A graduate research which explored the relationship between our bodies and changes in the food industry. The results are translated to an installation named Leaf it to Nature. The installation prepares tea in real time. However, the tea’s taste varies throughout the day based on live weather data from where the tea leaves are grown.
Food is at the core of our existence. Our food environment today looks radically different from the past, when food was scarce and came directly from nature. For billions of years, we humans have been part of a natural ecosystem, with the central denominator being the flow of energy. To survive in this system, our bodies have evolved.
Now, with these same evolved bodies, we inhabit a radically different food landscape than before. Over the past 150 years, we’ve begun consuming substances made from new molecules through industrial processes never seen before in our evolutionary history. Today, ultra-processed foods—those created through industrial manufacturing—make up 70% of supermarket offerings. These products now constitute a major part of our modern diet. However, is our evolved body still capable of making the right food choices in today's eating age?
Our ancestors learned to obtain nutrients from nature. Natural products change in taste and content based on temperature, climate, soil and season. Through evolution, humans developed an intuitive sensory system that detects subtle taste changes and guides us toward safe, nutritious food choices. However, the industrial food industry achieves something nature cannot: consistent taste. Ultra-processed foods go through intensive processing that destroys original molecules, including essential micronutrients. While whole foods contain thousands of molecules, food production companies only add back a fraction of these. Later in the process, flavors are re-added through artificial additives such as flavor and aroma enhancers, giving food production companies ultimate control over the product’s taste.
However, when manufacturers develop flavors using enhancers and additives, the nutrients naturally associated with those flavors are absent. As a result, the taste of a product no longer reliably indicates its nutritional content. Several studies substantiate that the physical inability to make the correct associations between nutrients and a food can confuse the body. It’s possible that the intentional overconsumption of these high-calorie foods is the body’s way of looking for the missing micronutrients. In other words, we’re eating more than ever before while becoming increasingly malnourished.
The developments the food industry has undergone over the past few decades mean that instead of relying on our intuitive internal cues, we must rely on external cues such as marketing, packaging and advertising.
To enable our bodies to make healthy food choices and receive the essential nutrients we need, it's important for our food to be natural. However, this requires a fundamental change in the way we look at our food. Natural food cannot provide the perfect, consistent taste we’ve grown accustomed to. While the food industry controls our taste preferences—and we embrace this comfort, enjoying the predictability of flavors—we cannot impose these expectations on nature. Natural flavors vary: an apple might be perfectly sweet, sour, crisp, and juicy one day, yet mealy and bland the next.
Leaf it to Nature acts as a conversation opener about nature’s original influence on our food and eating patterns. By letting nature directly control the tea’s taste, the installation challenges us to reflect on our taste preferences and consumption behavior.
