The Future of Global Food Systems

A collection of signals for forecasting the future of food. Curated by Institute for the Future.

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ChefsFeed helps you discover restaurants in your area with recommendations from the experts. The app is free, and chefs in 50 different cities use it to make dining recommendations in those cities. (Find a list of included cities here). You can search by geographic location, or you can look up recommendations from specific chefs. You can also search by cuisine and look for recommended dishes at certain restaurants. There are over 1,000 chefs that contribute to the app, and you can browse them all by city. A few famous names include: David Chang, Christina Tosi, Antonia Lofaso, and Eric Ripert

Find the Best Restaurants Near You, According to Chefs

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The Case for Food Hubs

Food hubs – central locations where goods and produce can be aggregated, processed and shared with consumers and institutions – are key to the success of the local food movement.  

An exact definition of a food hub is hard to articulate, says Eat Local Caledon’s Karen Hutchinson.

http://wayneroberts.ca/archives/988

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Food designer Chloé Rutzerveld's concept for "healthy and sustainable" 3D-printed snacks that sprout little herbs and mushrooms for flavor

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Last November the Oakland City Council approved changes to the city’s agricultural regulations to allow gardeners to grow vegetables on vacant lots and sell without a permit, as long as they receive permission from the property owner. And in 2013, California passed the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones, which gave private landowners a financial reason to consider turning their vacant lots into a garden oasis: a lower property tax rate for those who allow their land to be leased for urban agricultural for at least five years.

Seeing Gardens in the Blight | Richmond Pulse

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"Satellites strip seafood pirates of their booty:" SkyTruth followed the ship Shin Jyi Chyuu 33 during one week last month. The group says the ship's irregular track and variations in speed, as seen on a map, are indicative of fishing.

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'What is the ethical boundary for designers' ability to influence consumption? Are we using our 'tools' wisely? This got me on a three-year journey to explore my field [and] examine the way we think as consumers,"

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As a potential method of preventing food waste, Paul Gong's conceptual Human Hyena project takes cues from the non-fussy eating habits of the scavenger animals. The idea involves the creation of new bacteria that could live in the human digestive system. This combined human-hyena bacteria would allow the body to eat rotten food without being sick.

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Republic of Salivation (Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta) - Design and Violence

this project comes from the realm known as speculative or critical design which does not work from the problem-solution paradigm but from the position of raising awareness and debate of issues through the creation of fictional scenarios that the creators do not necessarily advocate. This work does not therefore hinge upon its scientific accuracy, its moral relationship to our own values or even its plausibility to become reality. It rests on its ability to get its audience to discuss and react to the central subject matter – here, food shortages and famine. In fact your response in proposing a scientifically viable solution, in my view, only goes to prove the effectiveness of the work. To quote Paola from her Eyeo 2013 presentation, “in order to have consequence on a world that sometimes seems like to have lost its compass, designers and architects have to be brutal or disquieting, pose hard questions and tackle unpleasant subjects in uncomfortable ways.” This is what Burton Nitta do.

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If the artists were to focus more on observable nutrient and energy flows, and less on infantile science fictions, they would discover that the roots of our food crisis lie in a bad idea that can rather easily be fixed. The bad idea involved pumping nutrients out of distant ecosystems and feeding them to cities in a one-way process. This misstep dates back a long way, to the beginnings of agriculture, but its malignant effects have accelerated under thermo-industrial capitalism. For a long time, we did not realize that that the benefits brought by the plough and its successors would be time-limited. Now we do know. We are also beginning to understand how living soils function and how plants grow. In this new light, the idea of feeding ourselves by force, rather than by artful husbandry, is absurd. The good news is that we are on our way to “remembering the earth” once again. We are discovering—thanks, in part to science—that when left to do so, soil organisms support flora and food webs in mind-bogglingly complex but self-renewing interactions. These processes are interconnected, too, in a most modern way. In mycorrhiza, as Paul Stamets puts it, nature has evolved its own Internet over billions of years.

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It isn’t just that the alarm over the environmental effects of beef are overstated. It’s that raising beef cattle, especially on grass, is an environmental gain for the planet.

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Over the weekend, Russia decided to swap a dozen all-weather, supersonic, laser-guided attack aircraft for a load of Argentine beef and wheat.

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Why the next world war will be fought over food

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Cooki is designed to be a counter-top machine that can do most of your cooking for you. You'll still need to buy the ingredients and pre-chop your veggies and meats, but this the first appliance that promises to take care of all the remaining work when it comes to getting dinner ready.

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"When we digest fiber, the bacteria in our guts secrete a faatty acid called propionate, which actives the release of satiety horones. But to trigger the release of enough hormones to significantly suppress appetite, people would have to eat extremely large amounts of fiber." This more concentrated form of the molecule gives 8x the amount found in a traditional Western diet. Consumed in juice or smoothies, could help people maintain a healthy weight and cut back on overeating

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Venison As Benison: Food Banks Score From Deer Overpopulation : The Salt : NPR

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Africa's Ancient Plant Diversity And Seed Independence Still Under Threat From Proposed New Laws | Techdirt

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A start-up will contribute an interesting answer to the million-dollar food-policy question: If healthy food was as easy as junk food, would we eat more of it? (via The Dreadful Inconvenience of Salad - The Atlantic)