FOOD IS more than a question of taste. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that around 80% of agricultural land is devoted to rearing livestock, yet it yields only 18% of the world’s calories. Cattle are the fifth-largest producers of methane, a greenhouse gas which affects the climate. Were the world’s eaters to switch to vegetarianism, in 2050 agricultural emissions would be 29% lower—or 70% lower were people to opt for veganism.

A new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London seeks to “pose questions about how the collective choices we make can lead to a more sustainable, just and delicious food future”. Entitled “FOOD: Bigger than the Plate”, it features more than 70 installations by artists, designers, scientists and chefs, divided into four sections: “Compost”, “Farming”, “Trading” and “Eating”.

The first part, “Compost”, examines how the invention of landfill rubbish-disposal and mains-drainage systems during the Industrial Revolution disrupted the food cycle. Where before people had been aware of the waste they and their food produced, returning its nutrients (and less beneficial byproducts) to the soil, a culture of “flush and forget” permanently changed attitudes towards waste. The projects featured in this section offer ways to restore the cycle—used coffee grounds from the V&A’s café make for nutritious soil beds, which grow mushrooms then used in café meals; an Italian dairy farmer turns the 150,000kg of manure produced every day by his 3,500 cows into a terracotta-like material for bricks, tiles and tableware. Though this is all interesting and innovative, the section rather resembles a sustainable design fair. One problem is being ignored: that of persuading people to consume less in the first place.

The best parts of the show try to take on these questions of scale. In “Trading”—which focuses on the buying, selling and transporting of food—“Banana Story”, a design project by Johanna Seelemann, points out the vast amounts of international travel hidden in “made in” labels. Her “banana passport” tracks a single banana’s 14-day journey from a tree in Ecuador to a supermarket in Iceland, covering 8,800km and passing through 33 pairs of hands. It succeeds because it attaches bigger questions to a small item: if you had to give that passport a stamp of approval every time you bought a banana in the supermarket, would you still buy it? Would you feel comfortable eating a banana every day once you had seen the energy and human labour required to deliver it to you?

On to “Farming”, and “Our Daily Bread”, a 13-minute film by Nikolaus Geyrhalter and Wolfgang Widerhofer, looks at industrial food production and high-tech farming. Bulls bred to provide sperm for artificial insemination file past the camera, pumped with so much testosterone that their muscles unnaturally bulge like bodybuilders’. In a lettuce field at night, kneeling workers inch forward in silence, following the picking-machine’s basket like dogs behind a bone. The slick processes show how detached and clinical food production has become, which is almost as troubling as scenes of animal slaughter. “Our Daily Bread” is partly screened off—presumably because some viewers or young children might find certain scenes upsetting—but it is one of the few things in the exhibition that fulfils its claim to “question values” or “make us reconsider”.

“FOOD: Bigger than the Plate” also features tasty morsels exploring more positive attitudes towards food. In the final section, “Eating”, the visitor is introduced to the Korean idea of son-mat (literally, “the taste of one’s hands”), an expression which refers to the ineffable brilliance of your grandmother's cooking. A table is laid with examples of innovative tableware. There are coloured plates to make eating easier for those with dementia—food is more easily distinguishable on bright blue plates, and the colour apparently stimulates the appetite—and funny-shaped spoons which are said to heighten the sensitivity of the user's palate.

Despite these highlights, the exhibition lacks a clear thesis and invites only superficial engagement. Perhaps the curators are right to avoid an overwhelming sense of doom and gloom, but the show does not prompt the viewer to consider how attitudes towards eating—whether gluttonous and globalised or ascetic and local—affect the environment. The final exhibit is a “food lab”, where staff make a miniature canapé for each visitor based on a quiz about the future of food. Gimmicks such as this are skirting far more interesting questions: a tiny canapé is not going to encourage people to think big, or make big changes.

“FOOD: Bigger than the Plate” continues at the V&A in London until October 20th