Hay Baling Fun
It is a widespread belief that, contrary to people living in urban areas, farmers have a strong connection with ‘nature’. One seriously starts to doubt that after watching this peculiar video. Thanks Roel Wouters.
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Posts Tagged ‘Food-Technology’
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Smart vending machine
At Tokyo’s Shinagawa Station visitors can now select beverages from a 47-inch touch panel.
An embedded camera will recognize your gender and age, allowing the machine to recommend a beverage suitable to whatever stereotype is attached to your particular circumstances. It will store your purchasing history too, so you can be freaked out by tailored ads every time you use it. 500 more of these units are planned to be installed in and around Tokyo over the next two years, with operating company JR East expecting them to tally up 30 percent more sales than their analog brethren. Via engadget.com
Smart vending machines in the streets show that Big Brother is being naturally accepted in a pixel consuming society.
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Nano Product: The Food Printer
Are we creating the penicillin or the asbestos of the 21st century? In the months preceding our Nano Supermarket Project, we share some speculative nanotech products with you. Here’s another one in the Nano Supermarket Products series: The Food Printer. And don’t forget to send in your own project for the Nano Supermarket!
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Natural-Born Junkies
Hippopotamus: a 2,5cm-long tablet-shaped nonliving chewable animal, member of a multi-species flock known as the Animal Parade, which tastes like fruit and is found in little pill boxes on supermarket shelves.
This definition of hippopotamus might seem exaggerated or even a bit ridiculous, and surely unnatural; but I’m afraid it is not, especially for little children. Supermarkets, pharmacies, and online ‘health’ stores are fraught with food (or energy if you prefer) supplements and their rapidly growing sub-category of specialized supplements for children, in which flora, fauna, chemistry and advertising blend together forming the strange nutritional abnormalities of the aforementioned kind.
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Kosher Coke
Last week I opened a bag of potato crisps that read: “We know the origins of all our ingredients”. As some crisps had already disappeared down my throat, this made me suddenly aware of the situation. I realized that I was taking my daily building blocks, but knew nothing about them except for the price that I had paid in the store.
Why is it of my interest that “they” know what is currently sitting in my stomach? The short answer to this question: faith. The sentence “We know the origins of all our ingredients” implies that I should have greater trust in some distant company, than in my own tongue or brain.
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Medicinal Blueberries
As our scientific knowledge of nutritious food increases, will healthy foods be progressively designed to look like medicines? This blueberry blister packaging created by Chinese designer Daizi Zheng certainly points in that direction.
Although utterly over-designed and unsustainably over-packaged, this might well be a product patients suffering from the healthy eating disease Orthorexia Nervosa would crave for.
Via Core77. Related post: Fresh from the Pharm, Orthorexia Nervosa, Food design in the 21th century, Organic Coca Cola, Nano Care Blueberry Paste Wax. Thanks Ehsan.
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Digital Gastronomy
The food printer seems to be one of those lustrous concepts that continues to pop-up in the fantasy of techno-connoisseurs. Some years ago James King already proposed a printed designers steak after being inspired by the disembodied cuisine project. Since then we have seen inktjet printed sushi, the candy printer and the Philips molecular food printer.
While some are already dreaming of printing human organs, we are still waiting for an affordable food printer to arrive in our kitchen. Perhaps the folks from the MIT fluid interfaces group can take bake the cake with their Cornucopia Food printer concept.
“Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients.”
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Natural Flavours
This article was originally published by JoLynn Braley on The Fit Shack and slightly edited for Next Nature.
Have you ever noticed the ingredient “natural flavor” listed on a food label? I’ve read it on the label of ground turkey that I purchased in the past, as well as listed on various other food items. I didn’t think much of it and now I realize that I was definitely uninformed.
Perhaps there was a part of me that did not want to question it, but I did think that it meant what it said, that it truly was natural. I have since learned by reading “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser, that natural flavoring is anything but natural.
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Scientists ‘grow’ pork
Scientists at the Eindhoven University of Technology are creating artificial pork. Prof. Dr Mark Post and his colleagues of the department of Biomedical Engineering have extracted cells from the muscle of a living pig and then put them in a sticky broth of blood from other animal fetuses. The cells then multiplied and created muscle tissue. They believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to artificially “exercise” the muscle.
According to this cultured meat is not only animal friendly, it could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals. However The Vegetarian Society said: “The big question is how could you guarantee you were eating artificial flesh rather than flesh from an animal that had been slaughtered. It would be very difficult to label and identify in a way that people would trust.”
The project is funded by the Dutch government and the sausage maker Stegeman.
Via Telegraph.co.uk, BBC and Food&Drink Digital. Related: Designing the meat of the future, Get vegetarian teeth and eat less meat, Meat Pork, Million Dollar Burger.
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Do It Yourself Pet
Image: A. Sidorov
Have you ever fantasized about creatures which carry the biggest smile? Or creatures which are so deeply covered with fur that you wish they were real? Good news, soon you’ll be able to watch your favorite animal become alive!
While the average consumer is still happy with laser printer technologies the first 3D printer which uses organic materials is on its way. Currently we already manage to print cell structures of about 2 inches high. Once finished these devices will be used for noble purposes like printing organs, victimless meat or other food. However, the real fun starts some years later, when they are cheap enough to buy one yourself.
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Crowdsourced drink
Remember the days when the flavor of a fruity drink was simply connected to an apple, orange, strawberry, kiwi, or perhaps – if you felt really exotic – an acai berry? Nowadays we quench our thirst with hyperreal beverages that serve us engineered tastes like Green punch, Wild ice zest berry, or Power-C Dragon fruit.
The Vitaminwater brand is moving to the next level by crowdsourcing its upcoming flavor. Fans are invited to collaborate on the design of their new drink. The design contest is organized through the launch of a Flavorcreator application on Facebook (watch out: you will have to let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends’ info, and other content for the app to work). Vitaminwater enthusiasts got the opportunity to name the flavor, write the bottle copy and design the label via a contest with the winner or winning team receiving a $5,000 prize from Vitaminwater. The result will be available in stores from March 2010.
We applaud this democratization of hyperreal flavors – if it the drink is designed anyway, why not let the customers have a say – and are now anticipating the first crowdsourced piece of fruit.
Via Coolhunting. Related: Organic Coke, Hyper Fruit, Why are carrots orange? Its political, Little Trees – Smells to refresh your car, Biomimicmarketd strawberry juice, Food design in the 21th century.
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Counterfeit Crab
Engraved Hairy Crab: fake or real?
大闸蟹 (Dazha crab), or more widely known as Shanghai Hairy Crab, is in season right now. This typical Shanghai delicacy is particularly sought after for its rich and creamy roe. And just like many other delicacies: sooo tasteful but sooo bad for your health… However, like, well, most things from China (if not all) hairy crabs suffer problems with counterfeits.
