Mills Fabrica Innovation Award 2022

Malu Luecking, MA Biodesign, wins the Mills Fabrica Innovation Award with her project Landless Food regenerating extinct flavours using microalgae.

Celebrating work that combines academic excellence with a focus on material innovation and sustainability, The Mills Fabrica have awarded Malu £1,000 and a three-month residency in their lab in either London or Hong Kong. The residency offers space and support to bring her innovation to life.

Landless Food is set in 2050 when our culinary life has been significantly reduced by the impacts of climate change and loss of biodiversity. Malu's project looks at the social and intimate experience of food, proposing a regeneration of humanity’s food system by introducing a new family of flavours that bring our culinary memories back on the table. She collaborated with the University of Greenwich and the Institute of Agriculture, Food and Fishery Belgium, to cultivate strains of microalgae which produce a range of flavours from seafood to floral spice.

“It is remarkable that this project can cover so much ground in terms of co-creating and co-existing with life and the environment but also in respect to human and socio-cultural dimensions without causing any negative side effects," says MA Biodesign Course Leader, Nancy Diniz, "The project reflects the pedagogy of our course validated by rigorous data collection and scientific experimentation embracing paradigms seen in the natural world, in symbiosis of complex systems relationships between humans, biological systems with our environment.”