The Greenhouse
Effect.
INTERVIEW WITH JOOST BAKKER
A house providing all the shelter, food, and energy we need without producing any waste might sound like something from the future, but Joost Bakker reckons it's a product of the past.
You've gone from flower artist to designing a zero-waste productive house that could solve the world's biggest problems. How?
I started in the early '90s as an installation artist in Melbourne which was exciting, because they changed the liquor licence laws and lots of small bars were opening and I was kind of the go-to guy. My work was unique because I juxtaposed natural things like flowers and plants with waste like old cabling, fire hydrants, whatever I could find in junk yards. Spending time in these places made me see how difficult we make it to recycle the things we use, so I got a really deep understanding of the problems we create by not thinking about the end.
In early 2000s I purchased a little farm and started planting it out. I wanted to be self-sufficient, and what I was using in my art was the wild overgrown flowers. I wasn't really interested in the monoculture cropping that was going on with flowers, where everything is the perfect height and same size. What I love to use are things that are wild, bent and twisted. So, over a period of three to four years we planted 25,000 different plants with over 1000 varieties.
After that, I wanted to build a non-toxic, natural house that was easy to recycle at the end of its life. Obviously, it's been designed to last hundreds of years, but I still think it's important to think about the end. The intention was to build my house and go back to my art and installations. Then a friend of mine shot the house and the photos were so beautiful that Vogue put it on the cover and suddenly I'm a house designer. I've got no background in architecture. I've got no background in anything. I left school when I was in year 10. Suddenly people were interested in the aesthetic, but also the fact I'd considered all these things and so that led me down the whole Greenhouse path.
Talk about the latest Greenhouse in Federation Square, Victoria, and how it's improved on previous versions of the project.
It's definitely been a big evolution. The first Greenhouse in 2008 was exactly the size of the average Australian house. It had a rooftop garden and what I tried to show was a house could feed itself, it could be an ecosystem, it could be a food producer, and energy producer. But because it was a hospitality venue, no one looked at it as a house. Everyone just looked at it as a hospitality venue. I became frustrated that a lot of the ideas weren't becoming mainstream, then I realised it's because there was too much going on. People would come and their minds would be blown, but it was too much to take in. So, I designed a cafe that looked like an ordinary cafe, but it had no bins. It was called Silo and that little cafe was only 45m2, but it was much more powerful and really changed the way people thought about hospitality, globally.
The idea with Future Food System was let's make a house that looks like a house–it's got two bedrooms, it's not a restaurant–so there's a lot of clarity around the idea. And it's all inspired by a lot of books I've read. Like Dr. Johann Schnitzer, who's still alive, he's a German dentist that discovered that malnourishment is the reason why we suffer tooth decay. Along with Weston Price, one of the founders of the American Dental Association, who travelled the world in the 1920s going to places where the food hadn't been influenced by western culture and hadn't changed in 1000 years. In his summary in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, a book he wrote in 1934, he said America is overfed and undernourished. And what he meant by that was populations like the First Nations, living just outside of Byron, that he studied in Australia, there was a group of over 300 First Nations people where he couldn't find one tooth cavity in the whole group. They were the only population on Earth completely immune to tooth decay, and he credits that group to having achieved the best diet on Earth. When he visited the Inuit in Alaska, he found tooth cavities, but only one in 200 or something. Whereas in the United States at the time it was one in two people had a cavity, so it was rampant.
I feel First Nations people had the answers, and we should be listening to that work. We should be studying and copying that work. So Future Food System was really about mimicking what First Nations people had achieved. They ate between 200 and 300 different foods, and to give you an example of the difference between a western diet at the time, they had 17 times more magnesium in their diet, 15 times more calcium, and other trace elements. And this is back in 1928, so you can imagine the diet in America was a lot better than what it is today.
Joost’s home in Monbulk, Victoria, covered in his signature vertical garden system. today, these terracotta pots, which are 100 per cent recyclable, are overflowing with over 11,000 wild strawerry plants.
Back in 2011, restaurants were'n’t recycling much, let alone creating entire venues that were zero waste (and easily transportable) which made the Greenhouse by Joost pop-up in sydney even more radical.
What's happened in the last 100 years is we've grown a huge amount of food in tonnage, but the food is empty. We're all overfed and undernourished. And what First Nations people in Australia had achieved over thousands of years is knowing what was crucial to well-being, what different foods were needed to be mixed with other foods, and seasonality. I was really interested in this research and that's what inspired the first Greenhouse.
Having proven our homes can provide shelter, produce food and generate energy, is it money, education or motivation that's stopping your Future Food System from becoming the norm?
I just think it takes time. I'm not disappointed that things aren't moving quicker. Things are moving quick. When I built the house I'm sitting in, back in 2005, there was only 64,000 houses with solar in the whole country. Now there's over 3 million. The transition is definitely taking place. We're in a really dynamic time. I think there's going to be a complete revolution in how we eat and what we eat. The technology being created around being able to scan food for nutrient density means we'll know whether it's been grown properly, no need for organic certification. And the technology around localising food, being able to have someone in your neighbourhood grow a particular crop and sell it locally, is exciting.
Being at the centre of the cultural shift towards a circular and truly sustainable economy, what's some changes or innovations you've seen lately that you're excited about?
Recently, I was reminded by a journalist that I said by 2030 there wouldn't be supermarkets. I don't know if it's going to be that soon, but I do believe the supermarket won't exist in the future. I think we'll go from a centralised economy to a decentralised economy. Over the next 25 years people will get what they need from a diverse group of people that they trust. Maybe beans will come from someone growing them in a vertical situation on a rooftop in Fitzroy. Or someone in Bangalow is growing amazing sweet potatoes. Technology will exist that'll allow us to source the best produce from the most local growers. The food system at the moment is insane. I know someone that works in a washing plant in Gippsland (Victoria) and there's lettuce leaves being driven down from Queensland, getting washed, and then put in bags and shipped back up to Queensland. And we all have to pay for that.
People don't understand that you'll never see a wild deer pick an apple off the ground. Animals pull things off trees because it's in a generative state when it's connected to its source. As soon as you remove it from the plant it's in a degenerative state. Animals know this and we're only just starting to understand. We can store apples for three years, but we don't understand the implications that has on the nutrient density and quality. I think it's a really exciting time to become more localised, more seasonal, and go back to the way First Nations cultures live.
You created the world's first zero-waste restaurant over a decade ago, and yet they're still not commonplace. How can new ideas, like the Future Food System, be rolled out at scale?
I think it's people-driven. When bureaucracy gets involved it's a disaster and it means you get big players suddenly controlling a situation. I totally believe a city like Melbourne could feed itself. I'm not saying every single person in Melbourne is going to grow food 30 years from now, but one in three might. I believe a third of us get so much pleasure out of growing food, harvesting food, sharing food, and cooking food, that in a city like Melbourne with 3 million people, that means a million people could have an incredible life filled with purpose and joy.
We only need a third of our current agricultural land globally to grow our food. We have such an insane system. Like Denmark: the dairy industry there uses a million hectares of soybeans grown in Argentina and Brazil to feed their dairy cows. And half the fish caught globally are used to feed farmed fish. The insanity of it all is hard to comprehend. So if we go back to a realistic food system that celebrates locality and utilises nutrients where we generate them, a city like Melbourne could potentially have a million people employed in a new system.
You're a regular visitor to the Northern Rivers. What opportunities do you see around the Byron Shire for increasing resilience, whether that's environmentally, socially or economically?
Some of the most creative people I know have moved up there, so I think the area over the next 15 years will become a beacon for exactly what I'm talking about. ▲
Photos: Earl Carter