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February 25 2012
‘Alp’ Turns Containers into Refrigerators
Transporting and displaying cold food is an incredibly wasteful and inefficient process. Current display refrigerators, like those that display meats or cheeses in supermarkets, create cold air that is quickly lost to the open environment. The volume that is cooled is inevitably greater than the volume. Alp, by Ethan Frier, is a transportation and refrigeration concept for the supermarket of 2021. It consists of standardized, reusable boxes in which food items are packed, shipped and displayed.
The boxes are constructed of highly thermally conductive nanomaterials. They cool food via contact with a refrigerated “wall” that is permanently installed in the supermarket for display purposes, or in the wheeled containers used for transport. This system replaces the cardboard boxes typically used to ship food, the refrigerated infrastructure used to transport cold food (refrigerated trucks, large industrial holding refrigerators) and replaces the refrigerated shelving systems used to display cold food for sale. Alp is completely modular and scalable, and can be configured to replace almost any type of refrigerator, from mini fridge to industrial size. Alp challenges us to critically think about how we refrigerate and transport our food.
For additional documentation, visit the project page.
Want to design your own speculative nanotech? Check out the Call for Products in the second edition of the NANO Supermarket.
February 23 2012
Growing Plants in the Dark
While sunlight contains all colors, the dominant type of chlorophyll in plants only needs purple light to function. This simple fact has big implications for the future of farming. Crops planted in soil, of course, depend on the sun, while commercial greenhouses use white light to grow their crops. All that extra red, green and yellow energy is wasted on the plants.
PlantLab has taken advantage of chlorophyll’s little quirk. By using red and blue LEDs to create purple light, they have dramatically cut the energy needed to grow plants indoors. The special lights boost the efficiency of photosynthesis from 9% to between 12 and 15%. Growing plants in a closed system conserves heat, water, and nutrients, and cuts the need for pesticides. Since the crops no longer need access to sunlight, they can be grown in dense stacks. The future of vertical farming looks a lot like a nightclub for plants.
Watch the introductory video here.
February 19 2012
February 15 2012
Meat the Future
Click here to view the embedded video.
This promotional video for in-vitro meat was brought to you by the bureau for in-vitro meat promotion students of the Beckmans College of Design.
February 11 2012
Tuur van Balen – Hacking Yoghurt
Click here to view the embedded video.
While most people think biotechnology is complex, expensive and exclusively practiced in fancy lab settings, designer Tuur van Balen argues it is actually quite accessible. He demonstrates his vision on DIY biotechnology by creating an ‘anti-depressant yoghurt’ on stage.
February 08 2012
Raise Crops on the Moon with Plant-Growing Jelly
In dry areas like the desert, on mountain tops or on the moon it’s impossible to grow anything. Or is it? A rain in the desert sparks extreme plant growth from the moment the raindrops hit the ground. As long as the ground is irrigated and fertilized, plants will grow during the warm periods of the day. For some regions, the nights are another challenge. In the desert, temperatures drop drastically at night. For farmers, its a big challenge to keep the soil “livable” for plants, and to cope with the drastic temperature differences between day and night. Money is another problem. There needs to be a stable environment for plants to grow in, at low costs. That’s what the Plant-Growing Jelly project seeks to solve.
Conceived of by industrial design students Ruud van Reijmersdal, Tom Slijkhuis, Joppe Spaans and Jeroen Rood, this speculative project consists of a gel which serves as an ideal growing environment for food crops. The gel contains all the vital nutrients for a plant to grow, and insulates it from extremes of temperatures. Isolated the plant from the outside world could enable plants to grow anywhere, even on the moon. This enriched environment would attractive for mass-production, as fruits and vegetables could grow faster, earlier, and take up less space than traditional methods.
Want to learn more about the inspiration and specifics for this project? Read the project report.
February 03 2012
Ice Cream Cones Made from Ice Cream, and Other Wikicells
Plastic is a part of the earth’s ecosystem, but it’s a part that no one wants. At Harvard, scientists are looking to replace single-use plastic bottles, plates, and cups with packaging that not only biodegrades, but tastes great. These so-called Wikicells are made up of liquid or solid food contained within an organic membrane that’s held together by electrostatic forces – the same forces that cause cling wrap to cling. In the wonderful world of Wikicells, the wrap around a cut of in-vitro beef could contain the sauce, or an ice cream cone could be made from actual cream. If the scientists get it right, we may soon have an edible way to stop using plastic bags and bottles that take 500 to 1,000 years to degrade.
Photo via The Way We See the World.
January 29 2012
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.
January 27 2012
Mark Post – Meet the New Meat
Click here to view the embedded video.
As we are moving towards 9 billion people living on our planet, it seems impossible to continue producing & consuming meat like we do today. Will we soon all be eating rice and beans? Perhaps. Yet professor Mark Post thinks otherwise.
At the Next Nature Power Show, Mark Post presented his plan to create the first lab-grown hamburger. He argues lab-grown meat could become the environmentally friendly alternative for breeding cows and pigs for meat consumption. It is relatively simple to take stem cells from an animal and grow them to produce new muscle tissue. Simply add sugar, proteins and fat and get it into shape with a bit of exercise to created edible meat. The only problem then is to find a new role for our livestock.
January 24 2012
Dumpster Fish the Future of Farming
Cities have seen guerilla gardens, rooftop honey production, and fire escape chicken coops. Now, urban farmers may be adding aquaculture to the mix. Headed by ex-banker Christopher Toole, the Society for Aquaponic Values and Education in the Bronx, New York, raises tilapia in tanks and trashcans. Closed recirculating systems use the waste from the fish to fertilize herbs like mint and basil. Toole and his girlfriend and partner, Anya Pozdeeva, envision a future where neighborhood fish like “Bronx Best Blue Tilapia” become a thriving local industry.
Efforts from Toole and other New York tilapia pioneers like NYU professor Martin P. Schreibman may represent the future of fish. As cities grow, and wild fish stocks dwindle to near-depletion by 2050, the urban production of hardy, freshwater species like the tilapia could be a sustainable way for city-dwellers to have their fish and eat it too. Urban aquaculture faces some steep hurdles before becoming a profitable venture. Similar small-scale city fish farms have flopped over costs and lack of demand. However, there is one bright spot: In China, which has practiced fish farming since 2,000 BC, indoor recirculating aquaculture is doing a booming business.
Photo via Blue Ridge Aquaculture.
January 23 2012
Tiny amounts of Alcohol might extend Life
A new study on the effects of cholesterol on the life span of Caenorhabditiselegans, a tiny worm often used in experimentation, resulted in some surprising finds. The life span of the critters was doubled. Now it turned out it wasn’t the cholesterol after all. The cause of the effect was set in motion by the solvent used to deliver the cholesterol. The solvent used? Alcohol.
Now we all know the detrimental effects of alcohol on the human body. So don’t start drinking just yet! The amount of alcohol administered to Caenorhabditis elegans was only a tiny amount. Equivalent to a tablespoon of ethanol in a bathtub full of water or the alcohol in one beer diluted into a hundred gallons of water. Increasing the amount is not very good for the wiggly creatures.
Although not certain on how tiny amounts of alcohol help the worms live longer. It does open some interesting speculation about the beneficial effects of alcohol on humans. If we cut our consumption of the toxic, to a dose proportional to that of what Caenorhabditiselegans helps to live longer, it might do the same for us. After all, the poison is in the dose.
And if the benefits turn out to be experimentally proven, will we ever succeed to make it our next nature to shrink our – almost ritualistic – consumption of the fire water.
via: UCLA Newsroom
December 25 2011
Rule #3: Keep it ASS: Abstract, Simple and Subtle
Part 3 of the 11 part series Golden Rules of Anthropomorphism and Design. See part 1 and part 2.
Making good use of anthropomorphism isn’t easy. As you’ve probably already noticed, people may dislike products purely because of their anthropomorphic elements. One way to reduce this risk is to downplay the anthropomorphic qualities: keep it as simple, subtle and abstract as possible. When the implementation is so subtle that most people won’t consciously notice it, they are less likely to be annoyed, while the product can still achieve the desired effect. Abstraction reduces the chance of directly evoking negative emotions, while preserving the positive associations.
The Senseo coffee maker, above, was designed to resemble a butler bowing down to serve a hot cup of java. The anthropomorphic form is not obvious, but it still succeeds in evoking the pleasant sensation of being served.
December 23 2011
City Rats Love Ethnic Food
City rats, it seems, prefer the same foods that humans do: Greasy, fatty, sweet, and salty. Although rats are usually seen as the billy goats of city life, ready to chow down on anything remotely edible, they show a marked distain for healthy vegetables. According to author Robert Sullivan, “A rat might starve in an alley full of raw carrots”. Like a human that missed the low-carb fad, Rattus norvegicus instead loads up on white bread, fried chicken, and mac and cheese.
Rats don’t only exhibit a human-like tendency to indulge in junk food. Although they naturally opt for sweet over spicy, their cultural background plays in a role in what they eat. In Manhattan’s East Harlem, home to one of the city’s biggest Latino populations, rats have reportedly developed a preference for the same spicy food that other rodents would reject.
Rats mirror our urban lives, eating what we don’t, absorbing our culture, and taking up residence in even the more undesirable real estate. Maybe they make us uneasy because they’re too good at acting human.
Via Edible Geography and Robert Sullivan’s Rats. Image via Caruba.
December 09 2011
Apes Like Cooked Food, and What that Means for Human Evolution
Humans are the only species on earth that cooks its food. Not only do we cook our food, but we usually find the flavor of cooked foods preferable to the raw version. Compare the smell of raw and pan-fried bacon. Which version makes you drool?
It’s no coincidence that your dog may be drooling alongside you. Several animals that have never eaten cooked food show a marked preference for a nice roast or stir-fry. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans all prefer cooked carrots, sweet potatoes, and even meat.
This natural predisposition has important implications for human evolution. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking is not some simple, pleasant cultural development. Instead, it is the central driving force that transformed us from primitive hominids into Homo erectus and on through to Homo sapiens.
The key to cooking lies in the energy demands of our giant minds. The human brain uses up a quarter of the body’s daily energy requirements. Cooked food provides significantly more available calories than raw food. From a chemical perspective, a raw and baked potato might have the same amount of total calories, but from a dietary perspective, the starches in a raw potato are largely useless to the average human gut. Add to this the fact that many poisonous plants become edible after cooking, and the first chefs were looking at a sudden increase of calories, not to mention free time. This influx of tasty nutrients allowed Homo erectus to redirect spare energy to evolving oversize brains.
Wrangham’s argument breaks down if animals favor raw food when give a choice. If our ancestors did not naturally prefer cooked food, they might never have bothered figuring out how to throw an antelope on the barbeque. The fact that the great apes gravitate towards the taste of cooked food is a good indication that Wrangham’s hypothesis may be correct.
Humans have become so perfectly adapted to cooking that it’s tough for us to live without ready access to a stove or campfire. Raw foodists have supplements, drying machines, and other wonders of modern food technology to get enough calories to survive. According to Wrangham, there are no verifiable examples of anyone surviving on a raw diet in a state of nature. Throw someone on a desert island with an endless supply of steak tartare, and they’ll still die of malnutrition unless they brought along a frying pan and a zippo.
Our dependence on heated food is encoded in our bodies. Our weak jaws, tiny teeth, small stomachs and short guts all indicate that our bodies are absolutely dependent on cooking as a a form of ‘exterior digestion’. Cooking, along with language, may be the most natural technology that there is.
Thanks to Peter van de Graaf for the heads-up. To learn more about how cooking created leisure time and institutionalized sexism, read Richard Wrangham’s excellent book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Photo via Avax News.
November 23 2011
The Search for the “Real” Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is fake-for-real. While it’s true that there was a minor harvest feast in 1621, held by English immigrants and Wampanoag Indians, the event was never celebrated regularly, and largely dropped off the national radar for the next 200 years. It took the Civil War for Abraham Lincoln to formalize the holiday, a political move he hoped would promote national unity.
Even if the holiday is invented, at least the food is real, right? When Americans sit down to groaning tables on Thursday, it’s tempting to think we’re participating in a culinary tradition not that far removed from the time of the Pilgrims. Thanksgiving food is, after all, as authentic and naturally American as apples (Kazakhstan), potatoes (Peru), and green bean casserole (Campbell Soup Company). Maybe we can find some culinary authenticity hiding between the gravy boat and the cranberry sauce. Hope you’re hungry…
No Potatoes, No Pigs, No Fun
Most so-called “traditional” Thanksgiving dishes would have been alien to the Indians and Pilgrims in attendance at Plymouth, Massachusetts. They might not even have recognized mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce as edible food. Sweet corn, the kind that can be eaten fresh from the cob, may not even have existed at the time, let alone been grown in Massachusetts. Apples, so vital for pie, were also off the menu. The English settlers had to wait for their imported apple seeds to grow, and on top of that, their crops were measly until they carted European honey bees across the ocean to fertilize the orchards. Forget ham, pork, or sausage too; the settlers were not the pig-raising types. And as for drinks? Nothing but water.
Plenty of Eel to Go Around
Most Americans nowadays would be just as puzzled by historical Thanksgiving foods. Pumpkin and other squash were likely eaten on the menu, but only as part of savory dishes. Other foods that Wampanoag and English gobbled down have been completely relegated to history. Venison is one of the few certainties of the first Thanksgiving – the Wampanoag brought a gift of five deer for the meal – but venison, like all wild game, is a rare sight nowadays. Clams, mussels, oysters, eels, cod, and lobster were also in abundance in Plymouth, not to mention turtle. Seafood, so vital in 1621, would look as out-of-place in a modern Thanksgiving spread as a mapo tofu.
At Least They Ate Turkey?
Turkey is a likely candidate for the Thanksgiving food that’s managed to survive the centuries unscathed – maybe. Wild turkeys were abundant in 1621, and Indians and immigrants alike enjoyed the bird. That’s not to say that M. gallopavo was actually served at the feast. The Pilgrims would have been just as likely to eat wild ducks, or even swans. Cookbooks from early American history preserve an astonishing appetite for wood cock, partridge, snipe, pigeons, and song birds of all kinds. Literally anything with meat on its bones and feathers on its back was chucked into the stew pot. For a real authentic feel for your Thanksgiving dinner, you might want to set up a bird feeder and shoot the first thing that lands.
Gobble, Gobble, Wobble
But let’s not be so fast about the turkey. Is our own iteration of the bird really that authentic to the holiday? Snow-white, broad-breasted, and enormous, the modern turkey would have perplexed the Pilgrims. 99.99% of all turkeys sold in the United States come from a single breed of turkey, the aptly-named Broad Breasted White. The most popular breed of turkey for over three centuries was the Bronze, a cross between wild turkeys and European domestics. During standardization and science obsessed 1960s, Bronzes and other old breeds like Bourbon Red or Slate Black Spanish all but disappeared from American farms.
Bizarre and marvelous, Broad Breasted Whites lost their natural bronze coloration because white pin feathers make the plucked carcasses more attractive to consumers. They reach market weight up to 12 weeks before ‘heritage’ breeds, and weigh in at around 18 kilos per bird, compared to a measly 10 kilos for a wild turkey. True freaks of this breed can grow as large as 36 kilos. Great for producing breast meat, the Broad Breasted White is not that great at being it bird. They can’t fly, their legs get bowed and wobbly under their weight, and their giant breasts prevent them from reproducing as nature intended – thanks, artificial insemination!
A Faux Feast
There aren’t many “100% natural” foods, and there is no one “authentic” Thanksgiving. Culture largely decides what we accept as historical reality. In a hundred or two hundred years, future Americans may be astonished to learn to that the Wampanoag did not come bearing gifts of dinosaur meat, and the Pilgrims did not chow down on the most American vegetable of all, pizza.
Image via Zimbio.
November 21 2011
Traditional Thanksgiving Meat
Greenridge Farm offers this pork molded in the shape of a piglet. But if you are more the traditional type of person, Greenrdige Farms also offer Turkey-breasts in the shape of an actual turkey. Perfect for a traditional Thanksgiving!
Will this pseudo-pig actually taste better in the shape of a piglet? Or does the shape reminds us too much of Babe, and becomes cruel to roast? At least it is a good marketing trick to distract you from what the piglet is actually made of.
Via Consumerist
November 04 2011
Mushrooms in the Mokum
Mediamatic is hosting a pop-up urban mushroom farm in the middle of Amsterdam. Rows and rows of shiitake, oyster, and the elusive almond-flavored Agaricus subrufescens are sprouting on metal shelves. With its experimental vibe, Paddestoelen Paradijs (Mushroom Paradise) proves that mushrooms might just be our best friends in the age of resource scarcity. They grow off dead, decaying, and often discarded organic matter, are low emission, and their roots can produce a material that’s stronger than wood, as light as packing foam, and completely biodegradable.
Click through to see a living wall, the Christian mushroom cult, and Philosopher’s Stones.
French artist Michel Blazy slathered a wall with a ‘cement’ of tomato paste and powdered potato flakes. After a few weeks of benign cultivation, the red wall is beginning to show signs of green, fluffy life. Soon the entire space will be covered with the kind of mold that normally makes us go “ew,” not “interesting.”
Humans and fungi have a long shared history, and not just because mushrooms taste really great in cream sauce. Some have theorized, with varying degrees of believability, that Christianity began as a psychedelic mushroom cult. Richard Doyle, previously featured on Next Nature, is granddaddy of this field for his belief that psychotropic substances spurred the evolution of the human mind.
Of course, no exhibit on mushrooms would be complete without some live, psychedelic versions. Here, Sclerotia tampanensis is growing next to some harmless but inedible turkeytail mushrooms. The Mediamatic staff is quick to emphasize that while mushrooms are certainly interesting as recreational substances, they’re far more useful as the food, medicines, and building materials of the future.
Paddestoelen Paradijs runs through November 27.
October 10 2011
Allergen Beagle – A Home Foodscanner
No shellfish, no peanuts, no soy, no milk, no eggs. An increasing amount of people suffers from various food allergies, which forces them to constantly scan food packages for allergen information that is often unclear, lacking or even false. But now there is the Allergen Beagle, a personal food scanner that empowers people with an ‘extra sense’, allowing them to inspect their food for potentially allergy-evoking substances.
Whereas today, people with a food allergy are dependent on expensive & inaccessible lab test, they might one day simply ask their beagle to test their food and avoid or locate the cause of an allergic response. The Allergen Beagle was designed by Sebastian Goudsmit who graduated cum laude at the Eindhoven University of Technology with this project developed in the Next Nature lab.
Food mass production and the rise of allergies
With the rise of industrialization of western countries, production, processing and consumption of food has endured extreme changes. Driven by the aim for broad and versatile offer and high quality but low price, food moved out of the hands of the local farmers, bakers and other craftsmen into international mass-production facilities.
Parallel to these developments, a particular medical condition becomes more and more prevalent:the food allergy syndrome. Currently prevalence of this syndrome is 2-5% in adults and 6-8% in children. Medical research indicates a swift increase of these numbers in the coming years (Hourihane et al 1998: p. 1271–1275). One of the most prominent Dutch allergy treatment research centers, the Elizabeth hospital Tilburg, warns that in the coming decade one in three children is likely to suffer from food allergies and tends to take on epidemic characteristics
People with the food allergy syndrome suffer from a range of heavy clinical symptoms, simply by eating a particular food product. Most occurring food allergens are: milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, seafood, shellfish, soy and wheat. (Ezendam et al. 2005, p2). The symptoms range from the oral allergy syndrome, to skin disorders, to gastro- intestinal disorders to even anaphylactic shocks (which can be lethal). (Asero 2007). At present, medical science lacks a cure for food allergies: keeping from any exposure to the allergen at all cost is the only measure for the patient. (Asero 2007).
Although a clear communality (in time) is visible with the mass-production and globalization of food production, immunologists and allergologists remain uncertain about the actual relationships between food allergies and food mass production. However, one thing is for sure: due to food mass production, it has become extremely complex to avoid allergens. Shared production lines, shared preparation processes and shared transport lead to cross-contamination more than ever. (Mills et al. 2004).
At present, international regulations do not oblige companies to declare cross-contaminations on food ingredient labels. Furthermore, in mass food production typical allergens such as soy, egg and wheat widely are used as basic components (for instance as binders or emulsifiers). (David, 1989; David, 1993). As a consequence, many food products contain undeclared food allergens and provide a large potential danger to patients suffering from food allergies. (Ezendam et al. 2005, p2).
So, what does this mean for the patient?
When a patient suffering from food allergies attempts to manage his or her food diet, he or she is not only very restricted in his or her food choice, he or she he is also confronted with food ingredient labels which provide poor information: the labels are incomplete, unclear or even incorrect about the possible allergenic contents of the food product. In practice this means that the patients are living in a minefield: they have to rely on trial -and-error to find out if a food product is free from allergens. This trial -and-error process proves to be burdensome and ineffective, and induces a high stress level on both patients and their social surroundings. (Sampson et al. 2008, p.443).
At the Technical University of Eindhoven Sebastian Goudsmit has dedicated his graduation project to an extensive evaluation of the present situation of food allergen management in manufacturing companies on one side, and user behavior on the other side. Next he has developed a food scanner, named the Allergen Beagle, which enables users to screen food for possible allergenic contents in their own homes, with a straight forward automated test at low-cost. This product has been developed together with three academic hospitals and manufacturing companies. At this moment, the system is able to detect peanut, shellfish, gluten, lactose, hazelnut, egg, soy, almonds and sesame. Future tests are developed to broaden this spectrum.
How does the Allergen Beagle work?
This product proves to be a valuable tool for people suffering from allergies. The tool empowers users to make sure that their diets are allergen free. This is done in two ways: before introduction into the diet, the patient can screen the food product for allergens he or she is allergic to, and hence obtain more certainty about the possible allergenic contents of the food . The system can also be of value when the patient has had an accidental allergic reaction. In this case the system can be used to trace back which food component has been responsible for the reaction. In this way, the Allergen Beagle may relieve the patient of feeling constantly at risk of an allergic reaction (which can be lethal).
As shown in the movie, the user goes through the following steps:
1. Take multiple small samples from the food to be screened for allergens.
2. There is one test-tube needed per allergen to be tested. Select the test tubes needed.
3. Fill up the tubes with the test-tube with the sample.
4. Insert the test tube into the Allergen Beagle.
5. An automated process completes the procedure.
6. During the procedure a bright light elicits the process.
7. When the light turns off, the test can be read. If the ‘ Test line’ colour turns dark, and the ‘ Control line’ turns dark, the allergen is present.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Images and movie by Sebastian Goudsmit
September 24 2011
Jet Powered Barbecue
At first sight it seems plain wrong to roast your burgers on this utterly technological machine: barbecuing is supposed to be a nostalgic low-tech activity that brings us back to nature and sooths our inner caveman.
Yet although we, 21th century people, consider barbecuing a more natural way of cooking food than our everyday microwave, at some point in our human history – most anthropologists estimate around 250,000 years ago – cooking food on fires was a radically new technological achievement: a handy technique to extend our stomach and predigest our food before it would enter our body.
Cooking is perhaps the greatest example of how that what was once a technological achievement may be naturalized over time – up to the level that we don’t recognize it as technology anymore and think of it as part of our nature. Think about it next time you place a burger on the grill, or in the molecular food printer for that matter.
Image source.
September 18 2011
Peelable Ice Cream
Filed under Biomimicmarketing. Pleases your inner monkey. Peelable banana ice cream by Nesle. Thanks Jurrian.
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