The Night Czar’s Gastronomical Light Banquet
Affirmative
Does food waste cost the average person in London £200 a year?
Does this figure rise to £700 for a family with children?
Does disposing of London’s food waste cost our authorities over £50 million each year, and generate around 2.1 million tonnes of CO2?
Do we live in a city where both food waste and hunger coexist?
Have those ‘Display Until’ and ‘Sell By’ labels which once prescribed our habits of consumption already been replaced in our supermarkets for equally vague ‘Use By’ and ‘Best Before’ descriptors?
Does more still need to be done, to reduce confusion, raise visibility and take advantage of the City’s left over produce?
Does food waste cost the average person in London £200 a year?
Does this figure rise to £700 for a family with children?
Does disposing of London’s food waste cost our authorities over £50 million each year, and generate around 2.1 million tonnes of CO2?
Do we live in a city where both food waste and hunger coexist?
Have those ‘Display Until’ and ‘Sell By’ labels which once prescribed our habits of consumption already been replaced in our supermarkets for equally vague ‘Use By’ and ‘Best Before’ descriptors?
Does more still need to be done, to reduce confusion, raise visibility and take advantage of the City’s left over produce?
Speculative
Could the ‘Night Time’ be the ‘Right Time’, to make a change?
Could we remove the equivalent of 1 in 4 cars from London’s busy roads by reducing the amount of good food we throw away?
Could our transport services be re-deployed in the night, as a network to collect this forgotten food from across the city?
Could a grand moving Banquet be set up for this expiring food, to host the many sleepless, hungry residents of London?
Could a performance be made of this social shortcoming, to extract value from waste through a theatrical composting mechanism and the collection of its methane to power a spectacular light exhibition?
Could the nutrient rich product of this composting be returned to the UK’s agricultural landscape, reconstituting it for the beginning of a positive new food cycle?
Could the ‘Night Time’ be the ‘Right Time’, to make a change?
Could we remove the equivalent of 1 in 4 cars from London’s busy roads by reducing the amount of good food we throw away?
Could our transport services be re-deployed in the night, as a network to collect this forgotten food from across the city?
Could a grand moving Banquet be set up for this expiring food, to host the many sleepless, hungry residents of London?
Could a performance be made of this social shortcoming, to extract value from waste through a theatrical composting mechanism and the collection of its methane to power a spectacular light exhibition?
Could the nutrient rich product of this composting be returned to the UK’s agricultural landscape, reconstituting it for the beginning of a positive new food cycle?
The Banquet at the British Museum
Summary
Yes we can! (Is this taken?)
You are most cordially invited to The Night Czars Gastronomical Light Banquet, to be inaugurally hosted by Night Czar Amy Lame in the Great Court of the British Museum.
Left-over and unwanted samples from all those establishments supplying food across our city will be sent out for by a fleet of taxis, buses, and vans, given new purpose in the night to collect and deliver the menu for your imminent all-society dining experience. Each morsel, as they straddle that urgent temporality between a qualitative ‘Best Before’ suggestion and ‘Use By’ command, will be fastidiously re-presented, all in silver dining platters and placed upon the Grand Table of Conveyance, to be transported slowly towards the gaping maw of a figurative anaerobic Imposter-Composter; a giant baby head, and methane collection unit.
Yes we can! (Is this taken?)
You are most cordially invited to The Night Czars Gastronomical Light Banquet, to be inaugurally hosted by Night Czar Amy Lame in the Great Court of the British Museum.
Left-over and unwanted samples from all those establishments supplying food across our city will be sent out for by a fleet of taxis, buses, and vans, given new purpose in the night to collect and deliver the menu for your imminent all-society dining experience. Each morsel, as they straddle that urgent temporality between a qualitative ‘Best Before’ suggestion and ‘Use By’ command, will be fastidiously re-presented, all in silver dining platters and placed upon the Grand Table of Conveyance, to be transported slowly towards the gaping maw of a figurative anaerobic Imposter-Composter; a giant baby head, and methane collection unit.
From Expiring Today to Best Before Tomorrow
Time is of the essence; until 6am, the food amassed for the banquet will remain legally and ethically delicious, so we warmly encourage you to gorge, and celebrate, or watch that awful chthonic machine play out the social ritual of destruction we otherwise enjoy the privilege of ignoring. An exciting prospect, either way.
And wonder at a spectacular exhibition of lights, which promises to cut an incomparable cultural section, dazzling you and delighting your loved ones with the satisfaction that all its energy requirements have been holistically met by the methane produced in that unassuming babies head; we’ve taken the poetic liberty of channelling the gasses collected from our compost to each of the display lights adorning the walls, via that very same medical tubing applied in the iatric setting to the supply of oxygen, for better breathing.
Attend, enjoy dinner and the acapella musical stylings of Sadiq ‘Chaka’ Khan, collect your complimentary gas mask (it gets smelly, from all that compost off-gassing) before retreating into the early morning haze in palatery preparation for the Night Czars next great feast; we offer the sincere assurance that any and all food not eaten in the course of the evening will be responsibly returned to the land, so to extract maximum value from its wasted resource and support food production where its grown and sourced locally.
And wonder at a spectacular exhibition of lights, which promises to cut an incomparable cultural section, dazzling you and delighting your loved ones with the satisfaction that all its energy requirements have been holistically met by the methane produced in that unassuming babies head; we’ve taken the poetic liberty of channelling the gasses collected from our compost to each of the display lights adorning the walls, via that very same medical tubing applied in the iatric setting to the supply of oxygen, for better breathing.
Attend, enjoy dinner and the acapella musical stylings of Sadiq ‘Chaka’ Khan, collect your complimentary gas mask (it gets smelly, from all that compost off-gassing) before retreating into the early morning haze in palatery preparation for the Night Czars next great feast; we offer the sincere assurance that any and all food not eaten in the course of the evening will be responsibly returned to the land, so to extract maximum value from its wasted resource and support food production where its grown and sourced locally.
^in collaboration with
Bilaal Raji Saheed, Dika Lim and
Limal Harris