Eating insects is not a solution and it is not cool.

Just ask India’s Dalit and indigenous communities, who’ve been eating more than 300 species of insects for centuries, yet endure prejudiced, caste-based tropes about ‘poor’ and ‘dirty’ food.

Or, you could send off a query to thousands of families in the northern latitudes of southern Africa. Although don’t expect a reply during harvest time, when entire families camp out in woodlands to pick as many mopane as they can. The mopane — a caterpillar of a species of emperor moth — is a vital source of nutrition and stimulates cross-border trade in southern Africa worth $50 million a year.

Yes, insects are a viable solution to many of the challenges the climate crisis presents to sustainable human diets. But to speak of problems to solve in the future misses the point. We already eat insects. They are already a lifeline.

As Lydia Carey describes in her report on chic eating and insect farming in Mexico, consuming critters is fraught with danger. Without first prioritizing the existing guardians of insect eating and ensuring the food security that bugs already offer communities across the globe, we risk reproducing exploitative food systems at the altar of sustainability. As a collector of honeypot ants asks: “We think that we are going to cultivate them, but why aren’t we thinking about cultivating ourselves?”

We need to break harmful stereotypes and disrupt limiting ideas that eating insects is weird or cool. Normalizing the practice can offer a new source of protein that won’t decimate the planet in the same way that eating animals already does. It’s fine if it isn’t for you. But judging or exoticizing the practice won’t help anyone.

There are a few more practical concerns we’ve got to get our heads around, too. As Tabby Kibugi writes, food safety standards will need to be adopted and perceptions adjusted. When a French botanist took the challenge of colonizing Madagascar into his own hands, he brought disaster. While we should hope that those at the forefront of entomophagy today are not so nefarious, we should not be complacent about what seems like an easy solution.

What is fast food?

We’ve asked many questions about it these past few decades. We’ve worried about how fast food has contributed to soaring obesity levels. Morgan Spurlock ate it all day every day for a whole calendar month in his film Super Size Me. We’ve observed how fast food franchises dominate food deserts and food-insecure communities, and asked if it is really the best industry to sponsor sports events.

Fast food is embedded in the cultural mythology of modern North America and has been exported to the world, homogenizing and undercutting native cultures and cuisines — a dynamic Mwende Mutuli Musau addresses in this issue. Drive thru the golden arches and salvation will be delivered by someone in a headset holding out a brown paper bag and an unreasonably large drink. But fast food has also been a villain for health advocates and concerned parents. It has symbolized a culture that had its priorities backwards.

These conversations are evolving with a steadily growing acceptance that sometimes eating fast food is … okay. Is eating ultraprocessed morsels of chicken every now and again really that bad when food corporations are exploiting and mistreating workers; when industrial farming and the meat industry is poisoning the earth? Debunking shame is the first step towards healthier relationships; the same goes for (fast) food.

We need this space to continue opening up if we are going to evaluate where we’re at with fast food and broaden our culinary imaginations. Fast food can be much more than we think. Fast food is also a food that’s created for travelling, to be eaten quickly, when the carnival comes to town, and by parents who are stretched and need to make sure their child gets a square meal. Fast food is memory. As Stephen Mosaku writes, we don’t have to take the cultural ascendancy of fast food franchises for granted, either. Nigerians, for instance, have broadly resisted fast food in favour of convenient twists on the country’s own traditional food cultures.

But this doesn’t mean we should stop asking the big existential questions about fast food. Like — what is fast food? Is it a cuisine? Is it a culture, a lifestyle? Some experts are even asking whether, nutritionally speaking, ultraprocessed fast food even is food. In this issue, Emily Monaco deconstructs a conversation that strikes at the heart of this — is fast food addictive?

Where scandals once seemed like exceptions they are now increasingly the norm. Scandal is the language of politics and the means of doing politics, too. Environmental systems are collapsing around us. We debate the innate goodness and badness of foods. And bad actors continue acting badly.

In this issue, you’ll learn about how foods and appetites become scandalized: how they break taboos and fall victim to moral panic. We see the nature of scandal changing, too, as we interrogate how social media has changed the way consumers and companies approach it, and look out how covering up scandal is baked into the food system. You’ll also learn about why people have been boycotting a major vegan, vegetarian and organic producer.We like to think of our issue themes as broadly as we can, to capture new ideas and original perspectives. Scandal may evoke some ideas immediately to you, but we think — and hope — this issue will surprise you with its scope.

There are few resources that will tell the story of our future better than water.

While southern Africa has seen deadly, climate crisis induced flooding in recent years, Mozambique is experiencing more droughts. In this issue, we learn about the plight of Zimbabwean farmers who are struggling as consecutive droughts see groundwater stocks disappear.

In the United States, the Colorado River is bone dry and, as Richard Keller describes for Sliced, competition between western states over water rights and access could see them coming into increased conflict. Water’s place as the most precious of resources will take on new meaning in this context.

As cricket’s groundskeepers are discovering, we will have to learn how to use water more smartly. Dwindling water resources and the need to ration our usage will be difficult and in many places near-impossible as stocks drop so low, but it is not completely a story of doom and gloom. In Vietnam, Peter Cowan describes how the Mekong Delta is subsiding, placing the country’s supply of rice at risk, but experts say this is an opportunity to farm new crops in the delta and to diversify the Vietnamese diet. In Sierra Leone, Benson Kandeh is bringing his own low-cost water pump technology to hundreds of remote communities.

Hong Kong has long had an abundant supply of water. Yet, as Marie Bröckling writes, it has neglected alternatives. As it suffers its own water crisis, desalination won’t be enough, but examples of innovative solutions elsewhere might be the inspiration it needs.

We should be worried about the future of water. But fear can be motivating, too. As the stark realities of the climate emergency hit home, our leaders need to realize they are all in the same boat together — otherwise we’re all going to run aground with them.

On the face of it, our Textile issue marks a bit of a departure from our usual themes. It relates far more to agriculture than to food, and it doesn’t seem to tell us much about what we eat and what’s on our plates.

But one thing this issue should show is that this is only really half true — if that. The future of textiles isn’t just about improving practices and using natural, plant-based materials — although, as Tabby Kibugi writes in this issue, that very much is the case for plant-based indigo in the denim industry.

The future of textiles and fashion is also about turning food waste into fabrics and finding new fabrics from old sources. In this issue, we see how farmers are making fabrics out of the “incredibly wasteful” banana plant, and learn about the traditional Ugandan fabric made from fig trees that is so versatile, you’re just as likely to wear it as you are to see it in your kitchen.

Giulia Alvarez-Katz interrogates why only some silk-producing countries eat the waste product from the process of making silk, silkworm pupae, and in doing so offers us insights on how and why certain foods are adopted. With the UN continuing to advise humans to adopt insects into their diets, she leaves us with much to ponder — as well as a fascinating story of a novel culinary delicacy, a story of trade and empire, migration and cultural intermingling.

And finally, Jen Sizeland breaks down the vital role that agricultural textiles have long played in farming, and why many believe it is time to ditch the materials. In doing so, she reveals the broad reach of textiles into different parts of our daily lives, and underscores how our textiles are embedded (quite literally, in this case) in the systems that feed and sustain us.

Maybe textiles do tell us a lot about what’s on our plates after all.

We are living in the age of plastic. It protects our food and litters our beaches. We toss away our plastic wrappers, only for them to end up choking birds and marine life. We heat up our food in plastics containers, even as doctors and researchers find increasingly high levels of microplastics throughout the human body.

We are trapped in a morbid dependency on plastic. We can’t live with or without it, and plastic will live forever. So what will we do?

Breaking free first requires understanding the problem. In this issue, you’ll learn about how plastic pollutes agriculture and our bodies, and why plastic packaging persists in the food industry. We see an example of a country — Kenya — that is trying to break free of the system that produces food waste and plastic pollution. And we will finish up with a more philosophical interrogation of our personal relationships with single-serve, plastic-wrapped snacks, and what would happen if we are forced to think about the consequences of them.

The plastic problem will, like the material itself, be a permanent fixture in our lives. We better face up to it.

War is a fatal fact of the human condition, with more than enough complex questions for food and agriculture. Already, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is disrupting Ukrainian wheat exports to the Middle East, which could potentially exacerbate food price rises to levels not seen since the Arab Spring.

We commissioned, edited and completed this issue long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine amounted to anything more than suspicions and reports of troop build-ups on the border. We’ll address the food and agricultural implications of this conflict — as well as those in Syria, Yemen and Tigray, among others —  through our social media channels.

In this issue, we reflect on the past and look forward to the future. Sylvio Martins asks whether we could recreate the do-it-yourself agrarian experience of WW2 Britain should global conflict break out, while Jennie Long deconstructs fascist Italy’s war on pasta and working-class women. Adhiambo Edith Magak’s reporting on warring pastoralists and malnutrition in Kenya shows that the climate crisis wars are already here.

There’s innovation — in technology, in the mind and on the ground — in this issue, too. Sharlene Gandhi reveals how blockchain technology is being used in food aid, and looks at how it could improve access to food for refugees and displaced people. Likam Kyanzaire tells the story of Syria’s Kurdish rebels, who — on land taken from the brutal Assad government — are applying their revolutionary approach to ecology and agriculture.

Conflict is constant — we hope this issue can provide readers with different ways of engaging with it.

Sport has a funny relationship with food. Elite sports players and athletes fine tune their diets to the finest detail, cultivating their nutrition plans to boost energy levels, improve recovery, and give them an added advantage in their particular area.

But at the event or game they’re starring in, they’re likely surrounded by fast food advertising. It might be emblazoned somewhere on their kit, too. Or, in the case of certain energy drinks companies, it might be an owner of one of the teams; or sponsoring the event where they’re watched by spectators eating — yep, you guessed it — fast food!

This is a well-worn contradiction. Sliced set out to take this theme forward, conscious of the food (and agriculture!) trends shaping sport, stories that inform where we are and timeless tales that transcend time and space. Readers will learn about groundskeepers adapting to the climate crisis, the one special dish that sumo wrestlers eat to fuel up, and how one man revolutionized diet in soccer.

This issue also reminds us of the kind of complex and contradictory issues sport can throw up, for which there are no easy answers. Long-distance runners rely on small packets of energy gels for competing, but they wreck their teeth and litter the environment. Sports supplements companies manipulate their research to sell supplements that we don’t need and don’t really work.

This issue covers plenty of ground — we hope you won’t need an energy gel to finish it.

Fungus evokes strong ideas in each of us; the gross, weird and gruesome mold that grows on our food, or slippery, poisonous mushrooms lingering at the base of trees in the forest. We sautée mushrooms, and worry about mold growing in a damp patch of our homes. And—I’ll whisper this—some people even take mushrooms as drugs.

But the fungal world is actually much broader than many of us realize. This kingdom is an organism of its own, neither plant nor animal but distantly related to us, humans. With 36,000 estimated sexes, our fungal friends really don’t ascribe to the gender binary, though. Mycelium—the web-like vegetative structure from which mushrooms sprout—acts like a kind of intelligence, autonomously connecting to surrounding plants and trees in an efficient exchange of vital nutrients and information.

Our notions of what fungi or mushrooms can or cannot be are seriously limited compared to the possibilities the fungal kingdom offers us. Koji, a crucial part of Japanese cuisine, is now being used to create vegan charcuterie. Mycorrhizal fungi are emerging as a safe, natural alternative to chemical fertilizers, by relying on mycelium’s ingenious intelligence. Communities spanning Pennsylvania, Central Europe, Madagascar, Iran, Tajikistan and New Zealand ascribe semi-mythological meanings to the relationship between mushrooms and thunder and lightning, dating as far back as the Romans. These beliefs may help us make sense of a future world where our leather and our meat, our houses and our packaging, are made out of mushroom-based material.

It isn’t all positive though. Overharvesting, rampant demand and the climate crisis threaten India’s indigenous communities’ vital source of nutrition—wild edible mushrooms. The climate emergency has caused a sharp rise in the presence of mycotoxins, toxins produced by mold, in grain crops, animal seed and more.

Fungi can speak to and solve many of the challenges facing our world today. It’s time we delve a little deeper, and disrupt our long-held ideas about fungus.

It’s remarkable the olive is so popular. If you pick one straight from the tree, it is barely edible. When people first began cultivating olive trees between 6000 and 8000 years ago, just one bite would have revealed the bitterest of fruits, rendered impossible to eat by oleuropein—an incredibly bitter compound that protects against invasive species and animals.

Many millennia later, long gone are the empires that started the trade in olive oil and planting olive trees en masse, and what remains is a global olive oil market that’s worth more than US$11.2 billion, and projected to reach nearly $14 billion by 2027.

And yet, there’s much we still don’t properly understand. Our olive oil often isn’t what it claims to be, hollowed out by adulteration and fakes and by exporters relabelling another country’s oil as their own. The climate emergency and a fast-spreading disease threaten olive trees across the world. What we know and what we can expect of this symbol of purity, resilience and renewal is far from certain.

As we grapple with the radical changes transforming our relationship with the olive, ingenious solutions and novel uses for it give plenty of reason for hope. Despite the most bitter of first contacts with humans thousands of years ago, the Olive thrived. Who’s to say it won’t survive the challenges of this century?

The challenges of eating food in space today are unrecognizable compared to those we first faced.

Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin ate the first meal in space in 1961—pureed meat in a toothpaste-style tube polished off with a tube of chocolate sauce for dessert. In 1969, NASA increased rations to 2,800 calories per day, but a lack of quality nutrients was still causing astronauts to lose weight.

By 1973, NASA began recognizing how eating meals together benefits astronauts’ wellbeing, so installed a communal eating area. Footholds replaced chairs to enable them to congregate together. The Skylab program saw the first fridge sent to space. These simple additions improved the culinary experience for astronauts as much as continuing innovation.

If Yuri Gagarin was locking into a foothold today before a meal, he’d have already spent days tasting and rating the menu prior to lift-off. He’d recognize many of his foods as those he’d eat on earth. And he might be wondering how all his food would last long enough.

Lunar and martian missions of the next few decades will be far longer than previous interplanetary journeys. Food will need to survive for years without spoiling, resupply trips may take weeks and, whether in the ISS or on the red planet, astronauts will have to start learning to feed themselves—with food they’ve grown in-situ.

Fuelling the greatest leaps of humankind is about to get seriously interesting.

Early archaeological evidence suggests Homo Erectus first mastered the controlled use of fire nearly two million years ago. Fire scared off predators and enabled our early ancestors to come down from the trees. They began socializing around fires and cooking food.

Fire made us human. Our brains expanded as cooking enabled us to derive more energy from food. Our intellectual abilities thrived as tending fires and performing rituals forced us to learn how to plan, cooperate and possibly even speak.

We may owe our contemporary existence to the flame, but our relationship with fire is radically different from how it began. Rare are those people in modern developed countries who rely on fire to live. We cook by gas, electricity, and even induction.

But fire’s relationship with food today is far more complex than summer-time campfires with s’mores, or drinking warm beers and eating burgers around a barbecue.

The meat industry’s fires are destroying the Amazon. The escalating climate crisis is forcing indigenous farmers to ditch their traditional use of fire, while increasingly frequent wildfires threaten everything from crops to oysters. Fires regularly break out in meat processing plants, but few people take notice.  

It is therefore only right to interrogate the place of fire in our food lives today. It is our past and the making of us, but fire today also suggests a very different future.

There are endless questions to ask about food and the complex journey it takes to reach our plates. From farmers and fast food chains to politics and technology, we need to step aside from common conversations about food, and break down barriers few of us know exist. What are the systems trying to feed us, and how do they work?

Here at Sliced, we’re so excited to begin with our Watermelon issue. Few foods spark so much joy as the first watermelon in summer. Yet, beyond occasionally worrying about genetic manipulation, we rarely say anything more about it than how much we love this fruit—and possibly moan about the seeds. But, as you’ll see flicking through our metaphorical pages, the watermelon is as contested as any other food. Its history is complex and its future is up for grabs.

After emancipation, recently freed black people often farmed, ate and sold watermelons in the U.S. South. The fruit had been a central part of their lives during slavery, and remained important in the new social order. But selling watermelons gave them more power, which southern whites saw as challenging the racial hierarchy. In quicktime they transformed the watermelon into a symbol to depict black people as messy and lazy. It became a racist trope which reinforced violent notions that black people were an ‘unwanted public presence’.

This idea exploded in cartoons and media, but depressingly still endures to this day. Not too long ago, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in a previous profession as a columnist, referred to black people in Africa as having ‘watermelon smiles’. In 2014, Jacqueline Woodson described the pain of having her dislike of watermelon soup turned back on her as a racist joke by a friend on stage at an awards show.

The examples are endless, proving food is as powerful a symbol as any other, and that we need to discuss food in more detail. This is as true for issues in sustainability, agriculture, innovation, nutrition, taste and more, as it is for a food’s place in our culture and history.

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