Tag: food

Bio · Design · Technology · Vital-Edible-Health

A new industry born from the disaster — LED indoor farming

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Humans have spent the last 10,000 years mastering agriculture. But a freak summer storm or bad drought can still mar many a well-planted harvest. Not anymore, says Japanese plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura, who has moved industrial-scale farming under the roof.

Working in Miyagi Prefecture in eastern Japan, which was badly hit by powerful earthquake and tsunamis in 2011, Shimamura turned a former Sony Corporation semiconductor factory into the world’s largest indoor farm illuminated by LEDs. The special LED fixtures were developed by GE and emit light at wavelengths optimal for plant growth.

The farm is nearly half the size of a football field (25,000 square feet). It opened on July and it is already producing 10,000 heads of lettuce per day. “I knew how to grow good vegetables biologically and I wanted to integrate that knowledge with hardware to make things happen,” Shimamura says.

Read full article at GE

Design · Technology · Videos · Vital-Edible-Health

TellSpec: What’s in your food?

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The TellSpec laser scanner appears, at least in its demo form, to have potential. The device is a raman spectrometer that uses an algorithm to calculate what’s in your food. You point the laser at a potato chip for instance, and the accompanying app on your smartphone gives you a read-out of the ingredients.

The creators raised more than $380,000 on Indiegogo at the end of last year. Now the company has to take some big steps towards getting the device on store shelves.

According to TellSpec: TellSpec is a three-part system which includes: a spectrometer scanner, an algorithm that exists in the cloud; and an easy-to-understand interface on your smart phone. Just aim the scanner at the food and press the button until it beeps. You can scan directly or through plastic or glass. TellSpec analyzes the findings using the algorithm and sends a report to your phone telling you the allergens, chemicals, nutrients, calories, and ingredients in the food. TellSpec is a fast, simple, and easy-to-use way to learn what’s in your food. We need your help to make it smaller and manufacture it as a handheld device.

Image via Bloomberg BusinessWeek

We Took The Laser Scanner That Tells You What’s In Your Food Out For A Spin

Is this the future of dieting? The gadget that can tell you how many calories are in your dinner just by scanning it.

Also:

SCiO, the Pocket Molecular Sensor

NODE by Variable Technologies

Bio · Design · Digital Media · Earthly/Geo/Astro · Education · Technology · Vital-Edible-Health

SCiO, the Pocket Molecular Sensor

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A small consumer-level molecular scanner lets you analyze the objects around you for relevant information, from food calories or quality, medicine, nature, etc.

When you get your SCiO, you’ll be able to:

Get nutritional facts about different kinds of food: salad dressings, sauces, fruits, cheeses, and much more.
See how ripe an Avocado is, through the peel!
Find out the quality of your cooking oil.
Know the well being of your plants.
Analyze soil or hydroponic solutions.
Authenticate medications or supplements.
Upload and tag the spectrum of any material on Earth to our database. Even yourself.

The Kickstarter was launched a few day ago and made it’s $200,000 goal within 24 hours – the potential for this tech is huge. Watch the video embedded below to see the potential:

Bio · Eco/Adaptable · Vital-Edible-Health

Enjoy your food. Disposable food bowl.

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Designer Michal Marko created a disposable food bowl concept (with minimum environmental impact) while teaching society about new biodegradable materials. On the label it states: “Enjoy your food. Then put the seeds from under the label with gravel into the bowl and let it grow. After a week, plant bowl with a herb into the ground. The bowl will degrade and you can grown your own herb.”

Human-ities · Photographics · Vital-Edible-Health

In Your Fridge

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http://www.stephaniederouge.com/

Design · Performativity · Vital-Edible-Health

Tableware as Sensorial Stimuli

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Cutlery design focuses on getting food in bite-sized morsels from the plate to the mouth, but it could do so much more. The project aims to reveal just how much more, stretching the limits of what tableware can do. Focusing on ways of making eating a much richer experience, a series of dozens of different designs has been created, inspired by the phenomenon of synesthesia. This is a neurological condition where stimulus to one sense can affect one or more of the other senses.

An everyday event, ‘taste’ is created as a combination of more than five senses. Tasty formulas with the 5 elements – temperature, color, texture, volume/weight, and form – are applied to design proposal. Via exploring ‘synesthesia’ if we can stretch the borders of what tableware can do, the eating experience can be enriched in multi-cross-wiring ways. The tableware we use for eating should not just be a tool for placing food in our mouth, but it should become extensions of our body, challenging our senses even in the moment when the food is still on its way to being consumed. Each of designs have been created to stimulate or train different senses – allowing more than just our taste buds to be engaged in the act and enjoyment of eating as sensorial stimuli, therefore it would lead the way of mindful eating which guides to rediscovering a healthy and joyful relationship with food.

Text and Images via J I N H Y U N . J E O N

Photographics · Vital-Edible-Health

Pantone Pairings

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Via David Schewn

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Eco/Adaptable · Human-ities · Vital-Edible-Health

Revolutionary Plots: Urban agriculture is producing a lot more than food

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Can it be the antithesis of war, or a cure for social ills, or an act of healing the divisions of the world? When you tend your tomatoes, are you producing more than tomatoes? How much more? Is peace a crop, or justice? The American Friends Service Committee set up a series of garden plots to be tended by people who’d been on opposite sides of the Yugoslavian wars, but a lot of people hope to overcome the wars of our time more indirectly through their own gardening and farming.

We are in an era when gardens are front and center for hopes and dreams of a better world or just a better neighborhood, or the fertile space where the two become one. There are farm advocates and food activists, progressive farmers and gardeners, and maybe most particular to this moment, there’s a lot of urban agriculture. These city projects hope to overcome the alienation of food, of labor, of embodiment, of land, the conflicts between production and consumption, between pleasure and work, the destructiveness of industrial agriculture, the growing problems of global food scarcity, seed loss. The list of ideals being planted and tended and sometimes harvested is endless, but the question is simple. What crops are you tending? What do you hope to grow? Hope? Community? Health? Pleasure? Justice? Gardens represent the idealism of this moment and its principal pitfall, I think. A garden can be, after all, either the ground you stand on to take on the world or how you retreat from it, and the difference is not always obvious.

Excerpt of a text written by Rebecca Solnit, at Orion. Continue HERE
Image above via NYT

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Eco/Adaptable · Human-ities · Science · Social/Politics · Videos · Vital-Edible-Health

WWF: Two Earths Needed by 2030 to Sustain World Population

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The equivalent of two Earths will be required to support the world’s population by 2030. That is the stark warning made by the WWF’s Living Planet Report 2012, which was put together in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Global Footprint Network. It warns that the size of the planet’s population and the resulting consumption of environmental resources, such as food and fuel, is unsustainable at current rates. “If we keep on taking more renewable resources than can be replenished, then eventually they will become depleted,” the report stated. “This has already happened locally in some places, for example the collapse of cod stocks in Newfoundland in the 1980s.

Excerpt of an article written by Nicholas Edmondson, IBT. Continue HERE

Download the Living Planet Report 2012 HERE

Digital Media · Technology

The End of Barcodes: Supermarket Scanner Recognizes Objects

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A vegetable scanner made by Toshiba. I can already envision the future of this new device. What about the prices? Could the nutritional content of a vegetable dictate its price?

Film/Video/New Media · Performativity

Fresh Guacamole by PES

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PES: In this follow-up to his stop-motion hit Western Spaghetti.

Bio · Science · Technology · Vital-Edible-Health

Chew On This: Edible Silk Sensors To Monitor Your Food

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Nidhi Subbaraman: Sick of finding out that your milk is sour only after you’ve taken a big gulp? A new technology will let you simply wave your phone over it–or any food–to get a verdict on whether it’s still edible.

Silk is a marvelously versatile material that is useful in an incredibly wide variety of settings besides luxurious underwear. You can find it in surgical sutures, flexible electronics, and other biologically friendly applications. And soon you might be finding it in your food. Scientists at Tufts University have now engineered the multitalented material into fully chewable food sensors. Pasted onto eggs, stamped onto fruit or floating in milk, they can warn you when your fruit is ripe, or when your milk has gone sour.

“We see a huge market for food,” Hu “Tiger” Tao, a postdoc at Tufts University told Co.Exist. “People are always looking forward to some kind of sensor that’s easy to use and gives you information about spoilage.”

Writen by Nidhi Subbaraman for Co.Exist. Continue HERE

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Eco/Adaptable · Projects · Vital-Edible-Health

Meat The Future: The future of meat

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Meat the future is a project that intends to inform people about todays unsustainable and inhumane meat industry. But also give hope for a change as there is a solution in sight, called In Vitro meat.

This is a project by Afshin Moeini, Christian Poppius and Kim Brundin from Beckmans College of Design.

Bio · Photographics · Vital-Edible-Health

Reverse Engineering the Refrigerator by Jihyun Ryou

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Jihyun Ryou is interested in food preservation. According to her:

“Observing the food and therefore changing the notion of food preservation, we could find the answer to current situations such as the overuse of energy and food wastage. My design is a tool to implement that knowledge in a tangible way and slowly it changes the bigger picture of society. I believe that once people are given a tool that triggers their minds and requires a mental effort to use it, new traditions and new rituals can be introduced into our culture.”

This project is about traditional oral knowledge which has been accumulated from experience and transmitted by mouth to mouth. Particularly focusing on the food preservation, it looks at a feasible way of bringing that knowledge into everyday life.

Through the research into the current situation of food preservation, I’ve learned that we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator. We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it.

Therefore my design looks at re-introducing and re-evaluating traditional oral knowledge of food, which is closer to nature. Furthermore, it aims to bring back the connection between different levels of living beings, we as human beings and food ingredients as other living beings.

Through the objects of everyday life, design can introduce traditional oral knowledge into people’s lives through their experience of using it. Objects make invisible knowledge evident.

Via Architizer

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Design · Vital-Edible-Health

Delicate: New Food Culture…You are HOW you eat

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About This Book

You are HOW you eat, as much as what you eat. Now, more than ever, eating is an expression of our mindset, identity, spirit, culture, and aspirations. Against this background, this book is an entertaining visual exploration of a diverse scene of young entrepreneurs that see eating as a creative challenge. They are united by a passion for making food an experience and are striving to deal with eating and nourishment in more imaginative, more sensuous, and more responsible ways.
Delicate is an inspiring collection of people, places, projects, and products from around the world that are blazing trails for a new passion for food and the ways we share it.

Eating is so much more than merely fulfilling a fundamental bodily need. Eating appeals to all of our senses; it boosts our well-being on every level. Now, more than ever, it is an expression of our mindset, identity, spirit, and culture.

Around the world, a scene of young food entrepreneurs is developing that brings together creatives, tradespeople, and activists. This scene aspires to deal with both the food that we need, and the food that we enjoy, in more creative, more sensuous, and more responsible ways. It is united by a passion for making food an experience as well as by a high appreciation for the quality, origin, aesthetics, and workmanship of food.

Delicate introduces the protagonists at the forefront of this current movement along with the projects, places, and products associated with them. The book documents a wide spectrum from small brewers, coffee roasters, and chocolate-makers to artists, event managers, and creators of zines.

Event concepts are shown that use food to facilitate communication and social interaction in tried and true, as well as surprising new ways. Locations such as shops, markets, and restaurants become meeting places for everyone who would like to learn, participate, sample, and enjoy.

The experimental projects featured in Delicate are blazing trails for a better understanding of nourishment and a new passion for food.

Text and Images via Gestalten

Bio · Sonic/Musical · Vital-Edible-Health

Ultrasonic Absinthe Mist Cocktail

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Seattle Food Geek: It must be ultrasonic month here at Seattle Food Geek headquarters, ‘cause I’ve got another high-frequency food hack. I recently bought an ultrasonic mist generator to use as a humidifier for a meat curing chamber I’m working on. These little devices emit ultrasonic waves (around 20KHz) which cause the surrounding water to cavitate into a very fine mist without raising the water temperature. Since the mist is so fine (about 1 micron) and is instantaneous and low-temperature, I thought it might be a great way to disperse aromatics around a food or beverage. I ran a few experiments to see if it would turn alcohol into mist, but unfortunately most of the results were very poor.

Rum did bupkis. Whiskey gin were the same. Dry vermouth produced a small amount of mist, and absinthe on it’s own produced a decent fog. However, since Absinthe is meant to be consumed with added water anyway, the cocktail you see above was the best result I achieved in my limited testing. From what little I can gather, I think the mist generator relies on a relationship between the frequency of the emitted ultrasonic wave and the speed with which sound travels through water in order to produce the mist. Sound waves will move at different speeds in liquids with different densities, so perhaps tweaking frequency of the transducer would allow me to directly mist other liquids. Just a theory.

The mist generator has a ring of garish, color-changing LED lights built in – this is not part of the intended effect. However, the mist produced above the drink does add something nice to the act of drinking it; the aromatics of the absinthe are amplified by becoming airborne, so you get a pleasant hit of anise aroma before you make contact with the drink. I think there’s potential to this technique, but until I can make mists out of whatever liquid I want, and without having to submerge a plastic doodad in your cocktail, I’ll consider this to be a “promising prototype.”

Via Seattle Food Geek

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Film/Video/New Media · Public Space · Vital-Edible-Health

Urban Food Growing in Havana, Cuba

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A clip from the BBC’s “Around the World in 80 Gardens” (2008) showing some of the urban food gardening in Havana, Cuba. Presented by Monty Don.

Design · Science · Vital-Edible-Health

Are There Fundamental Laws of Cooking?

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Cooking is a field that has in recent years seen a shift from the artistic to the scientific. While there are certainly still subjective and somewhat impenetrable qualities to one’s cuisine — de gustibus non est disputandum — there is an increasing rigor in the kitchen. From molecular gastronomy to Modernist Cuisine, there is a rapid growth in the science of cooking.

And mathematics is also becoming part of this. For example, Michael Ruhlman has explored how certain ingredient ratios can allow one to be more creative while cooking. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that we can go further, and even use a bit of network science, when it comes to thinking about food.

Yong-Yeol Ahn and his colleagues, in a recent paper titled Flavor network and the principles of food pairing, explored the components of cooking ingredients in different regional cuisines. In doing so, they were able to rigorously examine a recent claim: the food pairing hypothesis. The food pairing hypothesis is the idea that foods that go best together contain similar molecular components. While this sounds elegant, Ahn and his collaborators set out to determine whether or not this is true.

Written by Samuel Arbesman at Wired. Continue HERE

Book-Text-Read-Zines · Human-ities · Vital-Edible-Health

Why eating together matters: A book explores the relationship between cooking, dining and happiness

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We sapiens are the only animals that look each other in the eye while eating without getting violent. At least most of the time. The other beasts fight over their food; we talk over ours, and share. We have ancient rules of the table, early glimpses of civilization, covenants that have softened into traditions reflecting the basic humanity we find in eating, its rituals, and its memories. If there is a leitmotif that follows the sinuosities of Adam Gopnik’s “The Table Comes First” — his investigation into the pleasures of the table, peeling back its veneer to examine the mechanisms that make it tick — it is “the simple path between eating well and feeling happy,” whether the table is at Noma or the humble home of a friend.

Gopnik writes with an easy cultural fluency; his sentences are roomy and comfortable, but agile. He alternates between chapters with definite shape and momentum, with specific centers of gravity, and chapters that chew on ideas, a ruminant grazing in a field of culinary philosophy.

The birth of what we would identify as a restaurant, in Paris in the mid-18th century, falls into the first group. It is a terrific story, told here with grace and insight, that buries the old tale of chefs being shown the château door during the French Revolution and, so, opening their own. The restaurant rose earlier, when Paris was awash in a cult of health and simplicity, when the Palais Royal assumed the mantle of the modern street store, and when notions of caste were already in disarray, long before the revolution. A public place, welcoming as home — women, too, anyone with a sou — but capable of “a primal magic, a mood of mischief, stolen pleasures, a retreat from the world, a boat on the ocean.”

Written by By Peter Lewis, Barnes & Noble Review. Continue HERE