Making the Best of It:
Jellyfish
2016
Core Collaborators: Ryan Pera (Coltivare), Justin Yu and Ian Levy (Oxheart), Marina Zurkow
Supported by the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS), Rice University
DESCRIPTION
Making the Best of It is the umbrella concept for a series of regional site-specific pop-up food
shacks, installations, carts, tea houses, delivery drones, and designed community dinners that feature edible
climate-change enabled, and often not normally eaten, indicator species as part of the menu. These events are
designed to engage the public in tastings and conversation about the risks of climate chaos, our
business-as-usual food system, and short term food innovations at our disposal.
During a month-long residency in 2016 at CENHS (the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the
Human Sciences) at Rice University in Texas, Zurkow worked with stellar chefs Brian Yu and Ryan Pera to
explore what it would mean to eat jellyfish fashioned into a collection of American-style snack foods: jelly
beans, jerky, chips, and instant soup. This iteration of Making the Best of It laid the foundations
for a participatory public art project positioned as an innovative food product line.
With this proof-of-concept in hand (the snacks were tasty), Making the Best of It: Jellyfish is now
a proposal for a mobile, mysterious, silent, snack-vending system, intent on introducing jellyfish snacks to
ocean-side consumers. The system will be comprised of a white electric mini truck accompanied by a close-range
drone, each underlit by glowing LEDs that evoke the phosphorescent qualities of deep sea creatures. This
mobile snack system will resemble an undersea diving vessel and allude to the ghostly quality of jellyfish and
other deep sea creatures.
Jellyfish are old animals—relatively unchanged (continuously successful, biologically speaking) since the
Pre-Cambrian era 250 million years ago, a time when they were top predators of the ancient seas. In a more
balanced ocean ecosystem, they may bloom and disappear amidst a biodiverse array of other animals. But
jellyfish appear in large numbers and far more frequently today; they often indicate a distressed ecosystem.
Depleted oxygen levels, nitrogen run off, oil spills, pollutants, and overfishing transform the Gulf of Mexico
into an increasingly large dead zone. Jellyfish do well in oxygen-poor and disturbed environments. Their
ability to flourish positions them in the center of an unfortunate recursive feedback loop: They are a
“plug” in the food chain, eating most everything below them, while few animals consume
them—primarily sea turtles, molas (sunfish), and...humans.
As many of the formerly reliable Gulf fisheries declined, jellyfish have become an important economic
resource(1). They are netted in great numbers for the Asian market, where jellyfish consumption is common.
They are tasteless, but very crunchy with an unusual mouth feel. Given their drifts and blooms, jellyfish are
not a consistent or reliable fishery, raising provocative questions about feeding the world, supplementing
diets with jellyfish foraging, or thinking in systems rather than species-specifics about foodstuffs. As
jellyfish are rarely seen outside of Asian markets, Chinese restaurants, and specialty grocers, this foodstuff
seems grotesque, obscure or too exotic for American tastes. In the U.S.A. they are an unutilized food
resource. Arguments to eat them include: making the best of their sporadic but abundant population blooms,
reducing their numbers and therefore allowing more diverse competition for the animals they prey on, and
consuming a healthy food (jellyfish contain collagen, proteins, and are low in fat). In fact, I might
characterize jellyfish (of which there are at least 12 edible species) as an American dream food: a zero fat
protein with nutritional benefits that may include aiding beautiful skin and prolonged youth.
Making the Best of It: Jellyfish aims to raise awareness about systemic environmental degradation,
the structuring of fisheries and the systems our sustenance depends on, and how jellyfish participate in and
disrupt these systems. They are not only good to eat, but also very “good to think.” (2)
Many thanks to Juli Berwald, for her research on jellyfish and her new book Spineless, out
in fall 2017.
(2) “Les espèces sont choisies non commes bonnes à manger, mais comme bonnes à
penser.” Claude Lévi Strauss, The Savage Mind (1962)
