March 2014 – Kristen Baumlier

Guerrilla marketing and a social experiment? Today we are connected increasingly with social media, but how connected are we to people who are literally next to us?

I know that I am guilty of staring at my phone when out in public rather than starting a conversation with someone next to me. A project in Canada created by Duracell explores personal and social connection, and the idea of “what if you had to connect with other people, and to physically touch each other, in order to work together for a common goal?”

In Montreal heaters were installed in a bus shelter, and the commuters waiting there had to use their bodies to connect a circuit and get warm. In order to get warm, they had to create a human circuit by holding hands and creating a human connection.

Duracell created the project and produced a video of the bus shelter being used. The video of the shelter is on the Duracell Facebook page, and for each share they will donate $1 to Habitat to Humanity Canada. (Up to $25,000) Go ahead and hold the hand of the person next to you and check out the video.

Image Sources and Links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mQZqKLiMIg

@Duracell

Last year I got into reading more sites and blogs about food and culture. Last summer many sites were reporting on the MAD Symposium, an annual gathering of few hundred writers, chefs, scientists, historians and fermentation activists. This year MAD was held in Copenhagen in August, and was dedicated to the topic of “guts.” At MAD, chefs from around the world gather and discuss the challenges and responsibilities that go beyond cooking. Talks and discussions center on new questions to ask, and how to become more imaginative and inquisitive.

A new lecture series at the Drawing Center in New York brings chefs together on Mondays to talk about food, culture and other issues. I wasn’t able to attend (I am in Durham, NC) but I read a great review of the event on which listed the “top 10 quotes” of the event which focused on what it means to be a chef.

The event was moderated by Lucky Peach editor Peter Meehan and had 4 chefs and 1 author engaged in a conversation about chefs and cooking.. Some of the topics that emerged included the growing star power of chefs, whether cooks today are any better or worse than they were 10 or 20 years ago, and the impact of new cooking technologies.

You can read more about the top 10 quotes from the night from the review of the event on eater.com.

Here is a sneak peak of the topics of the top 10 quotes:

1) Batali, on the impact of food television:
2) Hanson, on how the cooking career path has changed
3) Batali, on his changing place in the restaurant community
4) Nasr, on why the food at Balthazar worked
5) Batali, on balancing customer-driven service with chef-driven vision
6) Hamilton, on shifting power dynamics:
7) Hamilton, on expansion:
8) Nasr, on his changing role as a chef:
9) Hamilton, on new cooking techniques and technologies:
10) Nasr, on the plus side of HR

Links and Image Sources:

http://eater.com/archives/2014/03/11/mad-mondays-nyc-batali-meehan-hamilton.php

http://www.finedininglovers.com/blog/news-trends/mad-mondays-coming-to-nyc/

Kristen Baumlier

Month: March 2014

MAD Symposium at the Drawing Center