Bio plastics

The IAAC also employed some unusual materials in the study, including orange peel, coffee powder and shrimp shells. There was a method to this and the material used has a genuine effect on the final plastic. The orange peel infused plastic was stronger, with better heat resistance, while the material containing coffee grounds displayed hydrophobic qualities.

The IAAC concluded that a combination of coffee and orange would make the best bioplastic and the geometry of the structure could then be varied to produce differing behaviour. Not every country has an excess of coffee and orange, but the study notes that each individual country can find their own combinations of food waste and plastic.

The amount of waste can also affect the level of shrinkage and bend over time in the plastic, which can be tuned for the individual purpose.

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FLW - foodie commune

"One part of that vision is to return Taliesin to a fully diversified farm; contoured rows crops cover the Welsh hillside, hundred-year-old trees are tapped for maple syrup, grapevines produce fruit table wine, and cows freely graze on the pasture before being milked or slaughtered for meat. But Taliesin is also meant to be a self-sustaining community of chefs, farmers, and architects contributing to the property as they once did as part of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fellowship Program, established in 1932. According to a 1934 brochure the program had fellows “farming, planning, working, kitchenizing, and philosophizing in voluntary co-operation in an atmosphere of natural loveliness they are helping to make eventually habitable.”

Taliesin worked closely in conjunction with Taliesin West, which Wright built in the McDowell Mountains of present-day Scottsdale in 1938 as a winter retreat for himself and the majority of the Wisconsin residents. Throughout the colder months, eggs, milk, butter, cheese, and preserves were sent by rail from those looking after the farm to their peers in Arizona. Wyer plans to revive this tradition this season with a shipment of preserved produce.

Sounds kind of like a commune, right? It closely resembled one. So much so that shortly before Wright’s death in 1959, a Wisconsin circuit judge determined that Taliesin was in fact operating for the sole benefit of Wright and not as a non-profit organization. Whether Taliesin was an Emersonian utopia or labor camp is still up for debate, along with the stigma surrounding the property’s existence. “Throughout the whole history of this place, they were so isolated that people in town shunned them, called them socialists, and didn’t want to get involved with them. They didn’t know what was going on with them and didn’t want to know,” Dungue says. “I think that carried through history and people still don’t know.”


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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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secret history of a food that everybody loves

The argument depends on the differences between how grains and tubers are grown. Crops like wheat are harvested once or twice a year, yielding piles of small, dry grains. These can be stored for long periods of time and are easily transported — or stolen.

Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground. Yuca, for instance, grows year-round and in ancient times, people only dug it up right before it was eaten. This provided some protection against theft in ancient times. It's hard for bandits to make off with your harvest when most of it is in the ground, instead of stockpiled in a granary somewhere.

But the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect their harvests, galvanizing the creation of warrior classes and the development of complex hierarchies and taxation schemes.

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food architecture - geometries

Architecture of Food  -

Full document here

More Bompas

The first thing I notice about the Bompas & Parr studio is the human skull on the conference table. As I await my hosts, two culinary entertainers who’ve made a name for themselves in London with their wacky flavor-based experiments, I take the skull in my hands to determine whether it’s real. It is. A loose tooth falls out into my palm. I panic and put the skull back on the table.

A few minutes later, Sam Bompas whirls into the room. He’s a svelte 32-year-old with a tall puff of blond hair, a playful smile, and a rumbling deep voice. He’s wearing a purple suit over a shirt covered in pineapples, which is actually modest compared to his counterpart’s getup: 33-year-old Harry Parr is sporting a bright long-sleeved shirt covered in McDonald’s characters, including Ronald and Grimace. He says his wife made it for him.

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Food Better - Harvard

Throughout the academic year, the Harvard community focuses on the food system and how to improve it – how to grow better, eat better, shop better, conserve better . . . how to Food Better. In 2014-15, the Harvard Innovation Lab hosted a year-long Deans' Food System Challenge, in which students from across the university were invited to develop innovative solutions to make our food system more healthy and sustainable. In conjunction with the Challenge, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, Harvard University Dining Services, Food Literacy Project, and Harvard Office for Sustainability opened a community-wide dialogue about how we can Food Better, which included events, field trips and more. These events continue on into the 2015-2016 school year.

LINK

fantasy projects

reeHugger has had some trouble digesting vertical farms for a decade, as has Stan Cox of Alternet, who wrote in 2010 that “Although the concept has provided opportunities for architecture students and others to create innovative, sometimes beautiful building designs, it holds little practical potential for providing food.” Now he is at it again, refining his points in a new article in Alternet that was picked up and retitled in Salon as Enough with the vertical farming fantasies: There are still too many unanswered questions about the trendy practice.

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dumpster house

How to get students thinking about their environmental footprints?

Jeff G. Wilson and his students at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Tex., retrofitted a garbage container into a cozy pad that he lived in for an entire year. It was, he says, “a radical experiment in what it would mean to live on, and in, less” — specifically, 33 square feet. He moved out last February but the experiment continues.

Nine educators have since taken up residency for up to a week to see what it’s like to live without running water. Cooking is on a camping stove. But there is electricity. To battle interior heat that rises to over 130 degrees in Texas’s sweltering summers, the bin had to be connecting to the grid so air-conditioning could be installed. There’s now a TV and an overhead light. But it’s still tight quarters.

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Innovations at the Nexus of Food + Energy + Water Symposium.

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas Department of Architecture is hosting INFEWS: Innovations at the Nexus of Food + Energy + Water Symposium. The event will join distinguished researchers and design professionals from across the U.S. with faculty and students from KU departments to study issues related to the health of interrelated food, energy and water systems and the built environment. These have been subjected to increasing pressure from climate change, population growth and resource depletion. The event will start Jan. 21 and ends at noon Jan. 23. The third annual Water Charrette for students is part of the symposium, as is a three-hour workshop on green roofs sponsored by Tremco. It is the third year in a row the department has put on an event related to these topics.

- See more at: http://news.ku.edu/architecture-dept-hosting-food-energy-water-symposium#sthash.rkXPXMuO.dpuf

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

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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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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...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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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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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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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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