International Gastronomic Center

"The objective of the current International Gastronomic Center competition for architecture students is the creation of a space for cultural exchange through gastronomy.

In this spirit, the International Gastronomic Center (IGC) will be a space for chefs from all around the world to exchange knowledge and share their experience in order to promote gastronomic research and for their own personal and professional enrichment."

Winners announced

"In a society that continually directs us towards the search for immediate satisfaction of our needs, we propose a space debtor SLOW philosophy. This movement proposes sensitize with the environment: in this case, food and all that it implies. We are getting used to the clock direct our lives, leaving us little time to stop and think and enjoy the action. The food should be a stimulus for sight, taste, smell, hearing and touch, has become a simple need to cover, a fact demonstrated by the abundant proliferation of restaurants 'fast food'. We propose a sum of spaces revive the senses through training and exchange activities ranging from receiving a cooking master class to learn how to grow in a garden."

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Dumplings - China - Home Refrigerators

"This is not simply transforming how Chinese people grow, distribute and consume food. It also stands to become a formidable new factor in climate change; cooling is already responsible for 15 percent of all electricity consumption worldwide, and leaks of chemical refrigerants are a major source of greenhouse-gas pollution. Of all the shifts in lifestyle that threaten the planet right now, perhaps not one is as important as the changing way that Chinese people eat."

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AA class - Play with Food

The Take-Away:
1. "Everyone has to begin with an idea, and evolve that through constant testing and re-testing; in design that can mean multiple iterations on the same 3D model, via option-eering or prototyping depending on the scale and necessity and likewise in the kitchen or behind the bar, this means reworking a certain dish or drink as a prototype that is re-investigated in much the same way, until it reaches the desired outcome."
2. understanding or glimpses of the backstory or the process that allowed a particular food or dish to exist.
3. questioning the origin, culture, and social connotation for almost every meal
4. I take a look at the two processes that merge into one outcome, harvesting and preparation. Food opens infinite doors of feelings as it triggers multiple reactions in its consumers. It goes beyond tasting, which is only an opening act. The bare act of consuming it has the power to gather people, generating gratifying experiences. In another aspect, food is one of the loudest voices of culture.
5. The design and thought process that goes into creating a dish or a new take on any particular food is exactly the same that goes on in our discipline. It’s a research and process based design with relentless experimentation and copious amounts of trial and error. More so, the assembly logics that go into each of the dishes are exactly the same as the ones we employ. You would be surprised at how similar the disciplines are.
6. interested in product production and by-products, - create a design which would play around the idea of cultural and social phenomena surrounding cuisine and “waste”
7. generating food and drinks is in essence the same as the one that generates architecture, due to the investigation aspect that both processes require. The key connection between the branches of gastronomy and architecture is that only through investigation and experimentation the parameters for the best outcome will be established.
8. designs do not come from nothing, there is always a cultural background established, that should be taken into consideration, however through the investigation we can discover new ways to get it done based on the different reactions that are generated. 

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Food Home Delivery Service

1. Blue Apron is a new concept in grocery delivery, built around incredible cooking experiences. They offer a once-a-week subscription service where they deliver all the fresh ingredients you need to make 3 meals, in exactly the right proportions.
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American City Dwellers Love Food, and Want More

"...food is a major driver of the American urban experience: 82 percent of urbanites appreciate their city's culinary offerings, and a new restaurant is the top reason the majority of them (46 percent) would venture to a new part of their city. This is compared to 25 percent of people who are incentivized by a new store and 16 percent by a sporting event."

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Urban Farms - Denver

The city passed an ordinance Tuesday designed to enable urban farmers to sell their crops from home, taking advantage of Colorado's 2012 Cottage Food Act.

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Edible Geography

Edible Geography is a blog written by Nicola Twilley, a freelance writer currently based in New York City.

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Muvbox

Fast Food Nation meets Shipping Container Nation in a brilliant concept that not only looks amazing, but probably tastes just as good. The Müvbox is a new concept, which recently emerged from Montreal, Canada and is a shipping container that opens up into a full-fledged mobile, outdoor fast food restaurant. Think Adam Kalkin’s Push Button House with a gourmet kitchen inside and a fabulous graphic paint job. Oh, and they serve local lobster from the Magdalen Islands.

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PF-1

"Dan Wood and Amale Andraos founded WORK Architecture Company in New York in 2003, after meeting at Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, where both worked for a number of years. Since then, they have operated their practice as a New York–style think tank, designing a headquarters for Diane von Furstenberg, a multi-level apartment for her fellow fashion designer Lela Rose and a new public library for Kew Gardens Hills in Queens; teaching at Princeton; publishing their research on 49 Cities, also a 2009 exhibition at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Current work also includes the extension of the Clark Art Institute at Mass MoCA and a new Children’s Museum for the Arts. In addition, their entry for the redesign of Hua Qiang Bei Road, Shenzhen, was recently awarded first place in an international competition. 

Since 2003, their research and teaching have focused on paired questions about ecology and urbanism, food and design. They first explored these issues in three dimensions with their winning entry for the MoMA/PS1 Young Architects Program in 2008: PF1, or “Public Farm 1,” a reinvention of the summer pavilion as a working farm made of cardboard tubes. The process of putting that installation together is the subject of the small book Above the Pavement, The Farm! Architecture & Agriculture at PF1, published this year by Princeton Architectural Press. "

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mobile produce market

"If only there were a way to get fresh food directly to these dinner-tables-in-the-desert.… That was the conversation in 2012, says Ms. Asantewaa, 45, who co-ordinates FoodShare’s Mobile and Good Food Markets, when the dream was to convert a full-sized TTC bus into a mobile produce market, just like the “Fresh Moves” program in Chicago had done. While FoodShare was getting by using a cube van, staff craved something customized for the task; however, limited real estate and a limited budget soon squashed the full-sized bus plan, and discussion turned to a smaller Wheel-Trans bus."

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New Ark

"WORKac and MVRDV together provided films for “Pioneers of Change” on Governor’s Island in 2009. While MVRDV examined producing all of New York City’s food on rooftops (resulting in an average of 60-stories of farming on every roof) WORKac looked at producing the city’s food organically and sustainably within a 100-mile radius of the city.

Through diet changes, strategic reorganizing of rural and coastal areas, the elimination of suburban sprawl and the creation of a “mega-agropolis” by moving 6M people into “New Ark” – made by combining Newark and Jersey City - 20.5M people can be fed."

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Futurefarmers

Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an interest in making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding us. Founded in 1995, the design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist in residence program and our research interests. We are artists, researchers, designers, architects, scientists and farmers with a common interest in creating frameworks for exchange that catalyze moments of "not knowing". 

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Open Food Booklets

OPEN FOOD booklets promote participation in local and urban food systems. 
Each booklet in the series introduces a different slice of local food, opening eyes to the importance and possibility of becoming a part of your food system.  

#1. Farms & Gardens Build Urban ValuePublished March 2014
#2. Landscape to Table: a guide to edible outdoor spaces
Published July 2014

By The Community Food Lab

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Healthy Corner Stores

"Food deserts, defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as ‘urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food,’ are a significant problem in North Carolina."

"According to data available from the USDA Food Access Research Atlas, North Carolina has at least 349 food deserts across 80 counties. Over 1,544,044 residents live in these food desert zones. Residents living in food deserts are more likely to suffer from obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other diet-related conditions, while simultaneously being more likely to be food insecure."

By increasing healthy food option in corner stores, healthy corner stores are created that can in fact bring change to the food access landscape. Healthy corner stores have been shown to have many benefits, including increased consumption of healthy food, changes in food shopping behaviors, and new markets for local farmers. Our hope in sharing this work is that this guide adds valuable information and replicable models for solving the complex problem of inadequate food access for the central North Carolina region and beyond. - The Community Food Lab

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Farmers Market Pop-ups

The AIA’s Small Project Practitioners Knowledge Community developed the Pop-Up Project Design Competition with the goal to re-imagine the farmer’s market canopy pop-up booth to make it easier for produce vendors to set up and transport their canopies and produce, while also helping them sell their product.

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First Supermarket