Niki Marathia
Previous
Eat the rich
Week 1 of 5
Team
Food is more than fuel. Consider the ways that food is a medium of exchange when an influencer shares a plate of food on social media, when it is hoarded or witheld by those with power, when the desire for it is supplanted by a costly injection. In an age of dematerialisation, food remains stubbornly and emphatically physical, sensory, high-touch and frictional. Design a currency based on food.
Project partner: Revolut
Ayesha Saleem
Eniola Aminu
Jaime Santos
Keya Bangera
Mary Mehtarizadeh
Matthew Yue
Niki Marathia
Oindrilla Sinha
Revati Banerji
Literature review

Our team comprised of people from Pakistan, Colombia, Nigeria, Greece, Iran, India and Hong Kong, so naturally, both food and money were topics we knew intimately for better and for worse. To identify areas of interest for the project, we started with a literature review covering the key features of money, blockchain, digital cultures, colonialism, and social class.

Figure 1. Key features of money


Figure 2. Blockchain and decentralisation


Figure 3. Digital cultures and food


Figure 4. Sociopolitical aspects of food


Figure 5. Our currency’s values


A set of guiding values started to emerge, as shown in Figure 5. The literature revealed that currency doesn't need to be issued by a state if it’s useful and collectively trusted. This led us towards the idea of a decentralised currency that derives its value from community agreement. The blockchain offered an architecture that is decentralised and transparent, reinforcing this idea.

The question of what people actually want to transact with led us back to food. bell hooks' Eating the Other (1992) explores how food becomes charged with desire, which made us think it was a fitting foundation for our project. 

Feedback

At our first tabletop, we were praised for approaching the topic from multiple angles, though it was noted that our scope was quite broad. We were encouraged to narrow our focus to a local system rather than a global one, so we could situate it somewhere specific. If we were to exchange food, we were also prompted to consider different stages of freshness. Finally, we were pointed towards alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound, and encouraged to start making things as early as possible.

Biomaterials

To get inspiration on making things, we started looking into biomaterials. We liked the following examples of British companies that use food waste: CornWall (Figures 6 and 7) transforms agricultural corn waste into biodegradable tiles and Osmose & Sages' mycelium sheets that are dyed with food waste (Figures 8 and 9).

Figure 6: Aouf, R.S. (2024) 'CornWall gives discarded corn cobs new life as tile', Dezeen, 11 January. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2024/01/11/cornwall-tiles-circular-matters-stonecycling/ (Accessed: 4 April 2026).


Figure 7: Aouf, R.S. (2024) 'CornWall gives discarded corn cobs new life as tile', Dezeen, 11 January. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2024/01/11/cornwall-tiles-circular-matters-stonecycling/ (Accessed: 4 April 2026).


Figure 8: Aouf, R.S. (2024) 'Food-waste dyes bring colour to mycelium leather in Sages and Osmose project', Dezeen, 31 January. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2024/01/31/sages-osmose-mycelium-dyes-food-waste/ (Accessed: 4 April 2026).


Figure 9: Aouf, R.S. (2024) 'Food-waste dyes bring colour to mycelium leather in Sages and Osmose project', Dezeen, 31 January. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2024/01/31/sages-osmose-mycelium-dyes-food-waste/ (Accessed: 4 April 2026).



Sources

Aouf, R.S. (2024) 'CornWall gives discarded corn cobs new life as tile', Dezeen, 11 January. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2024/01/11/cornwall-tiles-circular-matters-stonecycling/ (Accessed: 4 April 2026).

Aouf, R.S. (2024) 'Food-waste dyes bring colour to mycelium leather in Sages and Osmose project', Dezeen, 31 January. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2024/01/31/sages-osmose-mycelium-dyes-food-waste/ (Accessed: 4 April 2026).

hooks, b. (1992) ‘Eating the other: Desire and resistance’, Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, pp. 21–39.