Exploring the Food Revolution 5.0

Johanna Schmeer's project explores how enzyme-enhanced bioplastics produce nutrients by being exposed to light. She's among the 30 designers invited to imagine what and how we will eat in the future for the exhibition Food Revolution 5.0: Design for Tomorrow's Society, on until September 30 at Berlin's Kunstgewerbe museum. It shows how our decisions about the food we consume are highly political.

Since cattle farming alone produces more CO2 than driving cars, Kuwaiti designer Hanan Alkouh created a vision for a meat substitute made of seaweed, itself a superfood. To preserve "the theatrics of trade vocations like farmer, slaughterer or butcher," the seaweed was designed to look strikingly similar to a huge piece of meat.

Exploring alternatives to fossil fuels, Italian designer Maurizio Montalti created a transparent system to show how one fungus can break down plastic, while another makes it into bio-ethanol. Here, chopped up rubber duckies demonstrate how micro-organisms can get rid of our waste.

Photographer Klaus Pichler's photo project One Third takes its cue from a UN study that found that one third of the world's food goes to waste, while 925 million people are threatened by starvation. These intricate still life photos, including these rotting strawberries, call attention to overconsumption.

Hoping to make Europe's disgust of eating insects a thing of the past, artist Carolin Schulze created a rabbit shape out of mealworm paste with the help of a 3D printer. Could such a design have us eating worms — and enjoying them?

Another project that makes use of new technology, Chloe Rutzerveld's Edible Growth creates a 3D-printed dough that grows edible fungi in a pleasing form. Rutzerveld calls it a "high-tech but fully natural, healthy and sustainable food."

This mobile kitchen was created as a community project to unite 12 strangers who are required to sit together for the 1.5-hour duration of a three-course meal. "We were thinking about how to create a project where we get to know people, and the result was that we need a big table and food," says designer Ania Rosinke.

Creating a matrix for chickens, this project by American artist Austin Stewart imagines what would happen if industrial livestock were given VR headsets to simulate a happy, free-range farm life.

A far cry from a quiet life in the countryside, Henk Wildschut's photo series Food provides an inside look at how food is produced. These piglets are among the many animals that spend their lives in such clinical spaces before ending up in grocery stores around the world.