Fake Restaurant

For a few #blessed days, Lura Cafe was the hottest new restaurant in Providence. The bright, cozy farm-to-table joint hid in plain sight next to a downtown parking lot, steps away from the Rhode Island Convention Center. Lura would be a refuge for diners in the know, serving modern takes on cafe classics—all local, all organic, all certified GMO-free. It was upscale and casual, timeless and avant-garde. It had a vaguely Nordic air of refinement.

It announced itself—as all similarly accoutred restaurants must—with a social media blitz, featuring sans serif lettering, sunny high-angle shots of brunch dishes, even a breathless write-up in the New York Times.

It was also totally fake.

READ MORE

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.

LEARN MORE

MOFAD

The Museum of Food and Drink (MOFAD) is creating the world's first large-scale food museum with exhibits you can eat.

MOFAD will be a global leader in food education, featuring innovative exhibits and programs that show how exciting it is to learn and care about the culture, history, science, production, and commerce of food and drink. Imagine a place where you can use an Aztec kitchen, see cereal made before your eyes, decode food marketing, taste West African street food, make Chinese hand-pulled noodles, learn about agriculture and composting, and see how the body digests a sandwich—all in one museum.

In 2013, MOFAD debuted its first explosive mobile exhibition, BOOM! The Puffing Gun and the Rise of Cereal. The exhibition, which featured a 3,200-pound breakfast cereal puffing machine, drew accolades from media outlets such as The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.

MOFAD Lab, the organization's first brick-and-mortar home, will open in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn on October 28, 2015. In this space, MOFAD will design and showcase its exhibit concepts as it works toward opening the full museum in New York City by 2019. Join the MOFAD mailing list to stay updated on upcoming exhibitions and programs

LEARN MORE HERE

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. 

Learn more here

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.

READ MORE

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.

READ MORE

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.

READ MORE