Food@Stanford Seminar

The Food@Stanford Seminars highlight innovative food-related research seeking to create nutritious, health-promoting, and sustainable food futures.

Refreshments will be available for registered guests after the presentations.

RSVPs have closed.

Thursday, October 30, 4:00 PM

JORDI BROSS AND RAMON PERISE, R&D TEAM AT 2-MICHELIN STAR RESTAURANT MUGARITZ

Ferment(N)ation: From Microbes to Campus Communities

We propose looking at fermentation as a living narrative that connects entire ecosystems in different scales—from the microbiome to campus communities—to learn what’s behind inherent processes like symbiosis, but also from values like collaboration, uncertainty, and time. From Mugaritz approach, fermentation is not only a biological matter: it is a metaphor for transforming ingredients, ideas, and relationships, as well as a creative language for designing experiences with shared meaning. We will explore the essence of fermentation, how microbes inspire models of cooperation, and how those principles translate into bio-art-culinary scenarios (though workshops, installations, dinners and other). We will integrate an aesthetics of sustainability, understood as a sensory and narrative choreography that, by staging tensions—local/foreign and clear/enigmatic—turns eaters into co-creators and therefore transforms the act of eating into a source of knowledge and culture. We’ll close with a practical framework to co-ferment projects from interdisciplinary approaches, going from the lab to the table—and viceversa.

The Chef in Residence is hosted through a partnership between Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability Visiting Artist Program and Office of the Vice President for the Arts.