In an attempt to reconnect ‘urban man’ with agriculture, Carlo Ratti Associati has made a hydroponic greenhouse for FICO Eataly World in Bologna. Every visitor can plant a seed in the greenhouse and control its growth thanks to an app connected to a series of sensors that record the growth process.
Another attempt at this is the barge garden of Mary Mattingly at Concrete Plant Park, Bronx River, New York City. Swale – that is the name of the ‘floating food forest’ – has been created thanks to a non-profit association, ABOG (A Blade of Grass), founded in 2011 to promote socially engaged art and projects that can bring social change.
Will we be entomophagous in the near future? The Danish non-profit organization Nordic Food Lab has just published the book On Eating Insects for Phaidon, demonstrating that eating bugs is closer to our nutritional culture than we might imagine, and represents a choice of biodiversity that can activate processes of global food sustainability, considering the increase in nutritional needs forecast around 70% by 2050 (FAO).
Studio H, a group of food designers from Cape Town (South Africa), has presented the project of a food pantry in collaboration with the Dutch Salt Farm Texel, which over the last ten years has produced vegetables irrigated with sea water.
With Plant15, the Dutch designer Doreen Westphal proposes vegetable sausages made from the scrap of oyster mushrooms cultivated in Holland, maximizing local industry. Likewise, the ECAL graduate Carolien Niebling has designed, in collaboration with the chef Gabriel Serero of Lausanne, future sausages containing few proteins from animals, shedding light on the ways with which this food with historical roots in the culture of many European countries is made.
The production of food has always been a matter of design.