cricket housing

eeing the added potential to introduce insects into Western diets, Terreform ONE decided to take their design further and researched cricket behavior and enhancements that ensure the shelter could also be used as a clean way of farming insects for food in urban areas.
Joachim says the team quickly observed that crickets "don't like density" and become fussy with their food in crowded situations.

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Farm Pod

“This is how you’re going to get people fed when we have no water,” said Mike Straight, chief executive officer of FarmPod LLC, who dreamed up the idea of putting a fully automated aquaponics system inside a shipping container. “This is how you get fed when you have no land.”

Straight and his fiancée, Siria Bonilla, see the pod, the Santa Fe startup’s first prototype, as a common-sense solution to food deserts. New Mexico, where many people live in remote communities far from grocery stores or farmers markets, has some of the nation’s most expansive food deserts. About 300,000 people in the state, or about 15 percent of the population, lack access to healthy foods, according to recent studies.

Inside the shipping container that makes up the FarmPod’s bottom level, fish grow in three large tanks. One tank holds koi and two hold barramundi, a mild-flavored fish, also known as Asian sea bass, that’s popular in Thai cuisine. Water containing the fish’s waste is pumped up to the greenhouse on the second floor, where it trickles down through the vertical towers, feeding the roots of young plants. The clean water circulates back to the fish.

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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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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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ReGen Village

It's no secret that today's aggressive agricultural techniques can take a heavy toll on the environment, both on the land used for crops and livestock, and in the surrounding atmosphere.

But a new vision of a more sustainable 'integrated neighbourhood' community is being implemented in the Netherlands, with the first of a series of high-tech farm villages set to be completed next year. The project, being built just outside of Amsterdam, is the brainchild of California-based developer ReGen Villages, and after its pilot community is finished in 2017, the company plans to bring the concept to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Germany.

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greenhouse/community farming in Halifax

The greenhouse, designed by Fowler Bauld & Mitchell along with Dalhousie professor Brian Lilley, CBCL Limited engineers and the youth at Hope Blooms, was a massive community undertaking.

“It’s just something great. We’re all jumping for joy over here,” said Jessie Jollymore, Hope Blooms founder.

“To me, it really sheds a light on the youth, community and the innovation here. It shows that believing in young minds can shape a beautiful environment.”

The greenhouse opened last May at Brunswick Street and Divas Lane, and served to help the grassroots, youth-driven initiative that allows members of the community grow their own food.

The Hope Blooms message is that the youth can make a difference in their lives and community, and they help at the garden in Halifax.
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art of bento

Time to Play With Your Food: The Art of Bento

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