Infinity Kitchen

MVRDV designs transparent Infinity Kitchen to make food healthier and sexier


Venice Architecture Biennale 2016: Dutch office MVRDV has designed a completely see-through glass kitchen that aims to inspire a "more healthy, if not sexy" approach to food (+ slideshow).

Making its debut at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Infinity Kitchen has been proposed as a way of improving the cooking process by drawing greater attention to food choice, preparation and waste.

Each of the units and shelves is transparent, as well as the tap, sink area and worktops.

"If we imagine everything is transparent, clear and clean, doesn't it mean that the only thing that is colourful and visible is our food?" said the firm's co-founder Winy Maas.

"Doesn't it then imply that we are encouraged to love the food, in that way, and that maybe it even becomes more healthy, if not sexy?"

MVRDV hopes that the transparent elements will expose all aspects of the kitchen's function and processes, highlighting people's food choices as well as less attractive aspects like waste storage and disposal.

"The Infinity Kitchen wants to make better cuisine, better food preparation practices and it wants to raise awareness for the one room that we all rely so heavily on, and the processes that go on inside of it," said MVRDV.

"How much food do we have hidden away? How much waste is really being created? Is the kitchen really as clean as we like to think it is? But [the Infinity Kitchen] also wants to do one main thing: celebrate food and cooking."

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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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...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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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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Food Cart + Mobility + Social Causes

Geneva-based architect Aurélie Monet Kasisi has designed a mobile stand based on street-food carts to travel around Switzerland as a promotional vehicle for a suicide prevention organisation.

"The mobile units often used to serve food or sell various goods host a small collective experience within the city," she said. "That is exactly what I wanted the mobile stand to generate in Swiss public spaces."

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Microbes in our Buildings (fermented air)

This is a big shift in how we’ve previously conceptualized microbial life. We’ve long treated bacteria as the enemy. But it turns out that few of the germs we’re constantly trying to kill with hand sanitizer actually cause disease—and the more bacteria we have on the whole, the better. In fact, our habit of ultrasterilization appears to be hurting us. A number of recent studies have lent credence to the so-called “hygiene hypothesis,” which attributes the uptick in autoimmune and allergic diseases, including eczema and asthma, to a lack of early childhood exposure to germs.

 Today, scientists studying the microbiology of the built environment are changing the way we think about bacteria and working toward ways to harness their potential for good. Here we’ll use the term “bio-inspired” to refer to design that incorporates biological processes or systems.

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Obesity and Architecture

The Ohio State University study focused primarily on determining whether the home environment – architectural features and food storage and availability – was associated with obesity, but also measured a number of psychological factors. While architectural features had no relationship to obesity status, several food-related findings did.

People in the study who were obese kept more food visible throughout the house and generally ate less-healthy foods, such as sweets, than nonobese research participants. The two groups spent about the same amount of money on food and reported eating similar amounts of total calories, but nonobese participants spent less on fast food than did obese individuals.

“The amount of food in the homes was similar, but in the homes of obese individuals, food was distributed in more locations outside the kitchen,” said Charles Emery, professor of psychology at Ohio State and lead author of the study. “That speaks to the environment being arranged in a way that may make it harder to avoid eating food. That has not been clearly documented before.”

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Cape Town's Urban Agriculture Boom

In the last few years, Cape Town has witnessed the proliferation of hundreds of community gardens and urban farms. Abalimi is one organization that has worked to link the city's new micro-farmers with the types of middle-earners eager to fill their cupboards with local, organic produce.

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Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs

We are the UK government department responsible for policy and regulations on environmental, food and rural issues. Our priorities are to grow the rural economy, improve the environment and safeguard animal and plant health.
We are responsible for policy and regulations on:

the natural environment, biodiversity, plants and animals
sustainable development and the green economy
food, farming and fisheries
animal health and welfare
environmental protection and pollution control
rural communities and issues
Although Defra only works directly in England, it works closely with the devolved administrations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and generally leads on negotiations in the EU and internationally.

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Value Farm

"Value Farm creates value by cultivating the land as a collective effort. The project intersects issues of urban transformation, architecture and urban agriculture with an international cultural event, and explores the possibilities of urban farming in the city and how that can integrate with community-building. It forms part of the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013, within Ole Bouman’s Value Factory located at the Shekou Former Guangdong Glass Factory in Shenzhen, a site that is itself undergoing radical transformation. Responding to the Biennale’s theme of ‘Urban Border’ and Shekou’s post-industrial regeneration, Value Farm is realized as new architectural and landscape design providing permanent infrastructure for the site’s future as well as a substantial piece of performative, growing event-architecture throughout the biennale."

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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.
2. LINK

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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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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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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Food - World Resources Institute

According to WRI research, the world will have to close a gap of nearly 70 percent between the amount of food available today and that required by 2050. It must reduce agriculture’s impact on climate, ecosystems, and water. And it needs to ensure that agriculture supports inclusive economic and social development.

WRI works to meet these three needs. We develop analyses, partnerships, and strategies to secure a sustainable food future.

WRI’s World Resources Report project develops solutions to the world’s food production and consumption problems. We identify ways to reduce food loss and waste. We analyze strategies to sustainably increase food production, such as restoring degraded lands back into productivity, increasing pastureland yields, and improving land and water management. And we advance methods to reduce food production’s impact on the environment, such as climate-smart agriculture.

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Austin Food Deserts

Research involving data collection and visuallizing that information from UTSOA

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On Food

Some of the most surprising and fascinating features about food and food systems on Urban Omnibus are not about how or where a product is grown, or what it tastes like, but the staggering, complex infrastructure, which “supplies, processes, distributes, stores, and removes the waste of what we eat,”

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Color-coded food labels

“These results,” notes the study, “suggest that simple food environment changes can play a major role in public health policies to reduce obesity.” It also suggests the study is evidence that people will not develop “fatigue” from food labeling and “revert to previous unhealthy choices.”

 

In the battle to get people to choose healthier foods, could red, green, and yellow stickers plus moving the placement of the food be a simple piece of a complicated puzzle? Would this work in school cafeterias?  Work cafeterias? Our home kitchens?

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