Food – Page 10 – Kristen Baumlier

Category: Food

Today is World Food Day : A Focus on Hunger and Agricultural Cooperatives

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Kbaumlier

Today, October 16th is a worldwide event that is designed to increase awareness, understanding and informed, year-around action to alleviate hunger. Today around the world people are participating by organizing a World Food day food packaging event, walking to end hunger, doing food drives, and hosting a “World Food Day meal.” The day focuses on how each of us does can do something to help stop the needless suffering of nearly a billion people worldwide who are hungry.

This year’s World Food Day theme is “Agricultural cooperatives – key to feeding the world.” The theme is announced each spring by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. This topic was chosen since
cooperatives are an important force in achieving food security.

The World Day food website reports that:“70 percent of those who face hunger live in rural areas where agriculture serves as the economic mainstay. Smallholder farmers are central to addressing hunger, yet many face barriers such as a lack of infrastructure, outdated farming practices, and a lack of access to financial services. Cooperatives improve farmers’ agricultural productivity and equip them with access to marketing, savings, credit, insurance, and technology. Farmer cooperatives serve both to connect farmers to markets and to increase food production.”

Over 1 billion individuals are members of cooperatives worldwide, generating more than 100 million jobs around the world. Areas include agriculture, forestry, fishing and livestock keeping, members participate in production, profit-sharing, cost-saving, risk-sharing and income-generating activities, which lead to better bargaining power for members as buyers and sellers in the marketplace.

More information about World Food Day and Agriculture Cooperatives can be seen on the World Day website, and in video made for the event that is on Youtube.

Image Source:
www.worldfooddayusa.org

Links:

www.worldfooddayusa.org

youtube video – Agricultural Cooperatives

Flavour SenseNation: a Taste, Sight, and Smell Experience

Posted on October 2, 2012October 2, 2012 by Kbaumlier

Ever eat ice cream while holding marshmallows in your hands? Done a smell comparison test and tried to identify aromas? Flavour SenseNation is a traveling interactive event that explores the ways we use each of our senses through a variety of interactive activities.

Sight, sound, and perception all influence how food tastes. From hearing the crunch of an apple, to being able to identify when something tastes sour (suggesting what you’re eating might be ‘off’), our senses play a vital role in protecting us from harm. At the Flavour SenseNation event, traditional dishes are reinvented to make them look entirely different from their origins, so visitors can test if the food is still appealing.

Some of the activities include:

– Mapping your tongue and identifying which of your taste buds are most sensitive to the five basic tastes.
– Discovering how and why food textures can influence the enjoyment of food,
– Exploring how different sounds can enhance the appreciation of flavor.
– Testing your ability to identify aromas
– Investigating how preconceptions can impair our sensory skills.

At a recent event at the Abergavenny food festival in Wales, visitors could taste parmesan with spiced plum chutney, beetroot with walnut /orange sprinkles and dehydrated fennel shard ice creams. There also were hot and cold sweets, rose pepper chocolate, and other sweets to test.

The producer of the exhibition is ActionDog CIC – a not-for-profit production company that devises and delivers creative projects to inspire and educate young people. The project is funded by the Wellcome Trust, and was created by the Sensory Scientist Dr. Lisa Methven, Professor Peter Barham, Lulie Biggs and Kianna Bahrami of ActionDog. Pictures and information about the project can be seen on the Flavour SenseNation facebook page.

Images:
FlavourSenseNation – Facebook site

Links:

FlavourSenseNation – Facebook site

http://www.actiondog.net/

http://molecularcuisine.sva.edu/

The Cookie Cup – A Coffee Cup You Can Eat

Posted on September 30, 2012October 2, 2012 by Kbaumlier

Ever want to drink from a cup and eat it too? Recently, a Venezuelan designer named Enrique Luis Sardi created a unique cup for Lavazza, the Italian coffee company. The cup is made of a cookie for the outside, and has a special patented sugar icing on the inside that creates an insulator for the cookie and add sweetness to the coffee.

Who wouldn’t want to drink from a cookie, and then eat it too? On his website, Sardi reports that he has won many awards for the cup in the area of ecology and design.

Image Source:
Cookie Cup – www.sardi-innovation.com

Links:

Cookie Cup – www.sardi-innovation.com

Got sauerkraut? Sauerkraut Powered Robots

Posted on September 17, 2012September 18, 2012 by Kbaumlier

Earlier this year, artist and programmer Jesse Hemminger organized a series of five potluck dinners at his apartment. He asked friends to bring something to eat or drink, and to bring a canning jar or empty glass spaghetti sauce jar. He also asked them to write and bring a piece of paper something that they were holding onto and knew they needed to let go of.

At the potluck, everyone filled their jar with shredded cabbage and salt. Hemminger let everyone know that the cabbage would ferment and transform into homemade sauerkraut. He collected all of the sheets of paper and later shredded, pulped, and transformed them into a fresh new sheet of paper which Hemminger planned to make into a piece of art.

Sauerkraut is acidic, and can become a battery similar to lemon or potato batteries that are often created as a science experiment in the classroom. The chemical reaction of the copper and zinc electrodes put into the acidic food creates an electrical charge. From his potluck event, Hemminger decided to make robots powered by sauerkraut. He also decided to have them draw on the paper that he made out of his friends papers written with the things they wanted to let go.

He has shown the sauerkraut robot drawing machines at a couple of gallery shows this year, and also this past weekend at the Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland. I was doing a project behind him, and I watched as lots of visitors checkd out his sauerkraut batteries and his robots as they made marks and drawings on the paper.

The small robots look like insects and have small pieces of lead attached to them. They hop or skip around on paper while making graphite marks on the paper. One draws lines, another makes circles. The resulting drawings are abstract and the food batteries are a play on the “power of food.”

Image Source:
The Sauerkraut Project Blog

Links:

The Sauerkraut Project Blog

Video – The Sauerkraut Project

Jesse Hemminger Website

Local Food Lab – A New Food Incubator for Entrepeneurs

Posted on September 16, 2012September 17, 2012 by Kbaumlier

Are you interested in sustainable food and agriculture? Have an idea for a food or farm startup but lack the necessary business knowledge to get started? Do you want to improve access to healthy foods for more people while reducing our reliance on conventional agriculture?

Local Food Lab which is based in Silicon Valley has a food entrepreneur accelerator program that provides food entrepeneurs with training, access, and resources during a 6 week program. The program is designed for individuals interested in creating startups that offer prepared food products, catering and food services, food+tech products, urban to medium-scale agricultural services, and programs that expand the interest and demand for a more sustainable food system.

Cofounders Krysia Kajonc and Mateo Aguilar felt that the challenges of getting food from farms to table, and linking producers to buyers could be improved with a startup bootcamp. They wanted to wanted to tie in technology, design, and the startup model to help entrepreneurs work to create business models that might address the challenge of producing enough food so that the prices can be more affordable.

Applicants pay $2500 in tuition for a six week program to learn how to create a marketing plan, create financial projections, and have access to Local Food Lab’s kitchen, garden, and collaborative space, and meet with mentors. The end of the program culminates in a pitch night in front of potential investors.

Some of the past participants include Cynthia King who wanted to create a “edible churchyard,” and is currently planning to launch six farms in collaboration local churches, a synagogue and nonprofits. Each faith organization can decide how to use the food and whether is be donated or sold for profit.

Plans for Local Food Lab is to bring the program to New York and to expand it to other cities and countries in the future. If you have an idea, you can get information on the Local Food lab site about applying to the next accelerator program.

Image Source:
http://www.localfoodlab.com/

Links:

http://www.localfoodlab.com/