May your curiosity and your heart be listened to
First of all, we’d like to wish you a very happy new year, filled with experimentation, exploration and wonderful discoveries. May your curiosity and your heart be listened to, and may this year bring the desired changes or the expected stability.
In 2023, we’ve had some wonderful experiences, and we’re taking this opportunity to summarise them. Contemplating our past actions helps to set the direction for the future.
We’ve been lucky enough to share the practice of fermentation and the discovery of mycelium with many of you. Whether during a series of workshops held in our sunny studio in Barcelona, or at external events where we were invited.
A highlight of the year was our participation in the magnificent Foodculture Days art and food biennale in Switzerland, where we experimented with growing mycelium using the body heat of participants/visitors. The feedback was incredibly good and interesting, and the experience kept us energised for a long time.
Another key moment was when we participated in the Fixing The Future event, where we demonstrated our fermenter and explained its use and our vision to the public who had come to discover emerging solutions to the climate crisis.
A third project in the spotlight, of which we are very proud, has been a series of of workshops with MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona), Fablab Barcelona (a research and education centre) and AFAB (a digital fabrication workshop run by the city and dedicated to citizens), where participants in the Cuina MACBA made their own fermenter lab in the fabrication workshop from files downloaded from our site, and then used the fermenter to make a delicious batch of tempeh in the MACBA kitchen. it was great to see the participants building and using their fermenter from scratch.
We had a great time sharing our experience, our culinary delights and our vision with all of you. Thank you for being part of it! And if you didn’t get a chance to join us, drop us a line to organise a future workshop/experience together. We’re preparing our 2024 calendar.
It was also during this wonderful year of 2023 that our fermenter left our workshop to enter your kitchens and labs! What a pleasure to see you fermenting your own plant proteins at home, exploring a new culinary universe, getting closer to natural processes and loving it! Our Fermenter, Fermenter Lab and DIY kits for making your own fermenter are out in the wild, in Spain, Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, USA, Brazil, Canada and more. Thank you for trusting us and bringing the wonderful practice of fermentation, sustainability and resilience into your lives.
We experimented with mycelium. To produce plant proteins to reduce our dependence on the animal industry and drastically cut our CO2 emissions, thanks to tempeh. To discover new flavours, to observe the transformation of common foods into an incredible source of umami, thanks to koji. To obtain a substitute for plastic, to replace our petroleum-based products made from polymers that are almost impossible to recycle with compostable objects that can return to the Earth and benefit it.
In 2024, we want to create more open-source tools so that together we can continue to explore the world of fungi, bacteria and micro-organisms of all kinds. To feed ourselves, but also to get closer to them, to be inspired by them, and to share their beauty. We strongly believe that a change in society can come from a new way of seeing the world, from interspecies collaboration and mutual respect. Our work continues to move in this direction.
Thank you for following and supporting us.
We wish you all the best for this new year!
Maud & Antoine