4:30 PM
Tinkham Veale University Center Ballroom A
11038 Bellflower Road
Cleveland, OH 44106
With industrial advances in food production, is it possible that we have forgotten how food, as nature intended, tastes like? Most of our foods are engineered to taste ever sweeter or crunchier, often displaying only nominal traces to actual ingredients that humans can directly find in natural environments. The chemical modifications of natural ingredients have undoubtedly contributed to unleashing a ravenous human appetite leading to an overconsumption of good-tasting yet low-nutrient calorie dense foods. It has triggered a massive obesity and overweight crisis in the US and elsewhere and such dietary patterns have also proven harmful for our planet and non-human species. Not even the thousands of peer-reviewed articles in nutrition and environmental sciences and resulting reports for wider audiences have been able to stop the runaway train that pumps out a sweet, sugary smell prompting all of us to board it.
With cutting-edge AI technologies on the horizon, we are yet to experience a further revolution. Our panelists, consisting of Indigenous food experts, regenerative farmers, ethnobotanists, theologians, and techno-enthusiasts, discuss the concerns and potentials of the ways large language models can further shape human appetite and humans’ connection to the wider web of life. Should we re- discover what a real plum tastes like grown and eaten in the same bioregion? Should we harness AI to collate and process data of plant molecules to create new food alternatives or to find the best match for a plant-based camembert? In this interactive workshop,
we will invite participants to sample foods once grown by Great Lakes tribes all the way to AI-generated plant-based items in our search of envisioning a future with greater health and ecological balance.
This event is sponsored by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and is free and open to the public.
Registration is requested. Register HERE.