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. 

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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!

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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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