Supermarket
Humans evolved in an environment where food had to be gathered & hunted. As we are evolutionary still attuned to this way of food finding, in many respect the concept of the supermarket is just as outlandish for us as for a caveman.
If only the supermarket wasn’t such a mundane part of our life, we would realize how exceptional this environment really is: The supermarket is our next savanna.
Contents
Selective Shopping
In a cheerful attempt to investigate and subvert the image consumption power structures of the contemporary supermarket, designer Marco Ugolini and photographer Pedro Motta went out on a colorful selective shopping trip.
None of the products …
Shopping in 2015?
A panacea Yoghurt? Cures athlete’s foot, acne and dandruff! Triple irradiated Spinach? Three-week shelf life! Funa sushu? Asian carp fresh from Lake Superior! Minority Report sequel? Fake or Real? Neither. It’s futuristic shopping as …
Keep it cool with the Bio-Robot Fridge
The Bio Robot fridge is a speculative product that uses a non sticky, odorless gel to envelope stored food as individual pods. The idea is that the gel cools by absorbing heat energy, which is …
Virtual Offline Shopping
As the second most hardest working people on this planet, Koreans obviously dread their weekly shopping for groceries. It is therefore that Home Plus (Tesco in Europe) plastered walls of a Korean subway station with …
Video: Kapitaal
The short film Kapitaal gives you an impression of the enormous amount of visual stimuli that plague us every day.
Created by Studio Smack.
Supermarket – Our Next Savanna
We are living in the future and we find it boring. The best place to gather evidence for this claim is the supermarket. To begin with, try and have a fresh look at the word: Supermarket, it is such an utterly futuristic word, yet we use it mindlessly. If only the supermarket wasn’t such a mundane part of our life, we would realize how exceptional this environment really is.
As an experiment, imagine we would take a caveman – the hunter-gatherer type that lived 40.000 years ago – and put him in a time machine with the final destination: the supermarket around the corner of the street where you live. Surely our friend the cavemen would be astonished after opening the capsule.
Organic Coke
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 best friend for decades and consumed by millions every day, when a serious drawback arose: the real thing makes you really fat.
In 1982 the Coca Cola Company addressed the negative aspect of its drink with the introduction of a sugar-free version of the Ice-cold sunshine. Diet Coke was the first new coke brand since 1886 and signified a revolution – not only for wannabe thin women – but for the Coca Cola brand as a whole. Numerous coke by-products followed in the slipstream of the Diet Coke success: Cherry Coke, Caffeine-Free Coke, Classic Coke, Vanilla Coke, Coca-Cola Orange, Coke Zero, Coke Black Cherry Vanilla and many more. Today these spinoffs have saturated the market up to a level that we can safely say nobody drinks the real thing anymore.
Fruit4Day
Fruit does wonders for your health. No doubt about it. It is recommended to consume two pieces of fruit each day. One.. Sorry, I’ve lost count?
How convenient to have the two pieces of fruit mixed together in one product! Hunting and gathering has become too easy nowadays. Of course, you pay a bit extra for the service, as the retail price of Fruit2Day equals the price of FOUR pieces of fruit in their original packaging.
Fresh from the Pharm
Will we in the future still buy several needs according food in shops, or will we grow M&M’s ourselves? There is a lot happening on in the field of food technology, think for example of special cloned cow species or ‘extremely tasteful’ designers vegetables. We are radically intervening with Darwin’s survival of the fittest, since society strives to select and process the ‘best’ and ‘strongest’ species and types themselves – often based on commercial values.
According the magazine cover of Food & Wine in October 2105 the process of ‘creating’ food in factories will be outdated; next nature will grow the hyperfood itself. With a little help of technology the food/culture that society created will be combined with what we traditionally consider as nature. Think for example of the extensive use of photosynthesis to increase production of food, as they will become little factories. But also about processing design food via a biological way that for the present can only happen via complex chemical processes, e.g. the production of M&M’s through the genetic manipulating of beans. Furthermore, the special 22nd-century edition of Food & Wine explains that food will become more effective, healthy and ‘powerful’ by the integration of new developed vitamins and medicines. These will not only give us extra energy but will also power the electronic devices we use, since these will become a part of our body we’ll have to feed them as well.
Will in 2105 all factories where they produce food become redundant? And how will the physical status of future humans react upon the extra healthy food they will consume, shall it improve lifestyle in a …
Biodiversity in the Supermarket
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 healthful food, which can ultimately lead to early death.
While anorexia is typically associated with our visual culture and its unreachable beauty ideals, orthorexia seems closely related with our information age and the easy access to facts and figures. Today so many data about health benefits of our food are available – how it was processed, prepared, etc– and food packages are routinely decorated with scientifically detailed data on their contents. We are suffering from ‘overknowledge’.
While most of us respond to the food-data-overload with an occasional dosage of self chosen ignorance – forget about the facts, …
The Stray Shopping Cart Project
“…Until now, the major obstacle that has prevented people from thinking critically about stray shopping carts has been that we have not had any formalized language to differentiate one shopping cart from another. In order to encourage a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon, I have worked for the past six years to develop a system of identification for stray shopping carts. Unlike a Linaean taxonomy, which is based on the shared physical characteristics of …
Comeback of the 'ugly' fruits
Perhaps in the long run, historians will consider this as the official end of modernity as we knew it: The comeback of the wonky cucumber, abnormally bent banana, and comedy carrots, at least in the …
Who designed the banana?
Looking at a banana from a design perspective, one immediately notices the fruit is highly ergonomic and sophisticated: Bananas fit perfectly in the human hand, they come with a non-slip surface, a bio-degradable packaging that …
Why are Carrots Orange? It is Political
No, the image above does not some show some collection of freshly genetically designed hypercarrots in various colors of the rainbow. This is the spectrum of colors carrots used to have – and in some …
