Future food of nuisance beasts scrambled with talk on energy #dekeuze

Listen here to the podcast/work in progress by Jowi Schmitz who visited the event with chef Natasja Postma: 

Imagining 2020 in International Choice 2011

Liposuction fat. Blood. Puke. 'You can look at it that way, too!' says the Appetitheque's food designer excitedly. It doesn't bother her that her thin-skinned jelly, processed cola and her yellow-white lumps of beef salad are not yet at their appetising best. What matters is reuse. About a more effective future and yes, maybe she needs to work out the presentation a little better.

No lack of enthusiasm at the other Foodlab 2020 stalls on Rotterdam's Schouwburgplein either. No high-tech molecular cooking or expensive machines, but fun inventions, wild plans and surprisingly obvious solutions you wouldn't come up with yourself.
There is a 3D printer that currently prints plastic cups but which, according to the operator, could quite easily be used to build chocolate in the future. 'That's a bit complicated at the moment'. There is also salad from wild plants from the city, a set with handy drawings of the plants in question for the diligent do-it-yourselfer. There are tasty seaweeds from the Eastern Scheldt still waiting for a professional producer, there are maggots through the cruesli (huge amount of protein), complete with future cookbook (April 2012): 'The Insect Cookbook'. And tasting is allowed everywhere.
So a charming, not-too-big food market with a tad pretentious title, but why there is a four-part programme on Davis Freeman's Energy mixed in there, nobody understands. Doesn't even everyone know - the ladies of the weed immediately go hunting for free tickets.
Are Foodlab and Freeman two ingredients stirred together by a programmer?
Even after seeing Defining Energy, part 1 of the four performances Freeman presents, the connection does not become clearer. Defining Energy most closely resembles a talk about Energy. 'Edison invented the light bulb and that light bulb will soon no longer be made.' No but.
Although, fair is fair, your reporter did not know that Edison once electrocuted an elephant. (Now he does, there are even videos about it.

The Elephant's name was Topsy.

An additional problem of Defining Energy is the chemistry between the two performers, in favour of Freeman by the way, as the other performer has hair that usually hangs in front of his face like a wig and he sweats profusely. Poorly crafted long-windedness: the duo claims to want to generate energy with it but fails miserably.

Then it is better outside. There, meanwhile, the motorised Kitchenette of the Unwanted Animal has arrived. There are croquettes of Schiphol goose on the menu and in the future you can taste muskrat buttocks, crayfish soup from Amsterdam canals and Duck mussels. All nuisance animals that are now slaughtered and destroyed, but would do better in our stomachs, according to the Kitchen. They are right: the schiphol goose croquette is delicious.
And so, at the end of the day, a connection between the more successful acts and the less successful elements of Foodlab and Davis Freeman appears after all: Energy and future food are fine by us, if well thought out and somewhat attractively developed.
Because the consumer of 2011 understands residual waste, renewable energy and plants off the street. And those consumers really want to do their best for a liveable 2020. But it helps if that future looks at least a little bit nice.

Foodlab 2020 and Expanding Energy by Davis Freeman
24 and 25 September from 3pm on Schouwburgplein.