Reflections on Norra Matgårdsstaden

The team behind Norra Matgårdsstaden has shaped how the city of the future takes on a new role for food supply. A consistent theme is that the city's inhabitants go from merely consuming to actively producing.

The project partners have created four speculative recipes, what could be called parade dishes, which in their own way reflect the changes taking place in the environment with resulting changes in the food supply. A longer essay could be written about each recipe, but in summary, maybe in the future we will cook things such as:

1. Steamed cinnamon and banana bun on rice flour.
   Due to climate change, wheat has been eliminated, so rice flour based on local rice varieties becomes the new staple for reinterpretations of old wheat-based dishes such as cinnamon buns.
2. Root fruit salad with roasted jellyfish.
   Invasive species such as jellyfish will be a plague in the future, so by eating them you chop two carrots with a knife (in the future we eat more plant-based and do not express violent actions towards flies..).
3. Cellar mushrooms with smoked BBQ plum glaze.
   When no one has a car or engages in mass consumption, what should we do with car parks and shopping sheds? Why not convert the buildings into facilities for growing protein-rich mushrooms? With its good taste and high nutritional content, no one will miss meat.
4. Gray pea steaks with fermented blueberries and algae. - In the extreme weather of the future, we will learn to take care of traditional types of legumes that are very easy to grow and hardy. And blueberries – I just say blueberries…

Vid Norra Djurgårdsstaden on October 1, we were not invited to any boring exhibition, but the urban harvest festival, which in the year 2052 is a holiday at least as important as Christmas Eve. A holiday that centers around exciting, healthy and urban produced food. A holiday where you celebrate the journey the city has made from merely consuming raw materials to actively producing.

The journey here has been long with many arduous trials and polarizing debates. The many climate refugees from Asia have fundamentally changed our food culture, which has led to fierce discussions online. In 2035, a referendum was held on whether insects should be bred on a large scale, where the no side won. Around the same time, the architecture students raised their eyebrows when urban food production became a mandatory part of the curriculum.

This change in curriculum took place in a coordinated social media campaign organized by a powerful collective of "Grainfluencers". But after the storm subsides, everyone sits at the set long table and enjoys a feast based on produce from the city and its immediate vicinity.