Food fictions
Food fictions looks at our evolving relationship to what we eat, particularly in the social media and digital technology era.
Interventions in what and how we should eat are increasingly made though the media, and often claim to change our relationships with food, but also impact our own identity and social relations. Food fictions explores the stories told about food through the media and critically examines the impacts they are having on food culture and identity making. Through a series of interviews and the production of a food media taxonomy, the project mapped out key food narratives being told through the media. These findings were presented through an interactive dining experience, showcasing future food prototypes created by Burton Nitta. By reflecting on new and fictitious forms of food culture produced through the media through original artwork and academic research, the project considers the impacts food media can have on our everyday food practices.
Project events
Food fictions event and exhibition, Tuesday 21 November 2017, Somerset House, New Wing
Food fictions brought together a range of guests from environmental activists, social media personalities, to health promoters and food technologists to share their insights and contribute to a discussion on what and how we might consume food through a lens in the future.
A display of Food Fiction prototypes was open to the public.
Project film
Project team
Based in London, Burton Nitta is an interdisciplinary art and design studio collaborating with science and technology to investigate our future world and human evolution.Previous works such as After Agri, Algaculture, The Algae Opera, The Republic of Salivation and The Instruments of the Afterlife are published and exhibited internationally from MoMA, New York to the V&A Museum, London.New areas of research are explored through a journal called After... that invites audiences to taste the future and venture into alternative visions of the world and ourselves.
Dr Christine Barnes joined King’s as a teaching fellow in 2015. Her research interests are broadly in cultural geography, food politics and geographies of consumption, focusing on how ideas around good food are taken up by the public through the media and inform the way we consume and relate to food.
She graduated from King’s College London with a first class honours BSc in Geography in 2009. She then completed an MSc in Environment, Politics and Globalisation in 2010 where her research focused on food politics and healthy eating campaigning in the UK.
Christine completed her PhD at King’s in 2015. Her thesis considered the mediated forms of power celebrity and the media may have to operate as tools of governance within spaces of food and charitable care.
Food fictions is a collaboration between King's College London's Department of Geography and Somerset House Studios residents Burton Nitta, brokered and supported by the university's Culture team in partnership with Somerset House Studios.