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. 

Learn more here

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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