(28 Nov 2019) Mounds of fresh ingredients and lots of hungry mouths to feed.
This is the Food Forever Experience in London, a one-night event bringing together top chefs and unusual ingredients.
Food Forever claims about 60 percent of the calories humans now consume come from just four crops - wheat, rice, maize and potato.
By promoting crops that have fallen out of favour, this event is aiming to promote diversity.
Chef Asma Khan is serving pearl millet roti with her British beetroot raita.
Pearl millet is a crop that's highly-resilient to harsh climates and hot, dry conditions.
It's high in proteins, iron and calcium, but despite this, it fell out of fashion in India, in favour of wheat.
Khan used pearl millet to make the flour for her roti. She refuses to fly vegetables from India to serve in her UK restaurants.
She believes chefs have a responsibility to look for more diverse and sustainable ingredients.
"Chefs are responsible, they're very, very irresponsible for not actually trying to figure out what is happening on the ground," she says.
But there's no point seeking out diverse ingredients if they don't taste good.
Trying pearl millet for the first time is Eddie Nooner from Los Angeles, US.
"As you get into it and start tasting it, you have this burst of flavour and it's like something you haven't experienced before," he says.
Chef Thomasina Miers is the founder of the Wahaca chain of Mexican restaurants in the UK.
She's trying to spread ingredient diversity by using a nativo heirloom corn for her crisp tostada and an in-season Italian delica pumpkin.
She blames a lack of diversity on the food industry.
"If a public good - you can argue food is a public good because it keeps us alive - is not regulated and profit is the only motive, then, of course, things like flavour, and more importantly nutrition, will fly out the window," says Miers.
Chef Anjula Devi cooks at Manchester United football club. Tonight, she's trying to show visitors there's more to lentils than just the plain red lentil.
Her dahl contains urad lentils, moong lentils and arhar lentils, which have been grown in India for the last 3,500 years.
They're highly drought resilient as well as being packed with protein, amino acids and vitamins.
Marie Haga, executive director of nonprofit organization The Crop Trust, is trying Devi's dish - all served in a coconut shell.
Haga doesn't blame chefs or the food industry for a lack of diversity.
Instead, she thinks the spark needs to come from consumers. If the demand exists, then the market will follow, she claims.
"The consumers need to tell the food sector, the food industry, what they want," says Haga.
"That they want products that are produced sustainably, that have higher nutritional value, if consumers ask that of the food industry, the food industry will demand that from the farmers."
That includes consumers like writer Bee Rowlatt, who's visiting the event to try some of the recipes.
"There is that whole dilemma around we like to watch amazing and interesting food happening on television, do we actually make the effort to eat it ourselves?" says Rowlatt.
"And that's why this is a great event, because it's encouraging people to try new flavours."
Also on the menu are battered balls of muntjac deer and Ethiopian kocho bread made from enset, a member of the banana family.
Enset is also highly resilient to drought, heavy rains and flooding.
According to the United Nations, the world's population is expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050, up from 7.7 billion currently.
Google hosted the Food Forever Experience London event.
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