Interrogating ethics in future visions of food @ the EXPO 2015 in Milan

In 2015, the universal exhibition in Milan (EXPO 2015) focused on "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life" hosting several countries which showcased technologies, innovation, culture and traditions around food. The EXPO seemed to us as a maquette of rather hegemonic narratives about the futures of food and the foods of the future. For a great part, the proposals relied heavily on governmental and techno-scientific initiatives and substitutions to address the challenges posed by the possibility of human population growth forecasted for 2050. We took the opportunity of the EXPO to engage around citizens to reflect on the imaginaries portrayed in food futures through this universal exhibition. Our journey of citizen engagement at the EXPO 2015 was based on material deliberation methodologies. Hence, the activity we will describe in this paper is called Food Futuring Tours; it consisted of a series of walking photographic tours through the Expo pavilions, where participants were invited, both as individuals during the walks and then collectively in workshops, to interrogate the EXPO's futures of food proposals and then re-imagine food futures in the form of visions (scenari), considering their possible social, ethical, cultural and environmental impacts. In this paper, we will focus in particular on the ethics dialogues that took place during this citizen engagement exercise, highlighting how ethics has been performed in the ten different visions developed by the participants of the tours: ethics as driving force of future of foods, ethics as a distributed matter and in particular reflecting on the ways imagined by the participants in which human agency can change what is described as an urgent and complex human issue, i.e. quality feeding the planet. The paper will also reflect on how these types of engagement processes disrupt or emphasise current narratives that underlie policy development in the area of food, critically counteracting the prevailing view that describe and perform citizens as just consumers - i.e. choice and behaviour as drivers of food markets. Moreover, stemming from the ten visions developed by the participants, we will argue that current movements of deeper engagement of citizens in reconnecting and transforming the loci of production and consumption reflects desires for greater degrees of agency. In other words, policy making need to review the relationships people want to have with food and can no longer assume that e.g. food labelling is the boundary object that enables trustful relationships among citizens and loci of food production.