Mouthful (Trafalgar Studios)

We know we’re part of the guilty, greedy population that is both wasteful and eating far too much, and this series of six short plays paints a distressing picture of food production as a battleground, both now and in the future.

Commissioned by Metta Theatre, the pieces are loosely pinned together with impressive video design from artistic director William Reynolds, who illustrates the stark facts and figures about overweight children and water-hungry cattle with a mix of sparky graphics and video footage.

The credits to scientific collaborators as well as playwrights also gives the production additional credibility as a call to start a conversation about the political iniquities and inequities of food production.

Alisha Bailey is a charismatic actor who gets the series off to a strong start in Organica by Colombian writer Pedro Miguel Rozo, where a young woman’s ambitious attempts to farm organically are quickly scotched by the murderous secrets hidden within the earth.

She’s also bright and funny in Chocolate, by Bola Agbaje, which contrasts Western women’s passion for chocolate with the cocoa farmers who’ve never even tasted the end result of their labours.

Dona Croll is a visionary campaigner but not much of a mum in The Protectors, by Clare Bayley. In this dystopian future, food production is entirely at the mercy of multinationals with political impunity, where even mashing a potato can be enough to get the secret police on your tail.

There’s an attempt at lightening the mood with a bizarre musical number, Try Me, with the cast all dressed as insects, making themselves sound like delicious alternatives to meat. Costume designer Charlotte Espiner must have been delighted with this break-out part of the job, and her spangled insect costumes, complete with padded abdomens and antennae, are visual delights.

But then we are plunged back into the hell of a world without water. And so it goes on, with grim and increasingly didactic messages piling so high that the evening begins to feel uncomfortably like an imaginative world-geography lecture rather than a coherent drama.

If some of the writing feels laboured, and occasionally performances become stilted, this is nevertheless an extremely ambitious and well-intentioned examination of our relationship with food.

And the vision of what’s to come continues in the interval, where there’s a choice between a nice tub of ice cream, or a plate of fried insects. We have been warned…

Mouthful runs at Trafalgar Studios until 3 October.