Przemiany Festival 2019. Appetite and apathy
Przemiany Festival is inspired by critical reflection on the changes taking place all around us. They’re interested in broadly understood development and the change it brings.
The festival is characterised by its interdisciplinarity, which means that they’re looking at a given problem from different perspectives. The festival aims to confront different ideas and points of view, and the tension that arises from this confrontation serves as a source of commitment and generating new ideas among the recipients.
What is the future ahead of us? We’ve been producing more and more food, contributing to the destruction of the natural environment. This is the last moment to try to save the planet. Science and technology provide us with tools. It is up to us whether and how we shall use them. We invite you to the Przemiany Festival.
Probably nothing connects people with nature more directly than food. From the very beginning, the development of our civilization was determined by discovering and processing of various sources of food – more and more expansive, massive and interfering with the existing state of the environment.
In the end, this uncontrollable appetite has led us into a dead end. Factory farming is a hotbed of antibiotic-resistant superbugs and contribute to the climate catastrophe by emitting greenhouse gases. Monocultural farming carry the risk of losing biodiversity. Highly processed food adversely affects our health and encourages the development of many civilization diseases.
We waste huge amounts of energy and water, as well as food itself – we throw away more than would be needed to feed all the hungry people in the world. This is the last bell to wake up from apathy and design a more sustainable future for food: environmentally friendly, ethical and positive to our health.
Science and technology give us such a chance – although previously, they have largely led us to the current deadlock. Modern biotechnology allows to create new plant varieties and clean meat (with cells taken from a live animal, without slaughter) with impressive precision. We know effective and safe plant protection products, innovative food preservation methods. Automation of crops, breeding and distribution helps to save resources and care for product safety. However, science and technology will not save the world by themselves. A lot depends on us – consumers. Our personal food choices not only determine our identity, but also affect global change.
At this year’s Przemiany Festival we’ll get to know products, prototypes and processes that implement the results of the latest research and new technologies that change the agri-food industry. We’ll clash trends, data, inventions and innovations with social changes taking place under their influence.
We’ll also look at the statistical effectiveness of protests and boycotts, as well as lobbying, which large activist organizations undertake all over the world, basing their postulates on meticulous investigations and research. We’ll try to understand the complex psychological and social mechanisms behind the change in habits, the spread of pseudo- or explicit anti-scientific myths about food, a lack of trust in experts or general indifference to problems related to food and nutrition.
We’ll also look for a chance to make meals become again a community event within a new, socially responsible food system.
