Future Food Exhibition

We all know that the world’s population is growing exponentially: by 2050 it will have reached around 10 billion. We will need more food to feed everyone than our planet can produce. In the coming 30 years we therefore will have to transform what we eat and how we produce our food.

Scientists, farmers, companies and designers are already developing new forms of nutrition and innovative ways to produce new foods for the future.

In the exhibition we take visitors on a trip. Starting in the here and now and exploring the future. Discover the potential for animal –and plant based food, or functional foods. Discover which of today’s ingredients we may soon produce in new ways.

Will we really eat hamburgers made of cultured meat? Will we actually drink milk from a robot cow? Or will we be mixing powders based on our DNA profile?

Future Food aims to show and communicate the latest inventions, ideas and visions for the production and consumption of future food in an understandable and imaginative way.

De Studio

De Studio is a new location of NEMO Science Museum. It’s meant for adults instead of children and young families. Future Food is the first exhibition in the Studio, designed and produced mostly by an external team as an experiment.

We were up for an interesting challenge: with our tiny team we designed and produced the entire exhibition (+/- 800m2 ) in less than half a year, with very little budget and a mountain of passion and perseverance :).

The structure of the exhibition

Before you enter the world of future food through the giant mouth, you first walk on a colorful tongue where you can read the introduction text and study the factwall to understand why we need alternative ways of producing and consuming food.

Once you step into the mouth, the three different themes of the exhibition are explained: Animal, Plant and Functional foods.
Each theme includes:
1. Project tables which show machines, explain the latest food production technologies (like grassfed milk without the cow, or beef structures made from soy) and show examples of novelty food products.

2. Future labs, like the cultured meat lab from Next Nature Network in which you can see possible ways of the integration of cultured meat in society, the plantlab by myself, where you can play with the Future Food Formula to design your future tomato while learning about plant physiology and indoor farming and the functional lab by Mathijs Diederiks, where you can taste functional foods and listen to his documentary of how we lived for 12 months on liquid food.

3. Future scenario’s, projects specially created for this exhibition meant to question possible food scenarios like the creation of broiler insects or the longterm effect a fully functional diet would have on or body and mind.

Future Food is a collaboration between NEMO Science Museum and Next Nature Network
Curation: Tanja Koning & Chloé Rutzerveld
Exhibition design: Chloé Rutzerveld
Graphic design: Sjoerd Koopmans
Production: Francois Lombarts & Marco Lagrand
Editorial: Tjitske Visscher