About
Dinner 2040 is meant to empower communities to envision and ultimately design their own future food system. The endeavor is designed to bring together stakeholders, including local farmers, food producers, city administrators, educators, humanists, chefs and artists to articulate and design a food system that leads to a “future we want.” Such a food system would ensure values such as food justice, community health and environmental integrity, and co-designed and co-produced agricultural and marketing systems that nurture and grow these values. For Dinner 2040 events, the community, using a design charrette, gathered to determine what they must do to co-produce and achieve that food system.
Dinner 2040 asks: How does our food system affect the health and wellbeing of our community and the planet? Our current industrial agricultural system produces an abundance of food (calories) but not quality or healthy food. If our only value is efficiency then the global industrial food system is meeting that value. If we have other values, connected to culture, place and history, health and favor, justice and sovereignty, then we need to design a system that ensures those values. The mission of Dinner 2040 is to envision what our food system should look like in the future. Drawing on indigenous traditions as well as other food cultures we intend to explore what our food system should look like and how we get there.