Potatoes on Mars, cultured meat or milk from a steel cow. The food of the future is coming to the Evoluon in Eindhoven. The new exhibition ‘Spacefarming: the future of food’ opens on Saturday. “It’s as if you’ve stepped into a time machine,” promises Koert van Mensvoort, who is breathing new life into the Evoluon.
A huge reflective dome full of plants. A space designed like the International Space Station (ISS). Or Margaret, the stainless steel cow that converts grass into proteins. This is a selection from the new exhibition.
Algae shot
When you think of algae, you might immediately think of that sludge in the ditch. Yet it is also a very nutritious food. Visitors to the exhibition can also try a real ‘algae shot’ with spinach.
Perhaps the most striking is the ‘space farmer’. Potatoes grown on a simulated Martian soil. “It has a future! If people go to Mars, you have to eat something. And this works, as far as we know now,” says space farmer Wieger Wamelink of Wageningen University.
The world population is growing like crazy. “In 2050 we will have ten billion people on earth. How are we going to feed the population?” Koert asks. “Now we already have problems. We have real big challenges and questions.”
Such an exhibition is nice, but are we really going to eat all this? “We cannot predict that now. Some things will soon be really big, other innovations will disappear,” thinks Koert.
“Now you might be thinking, ‘what is this!’ But now we also eat pre-cut meat from packages. If you put someone from the Middle Ages in a time machine and showed that, they would also find it strange. It takes time.”
No major exhibition for 30 years
The iconic Evoluon was a gift from Philips to the city at the time. The dish was built in 1966. It was an educational technology museum for more than twenty years with many visitors in the early days.
However, those numbers decreased and from 1989 the spaceship no longer had a public function. From 1996, the Evoluon became a conference and events center. “You should be able to get into a building that looks like a spaceship,” Koert thought.
After more than thirty years, there was another long-term exhibition at the end of last year: RetroFuture. That’s about future thinkers from the past. That exhibition can still be seen today.
The second exhibition in decades is now a fact. It can be seen from Saturday until at least the end of March 2024. The exhibition is a prelude to the permanent exhibition ‘Spaceship Earth’ in 2025 in the Evoluon.