As a Future Food Designer, she designs new ways of producing food. Meat? A passed stage. Even vegetables won't have to be grown in the future. If it's up to Chloé Rutzerveld (Landgraaf, 1992), in the future fungi, bacteria and yeasts will form the basis and the sensory experience will be generated by virtual reality, augmented reality, touch, smell and sound.
Text: Bart-Jan Brouwer
Online editing: Natasha Hendriks
Where does your fascination with food come from?
"That has always been there. I come from South Limburg and there, eating and dining together is very important. My grandparents had a big vegetable garden. I did very intensive competitive swimming and was therefore very conscious of healthy eating. But before that, I didn't have the idea that I would find my job in it. That idea arose at TU Eindhoven, where I had chosen a bachelor's degree in Industrial Design. The first year didn't interest me; the turning point was in the second year. I came into contact with the cultured meat project of Next Nature Network led by Koert van Mensvoort. We students were challenged to think of ways in which cultured meat could be integrated into society. For me it was an aha moment, suddenly everything came together: it turned out I could combine my interest in food with technology, art and science."
That led to your project In Vitro Me in 2012, about growing cultured meat on your own body. Tell.
"Meat is far from sustainable: just think of CO2 emissions and the amount of water, energy and arable land involved in raising livestock. Culture meat is an alternative in which muscle tissue is grown from animal cells outside the animal's body. But why use animal tissue at all when there are so many tasty plant-based solutions? I designed a personal bioreactor, a kind of amulet connected to your vascular system, that allows people to grow meat on their own bodies from their own (stem) cells. With the underlying question: if you insist on continuing to eat meat, how far are you yourself willing to go? On the one hand, the project focuses on the passive attitude of consumers; on the other hand, I find it interesting to involve consumers in new technologies at an early stage so that they can form their own opinions instead of just reading about future products or technologies in the media."
To bring people closer to technology, you organized The Other Dinner, an experimental and interactive dinner that brings up the meat culture of the past, present and future. "The very best thing I've ever done! For three months I was able to work on one project undisturbed. With that dinner I wanted to break taboos - why pork and not mouse meat, for example? - and push to look at the future more open-mindedly. There were sixty people - consumers, students, scientists, artists... On the table were first parts of animals that we normally never eat, then strange animals like muskrats, and finally we were going to make our own cultured meat based on mouse cells. In six groups, the strange dishes - stuffed pig's feet, stew of cockscombs and wattles, blood sausage and mouse liver parfait - were prepared, de-haired and cleaned by the participants themselves. Pretty extreme."
Preparing a muskrat or a pig's snout is one thing, but then to taste it....
"There was a certain kind of social pressure, haha. But also because they had spent so much time on it, people were willing to go and taste it. Most of them even found it hearty!"
What is your goal as a Future Food Designer?
"In my job, I use information, knowledge and data from science that frustrates or fascinates me. For example, with the interactive installation Future Food Formula, I show that environmental factors influence crops: nutritional value, color, size, shape, taste, texture... I find it fascinating that you can tweak your final product just by the light, temperature or pH of the soil. As a designer, you're interested and passionate, you throw yourself fully into a process, and all that effort results in a final manifestation, whether it's an installation, an experimental dinner or a prototype. People come to see, you get feedback. Those reactions provide input to move forward."
What will be on our plates in, say, 50 years?
"Food is a beautiful thing, I love to eat and I love fresh fruits and vegetables. But I really wonder: what nutrients are still in them today? Is there mostly just water left in our vegetables because the soil is so depleted? That's why I really like the idea of taking microbially produced nutrients as a base, so that you can get all the nutrients in and turn them into something tasty by designing the shape, experience, taste and texture yourself."
In your fight against food waste and fascination with the amount of sweetness in vegetables, you made syrup waffles from vegetable waste.
"I wanted to show that we can do much more with vegetable waste streams than making boring soups and sauces, by making clever use of the natural properties of the crops. Beets and carrots, for example, contain a lot of sugar. You can make syrup from the vegetable juice and waffles from the fiber. So I used a typical Dutch delicacy, the stroopwafel, to tell the story to a wide audience. The tricky part is just that vegetable syrup waffles don't keep. Fiber attracts moisture; due to the high fiber content, the waffles quickly become limp. So it's really a fresh product, I can't package them. To make them keepable, I would have had to add sugar and start thinking industrially. And that's not what I want to tell you with the project STROOOP! In itself, the syrup waffle doesn't interest me that much; it could just as easily have been any other product. What fascinates me is making people look differently at an everyday ingredient and see how consumer perception changes."
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