A Glitch in the System - Script

Introduction to the Play

Working with children and young people during 'Beyond the Plate' highlighted to us that we are losing some of the stories behind the food we eat, and food as a topic throws up interesting ethical
questions.

For some of our young people, food was sustenance - quick, cheap and easily accessible. It was from brands and didn’t carry a story. Picking up Starbucks on the route to the youth theatre didn’t lean into tales of culture, tradition, and community. It did, however, open up a conversation about war, conflict, and whether it was
ethical to purchase, or was it a social media lie.

As practitioners, we realised that we were asking young people to talk about something that was no longer about the shared experiences of cooking, eating, and remembering - but simply about filling a stomach, and we decided to lean into this. We abandoned the stories the group had started about running away from home with your
favourite meal and started asking them some complex and ethical questions. The results led us to discover they had a shared love of dystopian drama. This was their starting point - a world in the future - at war with itself - where stories behind our food have been forgotten in the name of survival.

A Glitch in the System is set in a dystopian future, one where food heritage has all but disappeared. The teenagers in this world live in a time where the connection to their cultural roots has been severed. Old recipes, traditions and memories have been disrupted as the teenagers grapple with the question of AI’s role in the future of food production - a world where machines and algorithms shape what we eat and how it’s made, stripping food of its cultural meaning, reducing it to something artificial for survival.

The work belongs to the young people. Through their exploration, they debate some of the most pressing ethical and societal issues of our time.

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