food unites us

If politics divides us, it is surely food that unites. It is food that inspired most if not all the great campaigns to discover the world: spices that drove trade between the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans with Asia, the Arabs to cross the Indian Ocean, the Persians to find overland routes to India, the Europeans to discover the Americas.

While many, many wrongs were done during the great ages of Empire, the movement of people around the globe over the last 5,000 years in particular has been of infinite mutual benefit. As people discovered new cultures they discovered new ideas, new people to fall in love with, new books to read, new colours, new architecture, new foods.

In kitchens around the world, people welcomed new elements, new techniques of cooking, new ingredients, incorporated them into their own cuisines and synthesised them into new dishes.

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changing american diets

After seeing the Open Data Institute’s project on the changing British Diet, I couldn’t help but wonder how the American diet has changed over the years.

The United States Department of Agriculture keeps track of these sort of things through the Food Availability Data System. The program estimates both how much food is produced and how much food people eat, dating back to 1970 through 2013. The data covers the major food categories, such as meat, fruits, and vegetables, across many food items on a per capita and daily basis.

In the interactive below, we look at the major food items in each category. Each column is a category, and each chart is a time series for a major food item, represented as serving units per category. Items move up and down based on their ranking in each group during a given year.

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art of bento

Time to Play With Your Food: The Art of Bento

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More Bompas

While they work to establish a permanent home for the BMoF, B&P do collaborations with established institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as temporary installations. “We’re sort of a moving, roving nomadic museum at the moment,” he says. The latest iteration took place at the Borough Market this winter. It included exhibits like “Be the Bolus,” whereby visitors could experience what it feels like to be a hunk of chewed-off food going along the human digestive track. The cross-modal experience was obtained with a PillCam, and a massage chair that pummeled you up and down as watched the film, so you could feel what it’s like for the bolus. There was also the butterfly gallery that highlighted the fact that butterflies are “some of the unsung heroes of pollination.” The takeaway? “We are trying to think about how to make sustainability really sexy, making people ask questions rather than belaboring them with gloom and doom about the current state of the planet and food security.”

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mid century mod foods

There is no mystery for me in the almost cultlike enthusiasm for midcentury modern architecture and design. Whether it’s a Bakelite bracelet or a Barcelona chair, there is absolutely no denying the perfect harmony of 20th century technology and art. It doesn’t matter if it’s cars, toasters, apartment buildings, couches … it’s impossible not to appreciate the vision, if not to covet the object.

The same cannot be said for midcentury cuisine. It looks bad, tastes worse, and consumed over decades surely must kill you. Whoever first decided that food and technology were meant to comingle and produce offspring was delusional. Maybe evil...

Kurt Cyr, a Palm Springs renaissance man who has not only garnered a reputation for his modernism tours and popular lecture series/social gathering, Salon of the Parched, became fascinated several years ago with the question of why people who love midcentury architecture revile the food. His discoveries resulted in ModEats, a demonstration/cooking series he put on at the Saguaro Hotel. “If we are going to talk seriously about midcentury food, the spectacle of kitsch draws the focus away from one important factor that we take for granted today,” he says, “[And that is] the revolutionary discoveries of food science during this period.”

In fact, Cyr believes the work of world-renowned chefs such as Ferran Adrià of elBulli, would not have been possible without the trailblazing work of the mad food scientists at General Foods or Nabisco. “Molecular gastronomy is definitely the grandchild of the food science discoveries of the 1950s,” Cyr says, pointing out that the balsamic vinegar pearls that top modern deconstructed Caprese salads would not be possible without the invention of … Jell-O.,,,

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Momofuku

Ando is named, like its parent company, after instant-ramen creator Momofuku Ando. (It is also Spanish for "I walk"—fitting for a delivery service. Momofuku itself is Japanese for "lucky peach," hence the name of the magazine and also Má Pêche.) The business is a joint venture with Expa, a San Francisco–based startup lab built by Uber cofounder Garrett Camp. Expa is designing the app and overseeing logistics, while UberRush will tackle the actual food drop-offs. "We have a pretty big vision for it," said Expa partner Hooman Radfar, Chang’s cofounder on the project. "But our focus is very much delivery to delivery, meal to meal, neighborhood to neighborhood, until we get it right. We want to make this feel great—like Momofuku at home." Tosi is also involved; she’s creating three new cookies that will be initially sold exclusively through Ando: salt-and-pepper, Ritz Cracker, and what she describes as "darn good, slap-your-mama chocolate chip."

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Student design - eco - food cart

Students of Jamia Millia Islamia have built an eco-friendly food vending cart which has provisions for waste disposal and solar power generation. The cart was one of the submit showcased at the Festival of Innovations at Rashtrapati Bhawan, New Delhi.  The project, which the university is in process of patenting, was among the six entries selected out of 114 sent for presentation at the recently concluded Festival.

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Paper food

Barcelona-based paper artist Raya Sader Bujana gives a distinct twist to the saturation of food images online. From afar, her photographs seem to depict food items, but these are in fact painstakingly intricate paper creations.

Bujana transforms delectable food items into intricate paper sculptures. Through her creations, she strives to capture the same color, texture and sumptuousness of these foods in their original state. A slice of pie includes a dollop of whipped cream on top— a piece of white paper expertly folded and placed to resemble the luscious topping it imitates.

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Dorm room restaurant

A Columbia University student who is hoping to earn A's in the classroom may also have to worry about securing top marks from the NYC Health Department due to the restaurant in his dorm room.
Jonah Reider, 21, opened a New American restaurant called Pith in his dorm room and he serves his customers five- to eight-course meals that he prepares in the kitchen in his suite at Hogan Hall.
Diners, who typically fork over about $15, have to book at the college senior's trendy establishment with Yelp and Reider has reservations that will keep the restaurant packed through Christmas.

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Brownsville mobile farmer's market

Brownsville’s first mobile farmer’s market has begun to make its rounds around the city this month.
The market rotates between the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, the Citrus Gardens, Brownsville Independent School District, Villa Del Sol, and all 10 of the housing authorities in the city.
The goal is to expose people to healthy living, said David Vasquez, mobile market coordinator.

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more fun with food

domenic bahmann personifies everyday objects as whimsical scenes

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Food Architecture

Creative Food Architecture and Sculpture Designs

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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."

Check it out

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

Food Photos

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

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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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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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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.

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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