To help kids familiarize with the idea of eating sustainable meals such as insects and food waste, Swedish ad agency Forsman & Bodenfors have devised an innovative 3D-printed play food set which includes futuristic dainties the likes of the “Bug Mac,” an eco-friendly insect burger, and “Tasty Waste,” a serving that looks like a conceptual sculpture made of a pine tree and a pink donut but actually represents a dish made of recycled food waste.

As reported by AdWeek, the aim of this toy line, called “Play Food From The Future,” is to raise awareness about the fact that over the next decades we’ll have to teach our kids the importance of eating in a more sustainable way and reducing food waste.

FAO data indicates that roughly one-third of the food produced for human consumption every year—around 1.3 billion tonnes—is lost or wasted. For this reason, halving global food waste per capita by 2030 is amongst the targets of the UN’s Sustainable Developments Goals.

We also need to reduce meat consumption which is projected to double by 2050. As known, intensive animal farming has a heavy carbon footprint. Roughly 70% of the world’s soy production is fed to animals, leading to destructive consequences in terms of land abuse, deforestation, and waste of calories.

Just to give a tangible example, more than a football field of Brazilian rainforest is cut down every hour to produce livestock feed for Europe.

One way of curbing the environmental impact of the meat industry is to diversify protein sources for human consumption. For example, farming insects has the potential of being more environmentally sustainable than farming land animals. That’s the reason we find an insect burger as a futuristic play food item.

Other dishes imagined for the set include a meatball made of algae (an ingredient that might revolutionize our food ecosystem), a cloud-shaped meal replacement called “Power Powder” and a protein-rich, Russian doll-like giant bean.

Forsman & Bodenfors developed the project together with the WIN WIN Gothenburg Sustainability Award, a sustainability prize sponsored mainly by the Swedish city of Gothenburg.

All the 3D printable-designs can be downloaded from the initiative’s website.

Credit header image: Play Food from the Future