Food Photos

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

READ MORE

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:

READ MORE

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.

READ MORE

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.

READ MORE

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."

READ MORE

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.

SEE MORE

...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...

READ ARTICLE

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.

MORE HERE

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.

READ MORE

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”.

CHeck it out here

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.    

MORE

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.”

READ MORE

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.

MORE HERE

• 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?

READ MORE HERE

And HERE