Food, Appetite, and our Sense of Place: from Wild Rice to Chicken Nuggets to Blue Cheese made with AI

With industrial advances in food production, is it possible that we have forgotten how food, as nature intended, tastes like? The chemical modifications of natural ingredients and our increasingly desensitized taste buds have undoubtedly contributed to unleashing a ravenous human appetite leading to an overconsumption of tasty yet low-nutrient calorie dense foods. And with cutting-edge AI technologies on the horizon, we are yet to experience a further revolution where AIs are able to collate and process data of plant molecules to create new tastes and products.

Our panelists, consisting of an ethnobotanist, a forager and sustainable food system expert as well as a Michelin-star and Food Network chef, reflect on the recent changes in human taste and appetite and what it means to consume foods in one’s bioregion. As part of the event, we will invite participants to sample foods such as plants and crops that are native to the Great Lakes and AI-generated plant-based cheese in our search of envisioning a future with greater health and ecological balance.

The panel discussion will be moderated by Nárcisz Fejes, Associate Director at the Baker-Nord Institute for the Humanities and member of the CWRU Department of English.

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