Growing your own food has become a movement worldwide, with city-dwellers getting up close and personal with their food for the first time since food technologies made food production and distribution on a global scale possible. Designers are taking this one step further, addressing food futures and working with the community to create new ways of growing food.
Dutch designer Chloe Rutzerveld is addressing food futures by thinking small, as she relates in her talk at Ninety Minutes of Frame in Amsterdam. Using a personalized 3D file, Rutzerveld creates a small lattice shape in pastry or pasta, adding seeds, spores and yeast, with the resulting object developing and growing over five days into a delicious, edible and beautiful object.
“High tech food doesn’t have to be unhealthy or unnatural,” says Rutzerveld. “It can actually have a lot of advantages.” Here she is speaking about Edible Growth:
At the Milan Expo 2015, France is creating a pavilion on the theme “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” focusing on how to produce and supply food in a new way. The focus here is on combining a local and global approach, as well as recognizing the role of science and innovation, which does not rule out quality, or the preservation of taste or cultures. The architecture of the pavilion, by Studio X-TU with the support of Studio ALN Atelien Architecture and Studio Adeline Rispal, is based on an inverted landscape, a vast timber structure with vegetation grown directly into the structure, forming green walls, ceiling and roof. Reminds me a little of the incredible Seed Cathedral UK pavilion by Thomas Heatherwick at the Shanghai Expo in 2010.
In Sydney, architecture firm Woods Bagot has also been involved in food futures in the form of a Rooftop Garden for refugees, organized by St Canice’s in Kings Cross. This incredible community project has been built as a project for refugees on bridging visas who are not allowed to work. The food grown at the garden is used in the soup kitchen and also is being used by local celebrity chef Kylie Kwong’s new restaurant in nearby Potts Point. Woods Bagot helped with design services, including the design of awnings and a BBQ area, to be constructed this year.
While technology has changed food production for the better on a mass scale by making more food options available at low prices for more people in all corners of the globe, these projects are bringing the small, the local, back to the forefront of food.
Speaking of food futures, have you seen this beautiful video by Chipotle that won some awards a while back? Lovely animation and great branding.