Prototype Name: Tasting Tomorrow
Artist(s): Jonathon Keats
Creation Year: 2022 / Installation: 2024
Tasting Tomorrow is an interactive platform designed to help communities adapt to climate change through food and cuisine. As climate conditions change dramatically over the next century, future environments will be unfamiliar with what past generations have known. The platform emphasizes the need to learn from one another, adapt to extremes, and embrace new, climate-appropriate foods.
By using climate analog mapping—a tool that compares a location's future climate to another place's current climate—
Tasting Tomorrow explores the impact of climate change on food and culture. This helps communities find sustainable ingredients that preserve heritage flavors while anticipating future conditions.
The site-specific installation features custom-made tangerine seed packets and trees, symbolizing the urgent need for climate action. In 50 some years, San Francisco is expected to have a climate similar to Tangiers, Morocco, where tangerines have traditionally thrived. The tangerine seeds serve as a form of insurance for future generations, inviting us to reflect: What actions are we willing to take today to change the trajectory of our planet?
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Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer whose multidisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He is a research associate at the University of Arizona’s College of Fine Arts, a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, principal philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute and Biosphere 2. He co-directs the Consortium for Climate-Adapted Architectural Heritage at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics. Keats has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science to art and is the author of an online art column for Forbes.
