Food Time line

The food timeline! ...
"Ever wonder how the ancient Romans fed their armies? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip...and why? So do we!!! Food history presents a fascinating buffet of popular lore and contradictory facts. Some experts say it's impossible to express this topic in exact timeline format. They are correct. Most foods are not invented; they evolve. We make food history fun."

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Mobile food cart

Students of Texas Southmost College in instructor Murad Abusalim’s class have, after two months, completed a community service project — a mobile farmer’s market.

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Southern Food and Beverage Museum

“Everything is a trail through the museum,” said Williams, referring to the museum’s current exhibit titled the Trail of Smoke and Fire. “BBQ is not monolithic. In some parts of the south, it might be mutton or chicken. Or along the gulf coast we have roasted oysters and smoked mullet and other kinds of fish. And we’ve put them in the states where they happen just for context.”
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Southern Food and Beverage Museum

Agritecture

Almost half billion persons in and within the Nile Basin territories depends on Agrifood systems. The bulk majority of the Nile Basin population and communities are concentrated around water bodies and relaying more and more on diminishing resource base of land and mainly water, which are per se so limited or scarce. The current societies in and within the Nile Basin are undergoing voluntary and involuntary accelerated urbanization process. This rapid urbanization is dictated by the classical pushing and pulling factors affecting the rural urban or urban to urban migration processes including the peri-urban immigrant farmers who get the chances of socio-economic inclusion in the urban planning only through the informal settlement around the urban dwellings. This implies also urbanizing more and more the agriculture in formal and informal patterns pushing it to be agriculture in more architectured setting (agritecture), Agritecture is a blended agricultural science with architecture. It is an emerging inter-multi-trans-disciplinary domain inspired to address the urbanizing agricultural society contemporary and future challenge, overcome its constraints and capture its potential opportunities.

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Microkitchens

SEATTLE — For many, the American dream kitchen has long been a grand showplace, filled with granite islands that stretch like aircraft carriers through a sea of shining appliances.

But in the urban technology centers that have become the nation’s new factory towns, the kitchen gold standard glorified in design magazines and lovingly ogled in Nancy Meyers movies is being redefined. In cities like this one, where Amazon plans to fill 10 million square feet of office space, the aspirational kitchens of young cooks have small footprints and shrunken appliances.

The microkitchen, stocked with expensive blenders, elaborate coffee makers and professional-quality knives, suits digital workers who eat free at work or take their meals in homey but globally influenced restaurants in their apartment buildings. Dinner may come from one of a dozen app-based delivery services, either as a fully prepared chef’s special or a meal kit that requires cooking but not much chopping.

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AND the competition

OAXIS

Most Gulf countries import up to 90 percent of their food, which neither bodes well for food security no climate change – since the food that is brought in from Europe and elsewhere has a lot of what are called “food miles.” True to their name, Forward Thinking Architecture proposes a solar-powered hydroponic food belt as a solution.

Acknowledging that they are not designing anything new – because there are already several projects throughout the Arabian peninsula that utilize the sun and hydroponics to deliver food in the desert. One project that comes to mind is the Sahara Forest Project which has received a great deal of international press.

The OAXIS system aims to fuse existing technology in a modular, linear arrangement. The growing medium will consist of prefabricated and recycled steel structures equipped with super efficient irrigation technology that uses roughly 80 percent less water than most farms require. Rooftop solar panels provide energy not only for the architecture itself, but also to power artificial LED lighting that will help promote greater crop growth.

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food deserts 2.0

The USDA estimates that 14 percent of American households struggle with having enough food for an active, healthy life. In the Charlotte region, more than 157,000 people (roughly 18 percent of the population) face food insecurity. According to a sustainability report released by nonprofit environmental advocacy group Sustain Charlotte, between 2005 and 2012, the percentage of households in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) more than doubled from 6 percent to 12.3 percent.

Across the U.S., access to healthy food is a barrier for the 23 million who live in so-called food deserts — neighborhoods where ready access to fresh, affordable food is nonexistent. Currently, the Charlotte region has 60 identified food deserts. Despite the number of farmers’ markets increasing across the county, construction costs for full-service grocery stores and limiting zoning regulations thwart improved food access.

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Food Photos

Matthew Carden’s fantastical food photographs pay tribute to the bounty we eat

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Livable Cities

9th Making Cities Liveable Conference 2016
The 9th Making Cities Liveable Conference will be held at the Pullman Melbourne on the Park from the 27-28 June 2016. The Making Cities Liveable Conference supports improving the quality of life in our capitals and major regional cities, focusing on healthy, sustainable, resilient and liveable cities, with discussions on improving the quality of life in our capitals and major regional cities.

2016 Program Topics

The Conference Program will include an extensive range of topics with Keynotes, Concurrent Sessions, Case Studies, Panel Discussions and Poster Presentations. Topics will include:

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16th century food porn

Though the contemporary phenomenon of food porn may feel like an Internet-era excess, there’s a long history of different cultures taking part in obnoxious public displays of meals. The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, currently on display at the Getty Research Institute, considers the history of table decoration and food display in early modern Europe. The underlying message of these centuries-old examples feels echoed in contemporary TV cooking contests like Cake Wars or The Great British Baking Show: So much of eating is about spectatorship, about consuming feats of gastronomy with the eyes more so than the mouth. So lavish Pinterest planning and meticulous Instagram filtering of Thanksgiving dinner isn’t a corruption of the ages-old communal joys of eating—it’s a natural extension of it.

When it comes to party food especially, the sense of sight has always trumped the senses of taste. For Voltaire and other philosophes of the 18th century, taste was not a single sense but the act of discrimination in general, whether applied to painting or pastry. Its opposite was bad taste, or tastelessness. The meat mountains, fruit pyramids, and marzipan castles that graced princely and aristocratic tables from the 16th century onward may have pleased the palate, but they were primarily intended as feasts for the eyes: visibly expensive, fragile, and time-consuming to create, using hard-to-find ingredients like white sugar or out-of-season produce.

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retirement farms

Spark Architects won the “experimental” category at the 2015 World Architecture Festival, held earlier this month in Singapore.

The practice’s “Home Farm” aims to deal with two of the main issues facing cities in Asia: an ageing population and excessive food imports.

The idea is that elderly residents can occupy themselves with growing crops in “vertical farms” contained within buildings, thereby providing the city with food and themselves with a modest income.

Occupants can work as part-time agriculturalists, but there is no obligation to work.

Spark say that 90% of Singapore’s meals are imported, so action is needed to improve food security.

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Whole Foods Pub

"The bar-within-a-store is called the Piñon Pub, and while there are successful taprooms in Whole Foods in other states, this is the first to be rolled out in New Mexico. The bar area is where the much-trafficked, underwhelming cafe area used to be. A full renovation has turned the space into a legitimately cozy, approachable landing spot with a sleek wood bar, two giant TVs, and 24 (!) beer taps."

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Trend of less processed foods and more ready-made / to order foods at grocery stores

surrealist food scans

to spotlight the beauty and bounty of seasonal fruits and vegetables throughout the year, henry hargreaves and caitlin levin have formed a series of ‘food scans’, that recontextualize vegetation as visual, surrealist compositions. organized by month, the images traverse the calendar by taking on mirrored, mezmerizing configurations that explore the symmetry and aesthetic characteristics of everyday eats.

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...Shift in How People Eat

...Consumers are walking away from America’s most iconic food brands. Big food manufacturers are reacting by cleaning up their ingredient labels, acquiring healthier brands and coming out with a prodigious array of new products. Last year, General Mills purchased the organic pasta maker Annie’s Homegrown for $820 million — a price that was over four times the company’s revenues, likening it to valuations more often seen in Silicon Valley. The company also introduced more than 200 new products, ranging from Cheerios Protein to Betty Crocker gluten-free cookie mix, to capitalize on the latest consumer fads...

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General Tso

SYNOPSIS
This mouthwateringly entertaining film travels the globe to unravel a captivating culinary mystery. General Tso’s chicken is a staple of Chinese-American cooking, and a ubiquitous presence on restaurant menus across the country. But just who was General Tso? And how did his chicken become emblematic of an entire national cuisine? Director Ian Cheney (King Corn, The City Dark) journeys from Shanghai to New York to the American Midwest and beyond to uncover the origins of this iconic dish, turning up surprising revelations and a host of humorous characters along the way. Told with the verve of a good detective story,The Search for General Tso is as much about food as it is a tale of the American immigrant experience. A Sundance Selects release from IFC Films.

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Urban Forest

Italian architect Stefano Boeri dreams big and green. He has created six bold, transformational "ideas for a bio-diverse metropolis" that could be installed in and around the city of Milan, to establish "transitional states between the city, nature and agriculture" and provide "energy sources for a new model of urban economics." Visionary and Idealistic, they challenge us to think about cities and the possible in new ways. The concepts were first introduced to the public at an exhibition in Rome last year.

While all about landscape and greenery, BioMIlano is also about urbanist revitalization and putting a stop to sprawl. The key philosophy seems to be taking advantage of creative opportunities to green the urban core while also developing a greenbelt around the city.

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Food Design

Sonja Stummerer & Martin Hablesreiter
According to Austrian designers Sonja Stummerer and Martin Hablesreiter, “People should talk about food as an aspect of culture, as the most important good, as business, as a design product of daily life.” They founded the interdisciplinary design studio honey & bunny productions, curated the exhibition “Food Design” for Museumsquartier Vienna and performed as eat designers in Milan, Amsterdam and many other places. As authors they published the award-winning books “Food Design” and “Food Design XL” that show how shape, colour, smell, consistency, production methods, history and stories influence food product design. Stummerer and Hablesreiter have given a number of international lectures and taught at schools including Bucharest and Istanbul. In 2008 they directed the movie “Food design – a film”.

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Food Installation by Honey & Bunny

What is alpine cuisine? And could that be the approach allowing Austrian food to position itself internationally, just like it happened for the New Nordic Cuisine? Those were some of the topics examined during "Culinary Art 2015: Gates to the future", a two-day conference on food and eating that took place on March 16 and 17 in the beautiful city of Salzburg, in Austria, where local restaurateurs, hospitality professionals, tourism experts, as well as scholars and writers, discussed food and eating in theory and practice.    

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Thinking Food

The thinking food design project asked a question, what is Food Design?

Participants send a 2-minute video response.

Tagging each, we find convergence and attraction.

Since its creation thinking food design has appeared in food festivals, blogs, catalogues, exhibitions, as well as Wallpaper, le Fooding and Core 77.

This non-profit platform has been consulted by over 20,000 visitors in 100 countries.

explore it here

Food Deserts

Published this week in Health Affairs, the findings in some ways mirrored those of a few smaller, prior studies: Hill District residents did not buy any more fruits, vegetables, or whole grains after the Shop ‘n Save opened than they had before. In fact, in both the Hill District and Homewood, overall consumption of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains actually declined, for reasons Dubowitz says are unclear.

But there were also more nuanced, positive findings: In 2014, about a year after the Shop ‘n Save opened, residents consumed fewer calories overall, as well as less fat, alcohol, and added sugar. This was a significant difference compared to Homewood in 2014, where there were no significant changes in intake....

Fascinatingly, however, the differences between Homewood and the Hill District were not connected to where people shopped. Hill District residents who went to the Shop ‘n Save regularly did not decrease their sugar, fat, or alcohol intake any more than residents who kept shopping where they always had. Rather, the whole neighborhood improved together, as compared to Homewood.

“So that tells us there was something about the new store that changed these health behaviors,” says Dubowitz, “but it didn’t have to do with shopping.”

The change may have something to do with how people perceived their neighborhood. Before the Shop ‘n Save opened, about 67 percent of Hill District residents said they were satisfied, or very satisfied, with their neighborhood. One year after it opened, that rate rose to 81 percent.

Though she is still working on understanding how perceptions are connected to eating habits, Dubowitz believes it’s a pretty big deal that this relationship exists at all. “We know that neighborhood perceptions are important for overall community well-being and health,” she says. “We think that in and of itself is a large and important find for neighborhood investment in general.”

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Food Trends for 2016

CHICAGO, Nov. 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Kendall College, Chicago's top ranked culinary and hospitality school is unveiling its predictions for 2016 Food and Beverage Trends for America's tastemakers – millennials. This generation considers food as social currency – whether they want to be the first to discover the "next cronut" or tout their cooking chops by experimenting with a new global cuisine or cooking technique. To help these trendsetters, distinguished Kendall culinary and hospitality faculty analyzed industry and global insights to cook up the five biggest trends they anticipate seeing in 2016.

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• Pulses: Bigger and Better than Quinoa? Pulses are a time-tested staple in many international cuisines including Indian, Mexican and Spanish, but now they are making their way to plates in America. In fact, the 65th UN General Assembly declared 2016 the International Year of Pulses. So what exactly are Pulses? They are grain legumes that span from the more familiar lentils and chickpeas and the more exotic dried beans such as pigeon peas and run beans. Pulses are not only a trendy source of protein, but also an interesting option for those passionate about other hot-button food issues: local sourcing, economic value, and sustainable practices, for example. Kendall's own Chef Chris Koetke thinks we'll start to see pulses pop up on more restaurant menus next year. 
• Austrian Red Wines: According to Kendall College's Beverage Professor and Sommelier John Peter Laloganes, millennials will look beyond the traditional Pinot Noir, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon to new and unique red wine varieties from Austria. The region offers a trio of distinctly unique, indigenous red wines: Zweigelt, St. Laurent and Blaufrankisch. These new varieties can range anywhere from $12 to $35 and will be featured more prominently in retail and on wine lists in 2016.
• DIY Food Plating: With the popularity of Instagram and Pinterest, food plating is no longer just for restaurants. Chef Elaine Sikorski of Kendall College predicts home cooks will begin to focus on the way their dishes look in addition to the way they taste. Millennials can elevate the visual appeal of their dishes by plating on an unusual surface such as a salt block or wood and experimenting with a few different colors, textures and sizes.
• Sous Vide Goes Mainstream: Restaurants have used sous vide technology for decades, but now sous vide tools are becoming more widely available for cooks at home according to Kendall's Chef Brian Schreiber. The cooking method includes vacuum packing a meal and cooking it in hot water for an evenly cooked and flavorful result. Sous vide machines can be found everywhere from premium cooking stores to mainstream retail chains. Now everyone can enjoy a perfectly tender steak and a juicy duck breast!
• Haute Eclairs: Kendall's baking and pastry instructor Chef Melina Kelson-Podolsky predicts the humble eclair will be revamped for the first time in 30 years by infusing interesting and unexpected fillings from mango yogurt to salted caramel to goat cheese. These delicacies are starting to appear in premiere pastry shops in New York and will continue to gain popularity throughout the year.

Honey and Bunny

How can food designers introduce new behaviors to consumers? How can they move from ideas and projects to actual production? What is the best way introduce daring, paradigm-shifting innovation into the food industry, which is often hesitant to take risks and ends up proposing more of the same, often just in larger quantities? And how can these innovations become part of larger cultural and social visions?

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And HERE

How packaging can make food more flavorful.

Sitting in a pub one night a dozen years ago, Charles Spence realized that he was in the presence of the ideal experimental model: the Pringles potato chip. Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at Oxford University, runs the Crossmodal Research Lab there, which studies how the brain integrates information from the five human senses to produce a coherent impression of reality. Very often, these modes of perception influence one another on the way to becoming conscious thought. For instance, scientists have long known that whether a strawberry tastes sweet or bland depends in no small part on the kinds of organic molecule detected by olfactory receptors in the nose. Spence had been wondering whether taste might be similarly shaped by sound: Would a potato chip taste different if the sound of its crunch was altered? To explore that question, he needed a chip with a reliably uniform crunch. The Pringle—that thin, homogeneous, stackable paraboloid—was perfect.

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Expos end...

The towers are the heart of the Swiss Pavilion. Visitors will be invited to discover Switzerland – the diversity of products and values which underlie the success of the Swiss approach – by engaging in a fun exploration of the towers. Switzerland wishes to take part in Expo 2015 as  an active, caring and socially responsible stakeholder in the area of food and sustainable development. 

The journey through the towers is guided by this leitmotif, thus prompting visitors to reflect – on the basis of their own personal experience – on the global availability of food and sustainable development throughout the food value chain. Visitors will be free to take away or consume any amount of the products. How much will be left for later visitors – and for how long – will be determined by the consumer behaviour and level of awareness of each visitor.
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Director of Urban Agriculture

Green thumbs and farm-to-table advocates rejoice: Atlanta has hired its first Director of Urban Agriculture! Mayor Kasim Reed announced the creation of the position back in September, and the slot was officially filled by Mario Cambardella over the weekend. The position's expressed mission is to expand access to healthy food for all residents of Atlanta.

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Crowd Funded Grocery Store

Combine a powerful, supportive civic society with killer marketing chops and enlightened grassroots activism, and amazing things can happen. Case in point is the Westwood Food Co-op in Denver, Colorado, which just raised $50,000 in a successful Kickstarter campaign to fill its shelves full of wholesome, locally-grown food. With these funds, the co-op will become the city's first community-owned grocery store in a known food desert.

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Pizza Hunt

Photographer Ho Hai Tran’s Kickstarter project to record the unique but now repurposed architecture of the original Pizza Hut buildings created in the 1970/80s/90s is proving very popular. Tran’s project, Pizza Hunt (proving is so popular it has already exceeded its target funding), will see the photographer travelling across New Zealand, Australia and the US to shoot what you could call ‘ghost’ buildings.

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Fake Restaurant

For a few #blessed days, Lura Cafe was the hottest new restaurant in Providence. The bright, cozy farm-to-table joint hid in plain sight next to a downtown parking lot, steps away from the Rhode Island Convention Center. Lura would be a refuge for diners in the know, serving modern takes on cafe classics—all local, all organic, all certified GMO-free. It was upscale and casual, timeless and avant-garde. It had a vaguely Nordic air of refinement.

It announced itself—as all similarly accoutred restaurants must—with a social media blitz, featuring sans serif lettering, sunny high-angle shots of brunch dishes, even a breathless write-up in the New York Times.

It was also totally fake.

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Bompas & Parr

Bompas & Parr leads in flavour-based experience design, culinary research, architectural installations
and contemporary food design.

The studio first came to prominence through its expertise in jelly-making, but has since gone on to
create immersive flavour-based experiences ranging from an inhabitable cloud of gin and tonic, the
world’s first multi-sensory fireworks and a Taste Experience for the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin,
officially the best place to taste Guinness in the world.

The studio now consists of a team of creatives, producers, cooks, designers, specialised technicians
and architects. With Sam Bompas and Harry Parr the team works to experiment, develop, produce
and install projects, artworks, jellies and exhibitions, as well as archiving, communicating, and
contextualising the work. Bompas & Parr also collaborates with specialist technicians, engineers,
artists, scientists, musicians and many other disciplines to create wondrous events.

The studio works with some of the biggest companies and the world’s foremost cultural institutions
to give people emotionally compelling or inspiring experiences.

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MOFAD

The Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) is creating the world's first large-scale food museum with exhibits you can eat.

MOFAD will be a global leader in food education, featuring innovative exhibits and programs that show how exciting it is to learn and care about the culture, history, science, production, and commerce of food and drink. Imagine a place where you can use an Aztec kitchen, see cereal made before your eyes, decode food marketing, taste West African street food, make Chinese hand-pulled noodles, learn about agriculture and composting, and see how the body digests a sandwich—all in one museum.

In 2013, MOFAD debuted its first explosive mobile exhibition, BOOM! The Puffing Gun and the Rise of Cereal. The exhibition, which featured a 3,200-pound breakfast cereal puffing machine, drew accolades from media outlets such as The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.

MOFAD Lab, the organization's first brick-and-mortar home, will open in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn on October 28, 2015. In this space, MOFAD will design and showcase its exhibit concepts as it works toward opening the full museum in New York City by 2019. Join the MOFAD mailing list to stay updated on upcoming exhibitions and programs

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Food Axis

Blending architectural and social history with the necessity―and the passion―for food, this engaging new book attempts to understand the development of the American house by viewing it through one very specific lens: the food axis. Taking in far more than the kitchen, author Elizabeth Collins Cromley explores all areas of food management within the home―preparation, cooking, consumption, and disposal. Her food axis implies a network of related spaces above and below ground, both attached to the house and separate from it. 

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architecture of ants collecting food

Great architecture makes a difference even to ants.

Take a typical colony of 10,000 or more true harvester ants (Veromessor andrei). They live in an underground nest of flattened chambers connected by skinny tunnels. In a new study of these complicated arrays, having more tunnel connections is what matters for worker collective performance, not more space or nest volume, says Noa Pinter-Wollman of the University of California, San Diego.

The more satellite chambers that are connected to the main entrance chamber, the faster the worker ants converge on a food find, Pinter-Wollman reports October 21 in Biology Letters. And the more alternate routes that ants can take between pairs of chambers, the faster the foragers arrive at food. She didn’t see the same speed-up as the volume of the chambers increased, despite the potential to hold more ants.

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Edible Monument

The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) section of the Los Angeles center, features rare prints, elaborate serving pieces, as well as early cookbooks and serving manuals that show monuments of food from hundreds of years ago. One section of the exhibit is appropriately called the Theater of the Table, a title that could have pertained to the whole presentation.

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Jellyfish Barge

Composed of a wood and plastic dome and a base of recycled plastic drums, the Jellyfish Barge is a floating greenhouse that desalinates seawater to irrigate and grow plants. Mimicking the natural phenomenon of the water cycle, one solar panel located by the base of the barge heats up the salted or polluted water and makes it evaporate, turning it into 150 liters per day of clean, fresh water. This water gets recycled over and over into a hydroponic system, which allows crops to grow in an inert bed of clay enriched by mineral nutrients.

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Food Hacking

Food Hacking: Virtual Cookie
HOSTED BY SIMON KLOSE
October 6, 2015 / 10:00 am

Host Simon Klose kicks off our new series on tech cuisine with a Japanese researcher who shows us how to use virtual reality to make a cookie taste like five different things. We also take a bite of some of Tokyo’s best video game cuisine at Capcom Café. Enjoy!

VIEW IT HERE

Fayetteville 2030: Food City Scenario

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Arkansas Community Design Center’s project Fayetteville 2030: Food City Scenario has won a 2015 Honor Award in the Analysis and Planning category from the American Society of Landscape Architects. The project seeks to build food sustainability by promoting local urban agriculture.

Food City Scenario is featured in the October issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine and will be exhibited at the ASLA Annual Meeting and Expo in Chicago in November. This is the Community Design Center’s seventh ASLA Honor Award.

The Community Design Center led an interdisciplinary team at the University of Arkansas for Food City Scenario, which speculates on what Fayetteville might look like if the city’s growth integrated local urban food production sustainable enough to create self-sufficiency. Fayetteville’s population of 75,000 is expected to double over the next 20 years. In addition, although the region is the most prosperous in the state, it also has one of the nation’s highest child hunger rates.

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doctrine of signatures

the ‘doctrine of signatures’, an important aspect of folk medicine, drew upon the belief that herbs resembling parts of the body can be used to treat ailments of those human components. titling a series of self-portraits with this theory, french photographer marwane pallas has used forced perspective to link a group of edible objects to body parts. the four images draw a comparison between food and figure, depicting a peeled apart grapefruit as pallas’ lungs, red cabbage as a brain, a halved peach as a nose, and a bisected apple as a bottom.

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food art

photographer sam kaplan‘s obsession with organization has led to a still life series that sees candies, cookies and tea cakes turn into semi-architectural structures.

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fast quinoa food

The restaurant, Eatsa, the first outlet in a company with national ambitions, is almost fully automated. There are no waiters or even an order taker behind a counter. There is no counter. There are unseen people helping to prepare the food, but there are plans to fully automate that process, too, if it can be done less expensively than employing people.

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Corn Is as High as a Cabdriver’s Eye

But Mr. Santana, 66, and other Seaman drivers spend their downtime tending a small farm off Johnson Avenue in the Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx, near Riverdale.

“It was just a few guys,” Daniel Montes, a driver, said of the farm’s origins. “They just got together and started doing this.”

The farm began about 15 years ago with a few tomatoes and beans planted along a thin, unused strip of land behind a 30-story apartment building. It has grown into a thicket that stretches about a quarter-mile.

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Architecture fighting obesity

A 1950s-era elementary school in rural Buckingham, Virginia was redesigned to help kids lose weight. The architects worked directly with public health researchers to change a long list of details based on current research, from designing a kitchen with dedicated storage space for local, seasonal fruit, to placing healthy meals at kids'-eye level in the checkout line. In a teaching kitchen, third-graders can learn to make healthy meals from the foods they grow in the school garden.

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mega food parks

42 mega food parks to start operations by 2019: Harsimrat Kaur Badal 

The Mega Food Park Scheme, based on the cluster approach, is modelled on hub-and-spoke architecture, which follows principles from the spoke-hub distribution paradigm.

It aims at facilitating the establishment of a strong food processing industry backed by an efficient supply chain, which includes collection centres, a central processing centre (CPC) and cold chain infrastructure. 

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food inventions

7 food magicians who'll melt your mind

LINK

Personal Food Computer

The personal food computer looks like a fish tank. It’s the right shape and size, but there’s no water. Inside the two-foot-long box, under glowing purple LED lights, lettuces and legumes sprout up, their roots, free of dirt, misted by digitally-controlled sprayers. It’s a tiny, low-water, climate-controlled agriculture system, designed for growing food in cramped city quarters. The machine is plugged into a network, so all the environmental information runs into a database, where other farmers can see how much water and light the plants are getting, and use that data to tweak the way they grow their own crops.

Call it open-source farming or data-driven agriculture. Either way, it’s a way to program how we grow what we eat. Caleb Harper, an engineer with a background in architecture and design, developed the personal food computer. He also runs the City Farm group, which looks at innovative ways to grow food in urban areas, at MIT’s Media Lab. He thinks his contraption is the future of food.

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alcoholic architecture

An installation called “Alcoholic Architecture,” coming soon to London’s Borough Market, dispenses booze in the form of a “walk-in cloud of breathable cocktail.” It’s the creation of Bompas & Parr, a whimsical food art studio known for its bespoke jellies and fruit-flavored fireworks.

The so-called “alcoholic weather system” is a thick mist, one part spirits to three parts mixer. Guests enter the chamber wearing protective ponchos and take in alcohol through their lungs and eyeballs. Inside, the humidity is so high that you can’t see farther than one meter around. According to a press release, Bompas & Parr worked with respiratory scientists to arrive at the optimal dwell time—50 minutes, or the equivalent of about one liquid drink.

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chopstick 3D printing

With the use of chopsticks as ‘lumber,’ the researchers state that this material is prime for creating a porous structure with its aggregate construction. Using two different methods, jammed aggregation and stratified aggregation, the team has been able to come up with a clear and innovative method for elevating 3D printed architecture to the larger scale. Both methods, conceptualized through research and testing, employ the use of rows and rows of chopsticks which are accompanied by glue, and dispensed by an equally innovative device.

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St. Louis Rooftop Garden

Mary Ostafi, an architect who founded the nonprofit Urban Harvest STL in 2011, has led an effort to dump some 40 tons of dirt on the building’s 9,000-square-foot roof and grow organic vegetables in a venture called the Food Roof Farm.

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compost bowls

The FOODSCAPES project tackles the problem of food waste in a completely different way. Rather than expending efforts to decrease food waste, they are utilizing food waste to be a functional piece of tableware.

FOODSCAPES is created by WHOMADE.IT and Michela Milani. It uses edible leftover materials and reconstructs a seed-shaped bowl that can hold dry foods. It is free of any additives, preservatives, colorants, thickeners, correctors, and artificial agents. Once you’re done with it, it can be dissolved in water and act as soil fertilizer.

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More Milan

"...While Herzog has a point that the planned structures are indeed fantastical, it is debatable whether interesting, informative exhibitions and wild pavilion designs are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, innovations in architecture, construction, and urban design are an integral part of how the world will address the food challenges of the 21st century..."

"...However, there are a handful of designs that stand out as attempts to rethink the way we build and how it relates to modern agriculture and sustainable food production for the next century. Most of the pavilions use sustainable materials and construction methods that utilize national building techniques. Inside, exhibitions—often interactive—showcase the biodiversity, culture, and food traditions of each nation..."

"...While the architecture of the Milan exposition overall continues the recent trends of the “vanity fair,” some fragments exist that might shed light on how architecture can interact with innovations in agriculture and food production in the coming decades. Ideally, this concept would be pushed much further, but for now these will have to serve as examples for future projects..."

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