Eating In-Vitro: Kitchen Meat Incubator

The Kitchen Meat Incubator does for home cooking what the electronic synthesizer did for the home musician. It provides its users with a set of pre-programmed samples that can be remixed and combined to their liking. Besides the preparation of traditional styles like steak, sausage or meatballs, consumers can bring their own imagination to the meat preparation process. The handy sliders on the device control size, shape and texture. More expensive models of the Kitchen Meat Incubator also come with a wireless link that allows you to download meat recipes from the internet or share them with friends.

Designed by Daniel Ong for the Eating in Vitro series.

Gravebook

Your last poke. Our peculiar image of the week was created by Han Hoogerbrugge.

LowLine Puts Park Beneath New York

Deep below bustling, noisy Delancy Street in Manhattan lies the Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal, a building abandoned in 1948. This terminal is just one of many tunnels and stations that riddle New York, unused except by rats and albino alligators. Now, designers Dan Barasch and James Ramsey want to do for the city’s subterranean spaces what the High Line and the Brooklyn Garage did for its aerial ones: Turn them into vibrant, immaculately designed parks.

Despite the abundance of empty urban caves, Barasch and Ramsey encountered one major hurdle to making the darkness bloom: Plants can’t grow without light. The team has come up with high-tech solution to bring light underground, involving tunnels, GPS, and a parabolic system of lenses and mirrors based on the one used in the James Webb Space Telescope.

In the exhibition “Imagining the Lowline” visitors recently got their first taste of a forest floor beneath the pavement, complete with moss, ferns, and a Japanese maple. Whether Barasch and Ramsey can realize their vision of converting the trolley terminal into the world’s first underground green space depends on city bureaucracy and, of course, money. Fans can contribue cash at their website. For all us vampires, night-owls, and Poe-reading goths, let’s hope Manhattan soon gets its next great public space, far beneath the madding crowds.

Via the New Yorker and Fast Company.

Donor Organ Shortage? Let’s Print Them

Another step in the fusion of the made & the born: Biological physicist Gabor Forgacs envisions to “print” new organs for use in clinical trials. Similar to an inkjet printer, Forgacs and his team use bio-ink particles to print living cells that sequentially organize themselves into a more complex tissue structures. Since the organ is printed from your own cells, chances of rejection should be minimal.

Pre-Peeled and Plastic-Wrapped Bananas

For when nature’s perfect packaging is just too darn hard to get off: Pre-peeled bananas in styrofoam and cling-wrap, from the kings of convenience at Austrian supermarket Billa. Luckily for the environment/common sense/peak oil, an internet uproar has led to the company pulling this hilariously unnecessary product from the shelves.

Via Gawker.

Brain Implant Restores Memory to Cocaine-Addled Monkeys

A team of researchers from three universities have succeeded in creating the first device that boosts the brain power of primates. In the study, five rhesus macaques were trained to complete an image-matching task. Each was shown one photo, and then asked to select the same photo from a larger pool of images. Using a tiny probe inserted into the monkey’s cerebral cortex, a computer recorded and analyzed the neural signals being sent when the primate was studying the first photo and when it made the “right” decision in the game. Over the course of two years, the monkeys acquired a 75% proficiency in this task.

Read more »

Eating in Vitro: Magic Meatballs

Magic Meatballs are designed to playfully familiarize children with lab-grown meat. Young people are more prone to overconsumption of proteins and fats, and are more sensitive to the hormones and antibiotics used in conventional meat production. Luckily, lab-grown Magic Meatballs can be tailored precisely to a child’s individual needs.

The basic meat consists solely of animal protein, and the combination of fats, omega-3s and vitamins is completely customizable. Colors and flavors can also be added to the neutral base to make the meat change color or crackle in your mouth. Magic Meatballs actively involve kids with the meat they eat, so that future generations will more readily accept protein grown in labs.

Designed by Mark Kanters for the Eating in Vitro series.

Eating In-Vitro: Meat, the Expectations

As the planet’s population speeds towards 9 billion, it’s becomes impossible to continue consuming meat like we do today. Will we all be eating rice and beans? Grasshoppers perhaps? Scientists hope to keep us eating vertebrate protein with in vitro meat. Grown in bioreactors from animal cells, in vitro meat could be a sustainable and humane alternative to raising a whole animal from birth to slaughter. The first lab-grown hamburger is expected within the next few months.

But why should lab-grown meat look like the meat we consume today? Growing protein in bioreactors could lead to entirely new forms of meat with radically different aesthetics, materials and eating rituals. While these new products might seem unfamiliar and artificial, much of the meat we already consume is divorced from the animal’s natural form: Ground beef, smoked sausages, and chicken nuggets.

The Next Nature Lab is currently developing new visions on the production methods, designs and eating habits that might emerge around in-vitro meat. These speculative designs vary from knitted meat, protein powder fondue and luxurious meat fruit, to kitchen based bio-reactors and colorful magic meatballs for the kids.

Current state of the Art: Tiny snippets of in-vitro meat.

A selection of these future in-vitro meat scenarios is currently shown at the highly recommended Food Culture: Eating by Design exhibition at the Design Huis in Eindhoven (NL). As you might not happen to be in the neighborhood, we will also publish them online over the next few weeks. The projects were coached by Menno Stoffelsen, Koert van Mensvoort, Cor van der Weele, Daisy van der Schaft and Ronald van Tienhoven. Illustration by K. Cheng.