Visit the Leeds Sauce pop up at Trinity Leeds Shopping Centre from the 16th – 19th of March to experience Flavours of FFS (Failing Food System)
A sensory experience of the multifaceted challenges facing our global food systems due to climate, intensive agriculture and commercial and consumer pressures.
The food system is failing. Lets start talking about it FFS.
In 2022, Popeye Collective created Leeds Sauce. The Sauce was made with the community and contained a cast of ingredients synonymous with the flavours of Leeds – Rhubarb, Beer and White Roses.
The starting point for Leeds Sauce was local food systems and dietary habits. Flavours of a FSS, a new work by Freddie Yauner, looks at the challenges facing our global food systems due to climate, biodiversity loss and commercial pressures.
“These issues of our food system are multi-faceted and together create a heady mix of current and potential future crises. By allowing them to be experienced through a new sensory installation I hope to create space for thought and conversation - using humour to address issues that can often feel too big to compute or act on. ”
SMELL FAILURE
What might the flavour of nutrient depleted soil be? What’s the taste of imported soy feed crops for industrial pork and chicken farming? Do anti-biotics that are essential to industrial livestock production or tractor fuel have a taste?
Flavours of a FFS will be available to sample – part apothecary, part dinner party – visitors will be able to smell the different aspects of our failing food system whilst contemplating the complexity of the topics.
The work has been made in collaboration with Leeds University School of Food Science & Nutrition – using a rotary evaporator to create food safe essences that represent a range of the the key issues facing people and the planet.
‘Working towards producing the essences has had quite an impact on the supporting team in the School of Food Science and Nutrition working on this project. The complementary aspects of Science and the Arts working in harmony; our shared awareness of the issues at play and working together from very different backgrounds to enable this installation to come together. But also the conflicts between Science and the Arts; the quite narrow and perhaps rigid scientific thought process meeting a very open and challenging remit to bring this theme to life, we have really benefited from having the boundaries of our mindsets broadened."
Flavours of FFS Include:
COW BURPS
Methane is a much more impactful climate gas than carbon dioxide. And ruminant cattle produce it as part of their digestion, not from farts but burps!
TRACTOR FUEL
Tractors are wonderful machines, extraordinary engineering. We played with them as kids and marvel at them as adults. But we rarely think about their fuel consumption.
ENDLESS WHEAT
Monocultures in agriculture involve planting a single crop over and over, year on year, and in mass-agriculture crops are planted at larger and larger scale .These monocultures are putting huge pressure on many aspects of the food system.
