At Haeckels, we continuously explore innovative ways to merge sustainability with well-being. This year, the London Design Festival gave us a special opportunity to extend our ethos beyond skincare and into the culinary world. We were excited to support “Down to Earth: Changing the Way We Eat,” an event featuring culinary artist Barney Pau, interdisciplinary artist Francesca Anfossi, and curator Huma Kabakci at e5 Bakehouse. Barney’s approach to food as a catalyst for environmental change aligns perfectly with our mission.

This week’s journal entry is written by Barney Pau himself, offering a firsthand account of the event and collaboration with Haeckels. In his own words, Barney reflects on the evening, the innovative menu, and the broader implications of reimagining our relationship with food:

The universal need to eat makes food one of our most communicable mediums. It can speak across languages and convey through time, telling tales of culture, climate, and cuisine. In a world where our ecological impacts affect every aspect of life, food can play both a familiar touchstone and conduit of change. In this, it is my artistic medium of choice. Our recent event Down to Earth: Changing the way we eat, was an evening of exploratory food seeking to challenge how we eat to inspire change in what we eat.

As a part of the London Design Festival, the evening centred on designing food futures to nourish both body and mind, as well as the fields that feed us. Working with Haeckels on this presented the exciting challenge of writing a skincare company into the narrative of an edible experience. In this, our shared passion for seaweed led the way. Haeckels innovation in working with an otherwise largely overlooked material is something which has inspired my cooking. Many of us only eat a handful of cultivated species, overlooking other diverse alternative food sources.

Seaweed is one such source which can help maintain a healthy flora, from gut to field. Rich in minerals and vitamins and growing in abundance, it is highly nutritious not just for our bodies—nutritionally and cosmetically—but also as agricultural fertiliser. Working with this, I used Haeckels nutritional range, combined with different seaweeds, to develop a menu designed to feed us and the world around us in a sustainable, delicious way. This paired well with our other partner, Hodmedod, whose UK grains and pulses support regenerative farmers.

Starting with a forageable tablescape, for the second course I steeped Haeckels Seaweed Tea into black barley. The meal finished with an earthy beetroot cake, baked from one of Hodmedod’s botanical flour blends—developed with seaweed to nourish the gut—paired with Haeckels’ Beetroot Probiotic, and a glass of my home-fermented foraged fig and medlar champagne.

The meal may have been whole, but its thinking is far from. Instead, it provided guests with the building blocks to create their own ideas around how to approach consumption more sustainably. Challenging convention runs throughout my practice, so Down to Earth provided fertile ground from which to seed these alternative thoughts. It was an invitation to change our ways, and feed our flora so they might flourish, starting with what—and how—food goes on our plates.

— Journal entry by Barney Pau, culinary artist

This powerful reflection from Barney Pau encapsulates the spirit of our collaboration and the innovative approach to sustainable dining that we were proud to support during the London Design Festival 2024.

Photography by Duru Bebekoğlu