The CLIMAVORE project asks restaurants to introduce earth-friendly menus
CLIMAVORE x Community Jameel at Royal College of Art (CLIMAVORE) seeks to reconsider how humans eat in the face of climate change, through the collaborating efforts of scientists, policymakers, farmers and chefs. The programme is a partnership between Community Jameel and Cooking Sections, the Turner Prize-nominated artist collective, through which Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe have explored the intersection of human diet and climate change. Daniel and Alon's efforts are now translating to action as CLIMAVORE partnerships with several notable UK restaurants have resulted in the removal of farm-raised salmon from their menus and instead, providing customers more sustainable options, such as seaweeds and bivalves.
We all have heard about being a carnivore, omnivore, locavore, vegetarian or vegan – all of whose labels are derived from the ingredients being consumed. But did you know that there are people who are climavores? It all started with the Climavore Project.
Cooking Sections, founded in 2013 in London by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, uncovers the systems that organise the world through food. They began exploring the overlapping borders of art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics through site-responsive installation, performance, and video.
Since 2015, they have been working on the Climavore Project along with several scientists, chefs, farmers, policymakers, and practitioners from a variety of fields that investigate how to eat as human habits affect the planet and that results in climate change. The collective will assist a long-term approach to help convert the food served at UK cultural institutions into a menu that tackles the climate crisis. In 2021, Cooking Sections was nominated for the Turner Prize. They were nominated for the Visible Award for socially active activities and received the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize. Daniel has been awarded the Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize for Being Shellfish in 2020. Their newest book, Salmon: A Red Herring, was released by isolarii (2020) in conjunction with the Tate Britain's Art Now exhibition of the same name.