2019 Year in Review | Food Forever

We went around the world in 2019 – on a gastronomic and educational voyage – to celebrate the diversity of our foods.

With the help of innovative chefs, we called on stakeholders in the global food system, from individual consumers to farmers, the private sector, media and governments, to plant the seed for a more diverse, sustainable and delicious future.

Explore our galleries for a look back at some of the year’s most memorable experiences.

With events in eight countries on four continents, 130 diverse and delicious ingredients, 28 partner organizations, 65 chefs and over 1,600 guests, we witnessed the power of what we can do when we all come together around the same table.

February 5: In San José Costa Rica, we teamed up with world-class chefs and the conservation community to organize an inspirational meal at the 2nd Global Conference of the One Planet Network: Sustainable Food Systems Programme.

On the menu: malanda, a nutritious root vegetable similar in texture to the potato, tacaco, carambola and pejibaye. Featured here is the dish ‘saddle steak with malanda and coulis of tacaco’ created by Chef Emilio Valverde of the Crown Plaza Corobici.

May 2: The next Experience was a home game. In Bonn, Germany, where the Food Forever Secretariat is located, we challenged four chefs to conceptualize and cook dishes of the future. Eifel olive, wild peach, birch blossoms and piquanté peppers were on the menu, as more than 1,500 decision-makers, activists, experts, business leaders and creatives from over 130 countries, gathered at the World Conference Center Bonn to take action for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Chef Erik Oberholtzer created a bite-sized dish to highlight hemp seeds and birch blossoms. Pictured here, the two are incorporated in chawanmushi (a savory custard) and additional hemp seeds are sprinkled on top with green peas and sugar snap peas. The Food Forever Experience Bonn showcased what we might be eating in the future if we embrace some of the weird and wonderful foods yet to break into the culinary mainstream.

May 22-24: In Cusco, Peru, we held a three-day gastronomic and scientific voyage to celebrate the International Day on Biological Diversity in the heart of the Andes - the birthplace of the potato. The experience sought to raise awareness of the vital importance of conserving and using agrobiodiversity for food and nutritional security, climate resilience, business innovation and economic competitiveness. We were honored to have the Peruvian President, Martín Vizcara, the Vice President and Food Forever Chair, Mercedes Aráoz, and the Prime Minister, Salvador del Solar, in attendance, who were first to sign the Declaration of Interdependence.

The Experience, which took place at Inkaterra Hotel in Cusco, highlighted local ingredients such as chirimoya, quinoa, tarwi, yacón, and multiple maize and native potato varieties. On the last day of the event, participants visited the Potato Park, where five indigenous communities are working to safeguard one of the most precious collections of potato diversity, containing more than 3,000 varieties.

June 11: In Stockholm, Sweden, we partnered with Chefs’ Manifesto and challenged 18 leading chefs, including celebrity chefs Marcus Samuelsson and Lorna Maseko, in advance of the annual Eat Stockholm Food Forum.

In teams of two, the chefs created futuristic dishes featuring unusual plants with wonderful names like scotch bonnet. Pictured here is Chef’s Lerato Sitole and David Johansson’s dish, highlighting enoki mushrooms, ancient maize flour and Skånska gryn (a locally sourced medley of oats, rye, wheat and barley).

July 11: In Chicago, we partnered with Google, Spence Farms, the Hatchery and others for a two-part experience aimed at educating and inspiring. The Experience featured ingenious dishes featuring crops backed up in the Arctic – inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault – and locally sourced specialties like pawpaw and ancient maize, as well as rediscovered foods from around the world, such as amaranth, moringa, edible insects and more.

Chef Christine Cikowski of Honey Butter Fried Chicken created a toasted squash blossom honey butter with a ricotta and squash camchi corn muffin. Her dish, and those created by her fellow chefs showed why Long of Naples squash blossoms and other lesser-known crops are so important for creating resilient, sustainable and delicious food systems.

November 11: In Rome, we welcomed guests to a celebration of biodiversity on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the coming into force of the FAO’s Plant Treaty.

Featuring unique ingredients important to Italian cuisine, from the Orte Artichoke and Cacio Fiore cheese, to crops of major global importance, such as durum wheat and chickpea, the joint reception celebrated regionally important ingredients.

November 27: In London, we partnered with Google, Kew’s Millennium Seed bank and the Chefs’ Manifesto to celebrate unique ingredients of cultural importance. Taking place the day before Thanksgiving in the US, we celebrated chefs’ favorite festive dishes and the stories behind them.

Along with Liberian wild rice, foods featured included lion’s mane, a toothed mushroom with a rich and savory lobster-like flavor touted for its health benefits; enset, a banana wild relative native to Ethiopia, known as the “banana on steroids” for its many uses and high yields and British lop pig, a heritage breed renowned for surviving on little and making use of otherwise unproductive land, amongst many others.

December 3: In Washington D.C., we co-hosted the inaugural Food Forever Solutions summit in partnership with Foreign Policy. The event convened high-level guests across multiple sectors to address and discuss the most pressing issues facing our global food system. At the summit, we aimed not only to raise awareness of key issues, but to challenge participants to collaborate and innovate to address some of our most pressing agricultural concerns.

Following the summit, guests had an opportunity to see – and taste – the concepts in practice at the Food Forever Experience D.C., featuring dishes from renowned local chefs using ingredients like Blondkopfchen cherry tomato, sunchoke, escarole and white icicle radish.

December 9: For our last Food Forever Experience of the year, we went to the futuristic skyline of Abu Dhabi in conjunction with the SIAL Middle East Conference where talented chefs, including celebrity chef Manal al Alem used regionally important foods such as the deliciously sweet and soft date, camel milk and much more to showcase the importance of crop and livestock varieties to conference participants.

Chef Manal al Alem packed this small spoon with a lot biodiversity, featuring two regional ingredients: Figa’a, a wild truffle mushroom, and Al Fendal, a local sweet potato variety.

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Food Forever joined the voices of transformation by collaborating in the Food System Dialogues. The first Food Forever Dialogues took place in Nairobi on 15 March 2019, alongside the United Nations Environment Assembly and focused on the importance of crop and livestock diversity for building an African food movement. The second and last dialogue of the year took place in Abu Dhabi at Food Forever’s second Annual Meeting and challenged Food Forever partners and champions to identify concrete actions for driving more awareness and action in support of UN SDG Target 2.5 in 2020, its target year.

The participants, who consisted of Nairobi locals, urban farmers, small enterprises and regional and international NGOs, were divided up into groups of five. Each group was asked to address a specific area of Kenya’s food system with a proposal that could, ideally, be put into action within the next three years. All proposals were then collected into a Summary Report.

One table put the spotlight directly on crop diversity. ‘Proposal 2: Make food a political issue to increase agrobiodiversity’ aims at scalling up production of, and access to, a more diverse basket of African crops. The participants believed such political will and action can lead to currently under-utilized crops becoming more affordable and available.

“A key step is to have dialogue between the stakeholders that are involved so that they can at least start to see issues from each other’s perspectives, and collectively find ways to handle the inherent trade-offs that are present in any change,” said Food Forever Champion Dr. David Nabarro for the Food Forever Dialogues in Africa. “There were some remarkable things about Nairobi. I sat and listened to the talk at all the tables, and I was super impressed by the interplay between professional groups.”

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Our year ended in Abu Dhabi, where we held the last of our Food Forever Experiences, but also convened for the second annual meeting of champions and partner organizations. Hosted by the UAE Ministry of Climate Change and Environment (MOCCAE), the meeting took stock of the progress made so far on supporting SDG Target 2.5.

“A sustainable, nutritious and affordable food system cannot be achieved unless we go back to building blocks of agriculture – the diversity of our foods – one of the most important global common goods in the world but one which we speak about the least,” says Her Excellency Mercedes Aráoz, Vice President of Peru and Chair of the Food Forever Initiative at the inauguration of the second Annual Meeting.

His Excellency Dr Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi, UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment: “As the deadline for target 2.5 is fast approaching, and crop and livestock diversity continue to diminish, the urgency of this mission has gone up several notches. The challenge is further amplified by climate change that wreaks havoc on global biodiversity and causes habitat degradation.”

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We are fortunate to have made so much progress in 2019 towards raising awareness of the critical importance of safeguarding and using the diversity of our foods, and we’re looking forward to taking this topic to even more corners of the world in 2020. Join our movement to promote the amazing benefits utilizing the world’s biodiversity brings to humankind and sign the Declaration of Interdependence.