the Italian National Research Council (IREA-CNR) in Milano, Italy and two researchers from DG Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. The project is a public participatory experience aiming at re-imagining food in the XXI Century. It consisted of 5 semi-guided walking tours, through the pavilions of EXPO2015 which focus was on “Feeding the planet, Energy for Life” (May-October 2015, Milan). During the tours, participants collected ideas, visions and imaginaries about the future of food/food of the future; later they attended workshop sessions to develop these issues. Participants visited a variety of Pavilions such as NGO Pavilions, industry/private Pavilions, The supermarket of the future, Slow-Food Pavilion and Pavilions representative of North and South, East and West of the world (participants interacted with people in the Pavilions when possible).The aim of Food Futuring Tours was to collect insights, imaginaries and expectations about food futures through a reflexive debate with citizens who usually are described and performed as just consumers. The project explored new ways to engage citizens’ views about an urgent and complex human issue: feeding the planet with quality. During an event, such as EXPO, this initiative opened a space that stimulated and challenged the imagination of citizens about food futures – including food production, distribution and consumption - by using non-discursive methods of citizen involvement in futuring processes based on ideas of anticipation and extended dialogue. This approach enhanced allowed this small number of citizens to view the EXPO as a site to contest and interrogate prevalent narratives of food futures. We have explored in this project ways of creating or connecting to safe spaces where these types of dialogues can be carried out on the one hand, on the other hand we have illustrated that even institutions that have insufficient interaction with civil society, can actually in swift ways promote such dialogues about the future , which in any case cannot be relinquished to those who are credited as “experts”.