[Commoning Times at Järvafältet 2014]

Summer 2014 artist and researcher Erik Sjödin arranged two excursions and reading gatherings in Stockholm together with Commoning Times, an initiative by artists Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas from 16 Beaver Group in New York who visited Tensta konsthall and Iaspis in Stockholm.

“Commoning Times is a speculative name for thoughts, practices, and unnamable, undefinable experiences which bring us closer to an understanding or experience of the common(s). It is a site to open a space/time for thinking/living the common(s). A space/time to have contact with the ground of the common(s).

Breaking the stranglehold of the categories of public and private over the contemporary political imaginary is one of the critical dimensions of the various emergent discourses, practices and struggles of/for a common(s). Rather than see common(s) as a subject matter, it can be a starting point for thinking new relations and possibilities for the use of space and time.”

Järvafältet is a large natural and cultural reserve situated in between some of the most multicultural and segregated neighbourhoods in Stockholm. In connection to the excursion at Järvafältet Erik suggested that we read and discuss Nature as Community by Giovanna Di Chiro. This is a text that Erik found particularly relevant while working with the farm Hästa gård on Järvafältet and the project A Farm on The Countryside in The City. The text points towards an idea of community that is inclusive rather than excluding by introducing the idea of “unity in difference” rather than “unity in sameness”.

[Commoning Times at Runmarö 2014]

The second excursion went to Runmarö, an island in the Stockholm archipelago. Runmarö is an island with many year-round inhabitants, but it’s only accessible by boat and there are no cars on the island. On Runmarö we met with the author Helena Granström, who had suggested that we read and discuss Nature and Madness by Paul Shepard. An essay influential to her decision to move out of the city.

On both Järvafältet and Runmarö we also discussed the Swedish concept of “allemansrätten”, “the right of the commons”. Allemansrätten is a set of rules (but not always laws) that regulates what is allowed and not allowed to do outdoors. For example it regulates that anyone may pick berries and mushrooms freely, even in a private forest, but you are not allowed to break branches from trees or in other ways destroy the forest. You also have the right to walk across any private property and to tent for a couple of nights on another person property, as long as you stay out of sight from houses and don’t disturb anyone. It also regulates that you have the right to access any shoreline and that most bridges and wharfs can’t be private, although many people try to claim both shores and bridges as private.

[Three-Stone Fire for baking flatbread. Losæter, 2014. ]

During the Full Moon Celebration arranged by Flatbread Society in Losæter / Slow Space Bjørvika in Oslo Erik Sjödin built and tended three so called “three-stone fires”. One for cooking soup, one for baking bread, and one for cooking potatoes.

[Three-Stone Fire for cooking potatoes. Losæter, 2014.]

A three-stone fire is one of the most simple arrangements for cooking food over fire. Unfortunately three-stone fires are very inefficient. As little as 10 percent of the heat a three-stone fire produces is transferred to the cooking pot. In this case the three-stone fires worked well for warming soup and baking flatbread but it took a very long time to cook a large pot of potatoes.

It is estimated that three billion people worldwide still cook over open fire, such as three-stone fires, or using rudimentary cookstoves. Inefficient biomass burning stoves used for cooking are major contributors to global warming, pollution, and deforestation. Every year millions of people die prematurely and fall sick from having breathed in smoke while cooking. Inefficient cookstoves are also a source of inequality since it is mainly women who gather fuel and cook, at the expense of studying or pursuing income generating work.

[Three-Stone Fire for cooking soup. Losæter, 2014.]

NOTE: It is generally not permitted to make fires in densely populated areas or during hot and dry summer months. Before making a fire: 1. Check with the fire department if it is allowed to make fire. 2. Don’t make fires if it’s dry and windy. Fire can spread rapidly. 3. Always have fire extinguishing equipment close by. 4. Always be at least two persons, in case something should happen. 5. Make sure you can call for help if there is an accident.

Houses for solitary bees, bumble bees and butterflies, designed by Erik Sjödin and built by carpenter Ola Hansson, demonstrated at The Garden City’s 100 Year Anniversary in Äppelviken, Stockholm.

Äppelviken is a residential area in Stockholm which in 1910-1920 was inspired by ideas and ideals from the garden city movement. It’s made up of houses and row-houses with fruit trees and berries in their gardens and plenty of green areas in between the houses. The garden city idea was initiated in 1898 by Ebenezer Howard in the UK and aims to capture the benefits of the countryside and the city while avoiding the disadvantages of both.

Note: The reed in the nest to the left was put in an empty plastic bottle for protection. That’s ok if the plastic is recycled eventually, but it’s better to use a biodegradable material since plastic risks becoming litter.

Maretopia is an artist collective which explores potentials of the waters in Stockholm. The idea is to create a floating culture- and eco-village on rafts which will function as platforms for activities and expand established ways of using the waters. The project is initiated by artist Jens Evaldsson, based in Liljeholmen.

During the summer 2013 artist and researcher Erik Sjödin cooked food with the rocket stove kitchen during the construction of a raft for Maretopia, as well as during a performance evening on the raft arranged by Maretopia during Stockholm Culture Festival in August 2013.

In 2012 artist and researcher Erik Sjödin hosted a session in a reading circle organised by B-open in Bergen, Norway. With the increasing popularity of “Speculative Realism”, “Object-oriented Ontology”, and “Posthumanism” in mind the participants read and discussed the texts Wilderness Ontology by Levy Bryant and The Trouble With Wilderness by William Cronon.

Speculative realism and object oriented ontology are terms for a variety of rather heterogenic philsophical endeavours. Speculative Realism is often summed upp as attempts to break with “correlationism”, the notion that there isn’t possible to access an objective reality, but that everything is subjective.

Object-oriented Ontology, is an attempt to figure out how entities (i.e. something that exists as a subject or as an object, physically or not.) are ordered, with emphasis on not privileging human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.

Posthumanism, finally, emphasises the roles of nonhumans such as other animals, plants, and other beings, but also things and concepts.

In doing this speculative realism, object-oriented ontology and posthumanist theory challenges dichotomies and hierarchies that tend to be present in the generally human centered contemporary thought.

Excerpts:

“What wilderness ontology invites us to think is this dizzying array of observing systems or autonomous substances, where no one substance–whether it be God, humans, or cultures–can successfully occupy the position of sovereign mastering all the rest, and to think the entanglements or structural couplings, the intrigues, and aleatory dramas that arise between these entities. Wilderness ontology invites us to become second-order observers, becoming cognizant of both how we observe or construct our referents or openness to the world, but also to begin observing how other entities do this as well. As such, it invites us to become posthuman.”

– Wilderness Ontology by Levy Bryant

“The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that
wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that
stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the
creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human
history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched,
endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be
encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.”

– The Trouble With Wilderness by William Cronon.

In The Azolla Cooking and Cultivation Project, artists, researchers, farmers, gardeners, chefs and scientists experiment with cooking and cultivating the water fern Azolla. Azolla is one of the world’s fastest growing plants and a rich source of nutrients. Yet it is virtually unexplored as a foodstuff for human consumption. This book summarizes work with the project during 2010 and 2011. It is intended as a base for future research on Azolla food and Azolla cultivation as well as a general introduction to Azolla’s biology and its many uses.

The book includes an interview with artist and researcher Erik Sjödin; An introduction to Azolla’s biology and many uses, including Azolla’s use as fertilizer in rice paddies – which goes back centuries – and its potential use as food for humans; Azolla’s use in polycultures, such as in integrated rice, duck, fish and Azolla farming; Practical advice on how to grow and cook Azolla.

Read / download the book here.

[Flatbread Society at Iaspis 2012]

Flatbread Society will appear in various locations between 2012-2016 in preparation for Bakehouse Bjørvika where it will reside in perpetuity. Periodic assemblies mark points of research, aligned interests, and new insights and skills that will be put to use in Bakehouse Bjørvika. Using prototyping as a practice, this particular instance of FBS (while in residence at IASPIS in Stockholm, Sweden) experimented with fire, mobility and flatbread recipes.

[Flatbread Society at Iaspis 2012]

NOTE: It is generally not permitted to make fires in densely populated areas or during hot and dry summer months. Before making a fire: 1. Check with the fire department if it is allowed to make fire. 2. Don’t make fires if it’s dry and windy. Fire can spread rapidly. 3. Always have fire extinguishing equipment close by. 4. Always be at least two persons, in case something should happen. 5. Make sure you can call for help if there is an accident.

While warming themselves around the fire at Munkebryggen in Bergen, Norway people shared stories related to fire such as for example that in South Africa it is a common belief that the smoke turns towards those that have a negative mind, in rural Thailand it is common to get together and cook rice balls over open fire when the electricity goes out in the evening, and that the best way to put out a fire is to sprinkle, not pour, water on it. 

A Fire at Munkebryggen was realized at Munkebryggen in Bergen (NO) in December 2011, during a performance evening arranged by artist Annika Eriksson and students at Bergen Academy of Art and Design. The fire was made with permission from Bergen fire and harbour departments, in an oil barrel modified with the help of artist Markus Moestue.

NOTE: It is generally not permitted to make fires in densely populated areas or during hot and dry summer months. Before making a fire: 1. Check with the fire department if it is allowed to make fire. 2. Don’t make fires if it’s dry and windy. Fire can spread rapidly. 3. Always have fire extinguishing equipment close by. 4. Always be at least two persons, in case something should happen. 5. Make sure you can call for help if there is an accident.

Text: Anders Rydell, FARM #5 2011. (Translated from Swedish)

The small water fern Azolla can do almost everything, replace chemical fertilizers, serve as food, prevent malaria and pave the way into space. Perhaps it is also responsible for the Earth’s climate.

I’m standing outside a uniformly gray apartment building in the Stockholm suburb Årsta in the worst winter cold in decades. It is a boring house to look at. Nothing here would interest me if I didn’t know what was hidden in the basement. There grows something which probably has had an impact on all of our lives.

[Azolla cultivations in Årsta. Photo: Erik Sjödin.]

By the door I meet the artist Erik Sjödin. He has a scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. He sniffles and invites me into a small room that can’t be more than 20 square meters. He tells me that he rents it for 800 Swedish kronor a month and hands me a cup of tea. It’s buzzing from fluorescent lights and bubbling from pumps. In ten or so rectangular plastic boxes floats a plant that Erik has become virtually possessed by, a plant which has been attributed almost miraculous properties. Azolla is a moss-like water-floating fern that has fascinated space scientists as well as rice-growing philosophers. This extremely nutritious plant has been used both as fertilizer and animal feed. Its special properties has also made it interesting for agriculture in space. But through his project “Super Meal” Erik Sjödin explores another use, Azolla as a future food.

– It tastes a little like forest, mossy, but if you spice it up and fry it it tastes OK, says Erik.

[Azolla food cooked at Färgfabriken. Photo: Erik Sjödin.]

The ongoing project has resulted in several exhibitions and in the future it will become a book. Actually Azolla doesn’t belong in Årsta but in the tropics. It is obvious that it doesn’t really thrive in a basement. Erik says he is only trying to keep the plant alive until the winter is over. In the boxes floats more or less thriving Azolla, from healthy green to decaying brown. For safety’s sake he has applied different methods of cultivation in the boxes, some are filled with peat and fertilizer, others with topsoil. All in an attempt to find the best conditions.

– It seems to be surviving now, but it’s nothing compared to how it grows in the summer. I planted it in a pond at the art and farming collective Kultivator on Öland last summer. It filled up an area of perhaps 50 square meters in a few weeks, says Erik.

Under the right conditions Azolla isn’t difficult to charm, it is the fern’s unique symbiosis with a bacteria that makes it grow so fast that in many parts of the world it is considered the worst of weeds. Under ideal conditions Azolla can double its biomass in just two days, making it one of the worlds fastest growing plants.

Erik Sjödin’s love affair with Azolla began in late 2009 when he visited a friend who carries out research at the Department of Botany at Stockholm University.

– They grew Azolla in a greenhouse. It was really green and thick, like a lawn. When you touched it the whole surface rippled, I was caught by the aesthetic qualities. Then I thought that I must do something with this plant.

Erik began reading about the fern, and found among other things a recent report from Japan’s equivalent of NASA, JAXA. The report pointed out Azolla as a key crop for a possible colonization of Mars, but he found no recipe for how to cook it. So he decided to try it out himself.

[Azolla and rice cultivation at JAXA. Photo: Erik Sjödin.]

The experiments did, among other things, result in an exhibition at the art space Färgfabriken in Stockholm during the summer of 2010, where Erik together with Färgfabriken’s cafe came up with several dishes using Azolla as an ingredient. Among other things Azolla burgers and Azolla soup. During the fall Erik Sjödin visited the researcher Masamichi Yamashita at JAXA outside Tokyo, who had written the report on Azolla. Yamashita’s research area is space agriculture. In addition to research on Azolla he has, among other things, done research on silkworms as a source of proteins on Mars.

– The goal of space agriculture is to grow as much food as possible with the least amount of resources. It is the most efficient farming you can imagine. Everything must be done in completely closed systems with animals and plants. It is extremely difficult to achieve.

Erik gives me a book with recipes from the Biosphere 2 project. A result of an experiment where a number of scientists were locked in a closed system in Arizona for a few years in the nineties. In the project Azolla featured as an important crop.

– Through his research Yamashita has figured out that if you create a system where you grow rice, Azolla, fish and insects you could produce all the food that a person needs to survive on a surface that is less than 200 square meters, says Erik Sjödin.

To put it in perspective, the average American diet now require 21 000 square meters per capita, 105 times more than the Azolla system.

What makes this little water fern so special is its energy content. Dried Azolla contains 25-35 percent protein. In addition it contains a slew of minerals, vitamins, amino acids (a total of about 20 percent dry weight). Nutritionally it is comparable to alpha-alpha sprouts and algae such as Spirulina.

However, what makes Azolla unique is its nutrient content in combination with its rapid growth ability. The Azolla live in symbiosis with a so-called cyanobacteria (Anabaena Azollae). In the Azolla’s upper leaves there are small cavities in which these bacteria grow. The fern provides protection for the bacteria while they are nitrogen-fixing, which makes it possible for the Azolla to get nitrogen both from the air through the bacteria and from the water through its roots. This dual energy system provides the fern with a kind of biological turbo engine.
The high energy content and the propagation speed makes Azolla ideal both as a nitrogen fertilizer and as fodder. This has not been entirely unknown, on the contrary Azolla is mentioned in Chinese literature as far back as two thousand years ago. In a book about farming from the sixth century it is described how Azolla can be used as fertilizer in rice cultivation. By growing Azolla in rice paddies a natural fertilization process is created. However, Erik says that the tradition of using Azolla as natural fertilizer has been lost in many locations.
In various parts of the world Azolla has long been in use as animal fodder because of its nutritional content. But according to Erik Sjödin there is a wide range of further uses of the plant which has been nicknamed “A Green Gold Mine”.

– It could for example be used in water treatment systems because it is very good at absorbing heavy metals from water. Another application that has been talked about is malaria prevention, Azolla forms an extremely dense cover on water surfaces which is said to prevent the reproduction of mosquitoes. Azolla as biofuel and medicine has also been discussed.

But research on climate history at Utrecht University in Holland suggests that Azolla probably has played a much more significant role throughout our history. 49 million years ago, scientists believe a massive bloom of Azolla at the Arctic (which then was a warm sweet water ocean) fixed so much carbon dioxide from the air that it changed the Earth’s climate. The bloom is supposed to have carried on for 800 000 years and cooled down the Earth, which was much warmer then. In other words, Azolla created the climate we know today. Within the sciences the event has become known as “The Azolla-event”.

We leave Erik’s green basement room in and step out into the cold. Erik says that it is important that the use of Azolla in for example agriculture isn’t perceived as a return to something “primitive” – but as something progressive. He sees a risk in that people perceive this type of solutions as a step back, to something “natural”, instead of something more advanced than the agriculture we have today and have had in the past. Through the project he wants to pose questions about how we approach agriculture and food production.

– Agriculture, for example rice cultivation, is based on monocultures today. There is only room for one crop, and everything is driven by machinery, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It works, but it isn’t sustainable in the long run for many reasons. But by designing systems in which several animals and plants interact, it is perhaps possible to create an agriculture that is both more sustainable and more productive.

However, Erik doesn’t want to be perceived as an Azolla prophet.

– I have no definite answers. I just want to raise the question whether another system is possible? I have been contacted by everything from small scale farmers in India to horse ranchers in the U.S. who want to use Azolla in various ways. I want to disseminate knowledge, but it is important not to create any illusions that this plant is a panacea. It’s important to tread forward carefully, if you release Azolla in the wrong environment it can cause serious problems.

RÉGINE DEBATTY I am interested in the way you try to engage the public into your research about Azolla. You have already exhibited this project in several art spaces. How does the Azolla project take shape? Do you change strategy each time you exhibit it? Cooking at Färgfabriken for example and doing something else in Riga?

ERIK SJÖDIN What I end up doing is shaped a lot by circumstances. At Färgfabriken in Stockholm I exhibited in the summer and they had a court- yard so it was possible to grow Azolla outside. RIXC’s exhibition at KIM? Contemporary Art Center in Riga was too early in the spring for it to be possible to grow Azolla outside, and the room I exhibited in didn’t have any windows so I had to grow the Azolla under artifcial lights. I also try to fnd people to collaborate with around the exhibitions. At Färgfabriken I got the chef at Fargfabriken’s cafe to experiment with Azolla cooking with me.

[Azolla cultivation at Rogaland Kunstcenter in Stavanger, Norway]

I exhibit “The Azolla Cooking and Cultivation Project” as a work in progress because I think that an ongoing process can be more interesting and en- gaging than the conclusion. The project has always been more about the process than the result, but it is not that I don’t care about the result. I am hoping to arrive at something, but the result is the outcome of the process and in that sense the process is everything. Finding new ways of working, or living if you want, is very much what the project is about for me.

RD You are going to exhibit “The Azolla Cooking and Cultivation Project” again in end of May / June at Rogaland Kunstsenter in Stavanger. What will the work look like in Stavanger? Will you be cooking, growing Azolla?

ES I will make an installation inside the gallery where I will grow Azolla. There will also be a reading corner where a draft of the Azolla cookbook and cultivation manual that I am working on will be available along with some literature that relates to the project. Two texts that I will include are Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address by John Todd from New Alchemy Institute and the sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour’s text An attempt at a “Com- positionist Manifesto”. New Alchemy Institute was a research center that did pioneering research into agriculture, aquaculture and architecture in the ?O’s and 8O’s. In 19?6 they experimented with Azolla as a mulch for lettuce. The results of these experiments were published in the 1977 issue of their jour- nal, the same issue in which Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address was pub- lished. Already in the ?O’s New Alchemy Institute were doing and thinking about much of what is being talked about as novelties today. In Tomorrow is Our Permanent Address, John Todd talks about exploring a “new synthesis”; how “biological consciousness would fundamentally alter our sense of what human communities could be” and how “in the adaptive model of nature lie design ideas that will enable humans to create societies and cultures as beautiful and as signifcant as any that have thus far existed”.

Bruno Latour takes interest in the so called nature / culture dichotomy and argues that it has become untenable. In An attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto” (published in 2010) he talks about how “everything happens as if the human race were on the move again, expelled from one utopia, that of economics, and in search for another, that of ecology” and that perhaps it is time to “innovate as ever before, but with precaution” if we are to build a livable and breathable “home”.

This is what I know will happen in Stavanger. I am also trying to involve the Norwegian Gastronomic Institute in Stavanger in the project. I am hoping that we can make a larger outdoor Azolla cultivation somewhere and experi- ment with Azolla cooking together but nothing is set yet.
Throughout the summer I will also be working with Oloph Fritzén and Jenny Olofsson, farmers at Hästa gård, a 180 hectare urban farm in Stockholm. We will try to make some kind of Azolla installation on the farm and grow Azolla to use as mulch and as fodder for the farms animals.

In September I will exhibit “The Azolla Cooking and Cultivation Project” at the Halikonlahti Green Art Trilogy in Finland. For that exhibition I am collabo- rating with Tiia Paju, a gardener who will be growing Azolla in Salo during the summer. During the opening weekend of the exhibition I will be facilitating an Azolla kitchen where people can drop in and experiment with Azolla cooking.

RD Azolla has been used for biological fertilizer and as animal fodder. At some point in the booklet, you call it ‘not super tasty’ and you even add fur- ther on “To sum up you eat Azolla on your own risk. It might be healthy and it might not.” That was quite a warning! So what is your aim with “The Azolla Cooking and Cultivation Project”? To convince people that it is a valuable food resource? Or rather to enter in a broader discussion about the future of food and food production for example?

ES I am trying to fnd out if there is any real potential in Azolla as a food for humans but I haven’t reached any conclusions yet and I want that to be clear. As far as I know no studies have been carried out on the effects on humans of Azolla consumption so no one really knows weather it is healthy or not. But I will rewrite that sentence before the booklet is published. I don’t want to overemphasize the risks either. Apart from potentially being a new foodstuff Azolla has many applications, as fertilizer, animal fodder and for biofuels for example. I want to disseminate this information so that people can fnd appropriate uses for Azolla but I don’t want to “sell” Azolla or give that it is a panacea.

I am interested in how we produce our food today and could be producing it in the future and I try to get some insight into this by looking at how Azolla can be used in agriculture. When I started to work with “The Azolla Cooking and Cultivation Project” I knew very little about agriculture. Now I know enough to be convinced that the industrial agriculture we have to day is a dead end and that we ought to move towards an agriculture based on a diversity of species working together in stead of ever larger monocultures dependent on fossil fuel driven machines, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. The way I see it this is not a matter of going back to a pre-modern agriculture but of putting together both old and new knowledge of how the world functions and creating something that we have never had before.

Azolla has been used as an organic fertilizer in rice paddies for thousands of years in parts of China, but it is not until recently that this practice has started to spread to other parts of the world.

[Azolla soup and Azolla balls with rice noodles at Färgfabriken in Stockholm]

Experiments with Azolla in rice cultivation has for example just started in Italy where rice producers have problems with pollution and depleting soils. Using Azolla as an organic fertilizer in rice paddies is great, but when it becomes really interesting is when even more species are introduced in the paddy. A farmer in Japan, where Azolla commonly is regarded as a rice pad- dy weed, has recently shown that if rice is co-cultured with Azolla, fsh and ducks in the same paddy you can get greater rice yields than with conven- tional rice farming while at the same time getting fsh, duck meat and eggs. I think that systems like these are really promising and that what we need to do is to develop an agriculture with both a a great diversity of systems and great diversity within the systems themselves.

RD How does the public react to your project?

ES Most people I have met are really curious and enthusiastic about the project. It is fun to look at, touch and eat a plant you haven’t heard of before. Especially one as odd as Azolla, a foating fern that lives in symbiosis with a cyanobacteria and grows like crazy. I also think that a lot of people are inspired by the project because it is an amateur pursuit and because it is an attempt to look at how we can improve things. The only negative reaction I have received was when I presented the project at a permaculture course. I mentioned that scientifc studies have shown that cow’s milk productions can be increased and that chickens gain weight if they are given Azolla as a supplemental fodder. This prompted some strong negative reactions from a participant who associated this with pushing animals too far and treating them as biological production units rather than conscious beings. There was also a discussion around the appropriateness of introducing Azolla in agri- culture in Sweden where it isn’t an indigenous species. If Azolla would be introduced in the wrong environment it could become a problem. There are already examples of this having happened in Iran for example. However, I have found a Swedish garden enthusiast who has been growing Azolla in a pond in Stockholm for the past ten years without it ever surviving the winter so I don’t think we need to worry about it spreading uncontrollably at these latitudes. These are relevant concerns though.

I am interested in our notions of what is “natural”, how these notions are connected to language and aesthetics and how they are tied to how we relate to the past, the present and the future. I think we need to look beyond appearances at how things actually function and consider both new and old practices.
RD The nickname of Azolla is “super plant”. How come I read all those health magazines full of “super food” articles and I have never heard about Azolla? Could it become the new Tofu one day?
ES I don’t know why the health food industry hasn’t picked up on Azolla yet. My guess is that they just haven’t heard of it, though it seems strange. I don’t think it would be diffcult to market Azolla as a health supplement, like spi- rulina, and make a proft from it. I have been contacted by people who have been interested in growing Azolla as health food and I have been asked if I have intentions of doing this myself, which I don’t.

Tofu and in particular Quorn are interesting foodstuffs. Many people don’t know what they are made of or how they are made but they still eat them.

Quorn is also interesting because it is a newly invented foodstuff. In the 60’s it was predicted that by the 80’s there would be a global famine and shortage of protein-rich foods. Quorn is the result of research that was done in re- sponse to this. The fungus that Quorn is made from was discovered in 1967. After it had been evaluated for ten years the company that makes Quorn got permission to sell it for human consumption in the 80’s. The global famine never happened but Quorn ended up being a great vegetarian substitute to meat. I don’t fnd it unlikely that Azolla could be turned into a foodstuff like Quorn or Tofu with the right processing, but a lot more research has to be done.

RD In the introduction of your booklet you thank Masamichi Yamashita at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) because his work, you write, has inspired this project. What did JAXA make with Azolla? Did they manage to successfully include it in a diet? What was in it in JAXA research exactly that triggered your idea to work on a project about Azolla?

ES I was impressed that by designing systems similar to the rice-duck-fsh- Azolla system I mentioned earlier, and including Azolla in a human diet, it would theoretically be possible to grow all the food a human needs in an area of 200 square meters. That is less than a hundredth of the area the average Americans food production occupies today. This made me curious of what Azolla tasted like and since I couldn’t fnd any Azolla recipes or sat- isfying accounts of what Azolla tasted like anywhere I decided to try to grow it and cook it myself. For many people space and the future are synonymous so I thought it would be interesting to look into how we produce our food to- day and could be producing it in the future using space agriculture research as a starting point. I think a lot of valuable knowledge can come out from research on space colonization but at the same time I fnd our fascination with it kind of peculiar. I recently watched Werner Herzog’s The Wild Blue Yonder where a researcher talks enthusiastically about how in the future we will be living and working on asteroids and going to Earth on vacation. Why would we want to do that? Living on an asteroid and eating Azolla doesn’t sound that appealing to me. I would rather see that we try to fnd ways of co-existing with the diversity of species that we still have left here on Earth so we can continue to have varied food.

This interview was first published at www.wmmna.com on May 20, 2011.