A dozen of us convene in the foyer of The Core at Corby Cube. ‘Are you here for the meal?’ Someone asks. I nod. ‘Then you’re one of ours,’ a lady smiles, extending her hand. It’s an early January evening, and we are all bundled awkwardly into coats. ‘I hope there’s cockroaches,’ I hear someone joke. ‘Welcome to What’s Eating Our Reality,’ a staff member greets us. We enter the gallery space known as The Lab. Centred in the darkness, a table is softly-lit. Twelve place settings are laid, white plates brightly lunar. Guests are provided with a napkin and invited to take a seat. The table is free of linens, no tablecloth, name-cards or other dressings. We are joined at the table by Maya Chowdhry. Chowdhry is an artist focusing on the production of ‘democratic experiences’ that illuminate our food realities and futures. Chowdhry welcomes us to the table and introduces herself and Alison Clare. Clare is a chef, but also a writer and artist; an experimental ceramicist exploring the positive applications of the circular processes embedded in our food systems.
Chowdhry invites us to sample the water in front of us. It appears to be infused with some kind of plant-matter gently suspended in bottles. I am reminded of the wildflowers that surreptitiously exploded from the peaty soil of my garden’s raised bed. Dandelion? ‘What is it?’ someone asks. There is a sense of excitement. A giddiness. Guests whisper to one another. We intuitively lay our napkins across our laps as though reluctant to disturb the tablescape before us.
A gentle tinkling – almost a windchime, yet more familiar – sounds at the corner of the table. Chowdhry stands before us: a ritual host, a maitre’d. The music is coming from the object she is holding; knives and forks suspended from a length of purple fabric. Chowdhry smiles, quietens the chiming of the tines. The meal has begun. The artist stands with a book bound in a leather-type material, a small lamp positioned to cast light upon its pages. I think of many epic tales that begin over a table. We begin with a rather big provocation: ‘What if the food you love doesn’t exist in 2050?’ A series of faces appear projected onto our plates as each guest responds to a series of questions in turn: ‘Would you forage?’ We are asked. ‘Do you know how to preserve food?’ ‘Are you capable of cooking outside?’ ‘How would you live without chocolate?’
A young girl suggests a chocolate shortage would lead her to write a strongly worded letter to the relevant corporate powers. There is laughter around the table at her good-natured response, but this is flecked with unease. What would we really do if chocolate were in short supply? Would we write such a letter and what would it say? Who, in fact, would it even be addressed to? I ask myself: do we know enough about where the chocolate we eat even comes from? Can we adequately trace, without complicated research, the path from cacao bean to the ubiquitous purple-draped bar on our supermarket shelves? What do we really know about what we eat and who produces it and how might we start to rebuild food systems if ecological collapse completely dissembles them?
Mushrooms, perhaps some kind of morel, suddenly appear animated on the table. Their earthy colour gently melds with the softwood, as if undisturbed from their organic growing place. The projection shifts and the fungi spread in timelapse. They reach across the width of the table before moving, in spore-like miniatures, across each of our plates. Soon after, the first course is served and we begin to eat. Our projected mushrooms are joined with tangible counterparts; pickled mushrooms atop mushroom pâté served on a sourdough cracker. It’s as though the projections have spread and metamorphosed, settling decisively into physicality onto our plates.
Chowdhry invites Clare to the table. The shortest side is flanked; one end by Chowdhry, the other by Clare. A kind of interdisciplinary geometry. Clare returns to the table following each course, revealing to us what has just been served. As we eat, we hypothesise. ‘Is this mushroom?’ ‘It’s a kind of cracker – what’s it made from?’ ‘This tastes like chocolate. But maybe it’s not. It could be carob’, one diner adds. ‘Carob is meant to be healthier.’ ‘Maybe it’s better for the environment?’ another suggests. ‘Can I please have the recipe?, someone across the table asks. Eating food and experiencing art are both absorptions in and of themselves. But by initiating conversation, the meal pairs multisensory consumption with a kind of production. Talking together. Thinking through. A ritualistic experience that I might describe as a type of ‘deep eating’.
The conversation extends beyond the food on our plates. Prompted by Chowdhry and Clare, we move around the table to talk. We speak about cooking, food ordering apps and the lure of eating away from home. Food waste, food exchange with neighbours and the technology of ‘sonic seasoning’ whereby sounds and music are played to influence the way in which a food tastes as we eat it. Inevitably we also touch on the troublesome beast of food marketing: a spectre shadowing every conversation on our commodified, industrialised food system. We consider the moral imperative to be better consumers but also identify the many barriers that can eliminate access to certain types of eating, predominantly the cost. Consider a single mother in a supermarket, one diner suggests. She won’t always have the time, the money or the bandwidth to resist the powers of the food system that reigns in the capitalist West. Thinking through the concepts of food justice may be easier than enacting them.
As the meal closes Clare shares that all food served tonight was vegan. A large majority was foraged or surplus food. The water was infused with the herbaceous Galium aparine or ‘sticky weed’. An extra-terrestrial-looking cracker of chia seeds is set against an apple juice jelly. Another dish celebrates a wild herb potato scone. A beautiful pudding followed, dressed in custard made from surplus corn, served with a popcorn brittle. A tea brewed from foraged fig leaves. Our faces are illuminated by the warm light of the table. After just two hours I feel strangely connected to those around me. Chowdhry and Clare have roused a sense of hope. Their meal is not a vision of dystopian cuisine, as in many works of food performance art that tackles the reckoning of dearth catalysed by the imminent climate crisis. Our menu may have been spurred on by ecological crisis, but it also takes care to be inviting, interesting and importantly, delicious. There are no cockroaches. No fear foods. Chowdhry and Clare have chosen to harness a sense of communal creativity and optimism for our food futures. Their meal is mycelial. Moreish.
I leave with a packet of seeds in my pocket and I think again of my extremely modest garden, a tiny but necessary space: the spores, the weeds, the tangle. ‘Food is art,’ Chowdhry told me, following the meal’s final course. ‘Growing is art too.’ I thumb the seeds in my pocket. Perhaps there will be more than wildflowers this year.
Zara-Louise Stubbs is a writer and PhD Researcher based in Derbyshire, UK.
‘What’s Eating Our Reality’ was commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art and delivered in partnership with The Core at Corby Cube as part of the venue’s fifteenth birthday celebrations, from 18-19 January 2026. Funded by Northants Community Foundation’s Northamptonshire Creative Climate Action Fund and 100Green, the UK’s only 100% Green Gas and Electricity Supplier.The performance was originally commissioned by Compass Festival and hÅb/Divergency as ‘Peas on Earth’ in 2017.
This review is supported by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art.
Published 23.02.2026 by Rachel Graves in Reviews
1,338 words
