Culinary Adventures in the Pacific Garbage Patch

Anya Koehne, Annan Zuo, Jiabao Li

Building on my previous project Consume Our Consumption, Culinary Adventures in the Pacific Garbage Patch invites guests to a dining experience featuring edible bioplastics and a speculative pill made from plastic-eating bacteria. The event reframes pollution as food and critiques consumerism, sparking conversation about how plastic waste affects human health and global ecology.

At our “landfill-to-table” dining concept, guests sample edible bioplastics alongside a live colony of superworms actively consuming Styrofoam. Each dish is thematically linked to a plastic-related issue and paired with an education on the topic. Throughout the meal, we discuss visions of a plastic-eating future and consider how biotechnological innovation might affect our relationship to waste.

We urge participants to reflect on the weight of this “first supper”: each bite reversing ecological damage, restoring interspecies balance, and reimagining the cycle of consumption itself. This immersive experience allows us to step into the future that Ecobite enables and to envision the possibilities this pill supports.

Consume Our Consumption

For our first course we have the olive from a very "Dirty" Martini. These bioplastic olives have been sourced from only the finest of garbage dumps, bringing you the world’s first ‘landfill-to-table’ dining concept. Our chef has prepared these edible bioplastics to leave a salty sentiment of overconsumption and misguided optimism on your palates.

Muddled Mojito

For our next course, we present the mint leaf from a refreshing mojito, made from the contaminated waters of the Pacific Ocean. In these samples, you can have a taste of the hell that over half of Earth’s creatures live in! Only you can eat away their path to freedom!

Out with the Old Fashioned

To end our meal, we have the orange twist from an old fashion. These morsels were made from old, decaying plastics almost as outdated and toxic as the sentiments held by those seeking to profit off of our communal demise. Let us cleanse the Earth of these pollutants – one bite at a time.