BRINGING FOOD BACK AT THE CENTRE OF OUR LIVES

Charles Michels | YES& Festival Live Q&A - 31 March 2021
Written by Marion Giddy

From land custodianship as a human right, seed to soil practices, caring for selves in the midst of an ontological awakening and the one question we can be asking ourselves…

Charles Michel joined the YES& FESTIVAL LIVE Q & A session on Sat 20th March, to answer three important questions that have been asked to speakers throughout the Pre-Festival Program..

Read on to join the YES& Team & Charles as they kick of the Q & A and explore question one..

Lawrence
“Food educator, activist, and artist, Charles Michel is a nomad photomath studying the convergence of art, science and multi sensory aesthetics. 

Based at Oxford University between 2013 and 2016, he published over a dozen papers in scientific journals on cross modal perception. He works as an experienced designer in a variety of fields, and as an artist using food and the meal ritual as media. He recently starred in the Netflix series, The Final Table. 

In recent news, Charles has been working in cutting edge projects that innovate in community building, Food Innovation, hospitality, and experiential art. At the intersection of science, art, community and entrepreneurship, Charles aims to inspire solutions from important challenges in the ways humans relate to each other. And to nature. 

So welcome, Charles. It's really an honour to have you with us.”

Charles
“Thank you, thank you all for this invitation. Thank you, Lawrence. And yeah, it's such a pleasure and you know, they think that there are ways in which we can create synergies of inspiration and I feel that this is what has been happening here, have been super inspired not only by the YES& team in how can we are approaching this, this whole kind of curation of people and ideas. 

Thank you for doing that {acknowledging the custodians of the land}. I am in Bacatá. Today it is called Bogota, the capital of Colombia. This is Muisca territory. Muisca were very potent, beautiful. A culture that was pretty much eliminated from being in these lands through the colonising process that has lasted over the past 400 years. And, and yet, so acknowledging that it's also feel very connected to that, because my grandfather was, his origins were Muisca Indigenous here in Colombia. So really appreciated you acknowledging your land as well.”

Lawrence
"Thanks, Charles. For these Q & A sessions, we've been basically asking each of the speakers and artists that we're inviting the same questions, because we believe in getting a sense of them from them, what it is that they have experienced in this last 12 months, as a timeframe.  And so the first question would be, 

How has your experience of the past 12 months influenced your outlook on the future?”

Charles 
”I love the question. And I'm also curious to see how other creators or the speakers are going to address it, because at least for me, it has been a transformational journey inside. 

And, one of the insights, here we go, is that ...

I realised that access to land should be a fundamental right for all humans, if we are born on this planet.

Hence, we are born equal in rights as, as the Declaration of Human Rights wants to have it. Then everyone every single human should have in its lifetime, the right and the privilege to work the land, to be with land. 

That is where it started for me a year ago. I landed in France for a couple of weeks to teach at a university, and when I landed, things started falling apart. The day of the beginning of the confinement in France, I got to my father's place for seven months, I had the chance to just be in good relationship and learning from my dad, and from the land. We were, we are stewards out there.

It's only one hectare, only one tiny piece of factor and I understood how one hectare is enough to live a good life with a family. If you manage it, well. 

A third of our land is completely protected. There still porcini mushrooms growing, which means that it's very old growth. There's kind of a little path of, of wild boar and, and deer on the land. 

A third of it is for the let's say for the aesthetics also the beauty and like having a park and, and and the houses.

And the third of it, production. Part of it, beekeeping, my father's a beekeeper and part of it's just growing food. 

To me speaking about food so much and loving food and being so engaged and active, right, an activist around these issues of food. Having the chance to see the whole process from seed to soil of my food. 
I had the chance to arrive just in spring and see how these plants grew and how we would feed from them. 

And then building a compostable toilet because I had enough of pooping in clean water.
We talk a lot about how water is sacred.  
And our systems are the hardware of cities and homes today mean that most of us if not all of us are pooping in clean, drinkable water. 

I do not use cleaning products that I wouldn't put on a plant or a tree.   If it would kill a plant or a tree, if it does, if it wouldn't go in my mouth, I shouldn't be using it as a cleaning product. This is something my father says. 

But my outlook on the future to answer the question is that we need to have whole systems solutions, if solutions are only addressing part of the system or part of the problem, they are not solutions they are a veil like a curtain, that that can allow us to do a bit better here, but are not addressing the root cause.

We're still just trying to solve the solution, trying to solve the issues too low in the string. 

As Desmond Tutu said, we need to start thinking of why are people falling into the river and dying in the first place. So we need to go upstream and see what's happening. 

So how has this changed my outlook of the future? I think it just accelerated what was already obvious. It allowed me to embody what I already knew. And hence accelerates not only the depth of what I shared through my activism and education, my Patreon community, for my consultancies, as well.

And I think I tuned up the volume on the things that matter most. 

To hear more from Charles Michel, join us at the YES& Festival on Saturday 17th of April as he speaks more to BRINGING FOOD BACK AT THE CENTRE OF OUR LIVES.

Register now for YES& Festival | NEW GROUND.