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Feed the Planet

George Steinmetz

Couvent des Minimes

August 30 to September 14, 2025

10am to 8pm

Free entrance

Since the domestication of plants began some 11,000 years ago, humans have converted 40% of the Earth’s landmass into farmland. In our oceans, over 90% of the large fish populations have disappeared since the 1950s due to overfishing, and in our skies, food production is responsible for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Meeting the ever-expanding food demands of humanity has become one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time. With the global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by the year 2050, combined with the rising standard of living in rapidly developing nations, it is estimated that we will have to double the global food supply over the next thirty years. How can we do that without wiping out the few wild places and creatures we have left? This project documents where our food comes from, how it is produced, and examines some of the ecological and ethical consequences of the current system.

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Stained green with a topical solution to prevent skin infections, sows await artificial insemination at a breeding farm in Mato Grosso, Brazil. The facility, which houses 13,500 sows, is the largest piglet farm in Brazil. Each sow here averages around eleven piglets per birth and is used as a breeding sow for two to three years before her fertility drops and she is sent to the slaughterhouse.

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High on Ethiopia’s Amhara plain at an elevation of 8,000 feet, villagers harvest delicate stalks of teff by hand. One of the earliest domesticated grains, the highly nutritious grain now feeds some fifty million people in the food-insecure Horn of Africa. Though teff is highly drought tolerant, yields are low.

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At the end of August, some six hundred sheep descend from pastures above the Aletsch Glacier in the Valais region of the Swiss Alps. The communal flock has summered on steep alpine slopes, watched over by a lone shepherd. After a retreating glacier cut off the annual migration route, this narrow path was blasted out of a canyon wall in the 1970s to maintain access to the remote alpine pasture.