Are you hungry for exciting, thought-provoking, and delicious food experiences? You'll find them served up on a silver platter in our experience zone, Food Is Now, located between the Eos and Apollo stages.
As the name suggests, Food Is Now puts food front and centre, and this year's theme dives into the soil’s limitless potential and unique flavor universe. At Food Is Now, we’re offering workshops, panel debates, talks, performances, pop-up dinners, and sensory taste experiences.
The Food Is Now events in the schedule are free to join. Additionally, you can buy tickets for five special events where you’ll get both filled up and enlightened about the earth's possibilities.
The five events are:
Grab a piece of Baka d’Busk’s long, long potato rye bread
Baka d’Busk kicks off Food Is Now with a tribute to one of the world’s most cultivated veggies: the potato. On the pinnacle of Danish culture and gastronomy, rye bread, we create an enormous potato sandwich shaped like an endless snake.
You’ll get to savour new potatoes from Hyldemarken on rye bread spread with lovage mayo, wild watercress, and horseradish.
- Date: Wednesday 3 July
- Times: 17:30-18:00, 18:00-18:30, 18:30-19:00, 19:00-19:30, 19:30-20:00
- Price: Potato on rye bread, 70 DKK
- Non-alcoholic celery and watercress punch: 35 DKK (available for purchase at the event)
How does sustainable chocolate made without cocoa taste? What about beer popsicles crafted from bread? Can upcycled food create a whole new world of treats?
Presented as the future of the traditional sønderjysk kaffebord (Southern Jutland coffee table) Endless Food Co. introduces The Future of Indulgence in collaboration with some of the most innovative small Danish food companies, including Jalmer B, Agrain, Brøl, Hansens Is, and Reduced.
It’s going to be a cake feast like no other, including a talk on upcycling in food and how to create a fairer future food system.
- Time: Thursday 4 July, 16:00-17:30
- Price: 135 DKK
Living soil is the foundation for living food – and at Food Is Now, you can enjoy a plate of green and living food at the event LivingSoilLivingFood with CulinaH and Marie Hertz.
The plate consists of freshly dug potatoes, carrots, grilled baby beets, steamed onions on marinated creamy kefir-ripened labneh, and a small field salad. You’ll also get a glass of natural and pure wine from Georgia, which has thrived in large amphorae underground.
All ingredients are grown with the utmost respect for the soil and treated gently.
- Time: Friday 5 July, 12:30-14:00, 16:30-18:30
- Price: 135 DKK
Pop-up with CulinaH and Marie Hertz
Can't wait until Friday? Experience LivingSoilLivingFood on Monday, July 1, when CulinaH and Marie Hertz’s event pops up in The Yard, located in East City. The menu is almost the same – however, no wine is included.
- Time: Monday 1 July, 16:00-18:00
- Price: 105 DKK
- Location: The Yard in East City
Ærteekspressen (The Pea Express) offers you a three-course festival dinner featuring heirloom pea varieties from Lolland-Falster and other organic legumes from the Nordics.
At the event, ÆRT ETC will serve three delicious dishes filled with seasonal greens and spices from around the world, accompanied by a mushroom-legume burger from the fermentation team at MATR. During the dinner, you can also learn about the importance of legumes for fertile soils and the green food transition.
- Price: 255 DKK
- Time: Saturday 6 July, 13:00-14:00, 17:30-18:30
The earth isn’t just our source of life. At Food Is Now, it’s also a source of new perspectives. From Thursday 5 July to Saturday 6 July you can experience everything from audiovisual chef performances and bizarre cake-sittings to sensory rituals, talks, and reflections on the fast-paced mindset of postmodern life.
Here are all the colourful, entertaining, and thought-provoking highlights you’ll find at Food Is Now:
Dive deep into the earth's diverse ecosystems and their significance for a greener future with Think Tank Frej, who will start the day with "Soil Safari" on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Discover the hidden world of soil and learn about a crucial, yet often overlooked, aspect of our food system that can be significant in combating climate change and biodiversity loss.
Thursday 4 July, 10:00, Friday 5 July, 10:00, Saturday 6 July, 10:00
Focusing on a traditional seaweed soup, South Korean artist Yujin Jung envisions what the marine environment of the future might look like.
Fantasy merges with sounds and images in her culinary performance, 'Longing Energies: Ceremonial Recurrence', providing new perspectives on traditions, myths, time, and place.
Thursday 4 July, 11:30
Join a poetic picnic and a performative food experience with Amalie & Flora's Dinners, celebrating the earth that forms the backdrop of the festival itself.
The chef duo calls for collective care and appreciation for our planet, and together with the audience, they will explore new creative and hopeful ideas for how we can inhabit the earth together.
Thursday 4 July, 13:00
Get ready to be immersed in Alberte Skronski's grotesque and surreal world, where you can play with food, eat the soil, and be bold and sensual in ways that societal norms often deem forbidden.
Once you’ve eaten, chewed, and digested her artwork, you can witness something unprecedented at the festival: a special cake-sitting performance.
Time: Thursday 4 July, 14:30
What is extractivism? And what does it look like when an olive travels from a Tunisian field to a Danish supermarket? Reflect on this as Food Is Now morphs into an olive tree field, where there will be dancing, readings, and cooking.
Artists Elyes Lariani, Monia Sander Haj-Mohamed, and Mouayed El Ghazouani invite you to an artistic dialogue about the globalized food industry and its impact on small, traditional farmers.
Friday 5 July, 11:30
Using fruit and beeswax, artist Iben Zorn creates a performative and edible artwork, which only takes its final form once you sink your teeth into it.
In doing so, you become part of Iben Zorn's artwork, setting the stage for a slow, sensory, and collective process, where scents and tastes are the focal points for small, intense moments.
Friday 5 July, 14:45
It's about reconnecting with and celebrating our shared planet and humanity when award-winning performance artist Wanjiku from Kenya performs a piece created specifically for this year's festival, alongside Mother Tree.
'Back to the Roots' is a collaborative live performance and transformative experience that bombards all your senses through dance, sounds, and tastes. Rediscover and learn more about the colonial legacy that pushed aside native crops and replaced them with "cash crops" for export, while you get to taste these native superfoods.
Friday 5 July, 15:45, and Saturday 6 July, 15:30
You know the feeling: you’re getting hungry and craving something delicious, and you want it now. Most of us have experienced ordering food delivered right to our door, to the point where the bike courier has become a permanent fixture in postmodern city life.
With his surreal slow-motion bike courier performance 'Delivery', Swedish artist Axel Berger turns our relationship with work, efficiency, convenience, and burden upside down. His work invites you to pause and reflect on the fast-paced mindset that characterizes our postmodern life.
Saturday 6 July 6, 11:15. Can also be experienced at Flokkr on Monday 1 July, 12:45
A farmer, a philosopher, a miller, a doctor, and a member of parliament enter a stage.
This is not the start of some joke. These are the debaters you can meet when the food policy community Madland brings together five food system disruptors at Food Is Now. Delve into the soil and hear about their efforts to secure a better future for you and the planet in the talk In Defence of the Earth!.
Saturday 6 July, 11:30
