Food Technology
Photo Credit: Ryan Matthew Smith / Modernist Cuisine, LLC
Sweet, Sour, Salty, Science
Food is marketed as ‘wholesome’, ‘farm fresh’, and ‘all natural’, but there’s a whole lot more going on in that can of Pringles than plain fried potatoes.
Of all technologies, food technology does the best job of wrapping futuristic advancements in a veneer of old nature. Fake flavors become natural, while “fresh” food lasts for years. But don’t be deceived: bread comes from a can, eggs come from a tube, and everything else comes from the lab. With the development of molecular gastronomy and 3D printers, gastronomes have even taken industrial food science and turned it into an art.
Contents
The tissue engineered Meat of Tomorrow
The meat in the supermarket is abstract, square and habitually made from wickedly manifactured animals. A friend once told me he only eats meat if he “can not recognize the animal in it”. I felt …
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 …
Orthorexia Nervosa: the healty eating disorder
Following anorexia nervosa (under eating) and bulimia nervosa (overeating), orthorexia nervosa (healty eating) is the latest eating disorder in the book. It is characterized by a fixation on eating what the sufferer considers to be …
Surrogate Sushi unmasked with DNA test
These two teenagers, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, just found out many New York sushi restaurants and seafood markets are playing a game of bait and switch with their sushi.
“They found that one-fourth of the …
Some Kids don't like Chicken
But they love dinosaur!
Judge for yourself whether this dinosaur nugget product is supposed to give kids a history lesson on the evolutionary relation between dinosaurs and birds – indeed, chickens do stem from dinosaurs –, …
The Spice Trade Expedition
Explorers Jon Cohrs and Ryan Van Luit travel by canoe past massive cargo ships and factories in search of the numerous artificial flavoring factories of New Jersey, the flavoring capital of the United States.
The Story of Our Food
Every time we eat a piece of food, we take a bite out of the world. All these small bites tell a dozen stories. A carton of eggs presents the story of contented hens, a bottle of olive oil the tale of Italian grandmothers. Yet these pastoral scenes barely hide the realities of a food system that leaves one billion people starving and another billion overweight. Moving beyond food-based fictions, how should we react to the truth?
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 …
Food Design in the 21st Century
We want a printed steak, square fishsticks, dinosaur nuggets, organic coca-cola,hyper fruit, cloned meat, potato-free potato chips, frankenwein, vegetarian hamburgers and hypernatural tomatoes. We want vitamine+Q10 yoghurt that makes you loose weight. We want to hear the sound of a sausage when we bite it – we want notice how well designed that sausage sound really is.
Already for thousands of years people have been food designers. How will food technology develop itself into the 21th century? The Philips Food Design Probes investigate how we will eat and source our food in the future, like in 15 to 20 years. There are 3 products we might have in our homes by then:
With CandyFab, high-tech confectioners can 3D print with liquid sugar.
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.
I will not argue here whether it is beneficial or not for children to consume such supplements from a nutritional standpoint, because food is not just about calories, vitamins, and other kinds of quantitative analytics. Food is also a means for conceiving and apprehending the world, first through its form, taste, color, smell, structure and texture, but most importantly through its origins. No previous practice that alienated food from its distinguishing qualities (i.e. importing, packaging, off-season ‘greenhousing’, fast food) has ever been more successful than the design of food supplements. Food supplements are arbitrarily mashed and shaped, artificially colored and perfumed (with natural flavorings!), enhanced with magical features, and served in pill boxes. They are hyper-distillates of good things only, purged from anything bad, sanitized from the dirtiness and the impurity of the real world. Consuming them doesn’t comprise an experience at all; they have no origins, no actual points of reference; they are pure fiction employing biomimicmarketing to legitimize their existence; and (super)naturally, they are better than the real thing. Food …
Natural Flavours
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.
Natural flavor is a man-made additive, and it makes processed food and fast food taste outstanding. It’s not the only additive that flavors our (processed and fast) food, but …
Want Ketchup with those Flies?
Industrial-scale in vitro meat may be a long way off, but for meat-lovers looking for a cheap, eco-friendly source of protein, there’s no need to wait. We just have to swear off creatures with four legs and a backbone and look to tasty livestock with an exoskeleton and six, eight, or a hundred legs.
Bugs Originals, based near Amsterdam, is trying to introduce arthropods as the food of the future. Originally associated with primitive lifestyles or times of famine, entomophagy- the eating of insects- may be an ideal solution for growing world with an appetite for protein.
Ceci n'est pas une Potato Chip
Proctor and Gamble, the maker of Pringles, has successfully argued in a British court that their product is ‘not a potato chip’. Pringles are also officially now, not potato sticks or potato props or products …
Organic Coca-Cola
Whoever you are, whatever you do, wherever you may be. You can’t beat the real thing. It really refreshes and brings real satisfaction in every glass. It was not until America’s choice had been thirst …
Egg Sausage
Our food production is much more technological than we typically realize. My appologies for disturbing your trance; I realize that sometimes you’d rather linger in the illusion. At least, next time when you’re having a …
