The Taste of Tomorrow
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  • One word: Seaweed

    Posted in: Aquaculture 2.0

    Consider the fact du jour, on October 30, 2011, the day the world’s population breached 7 billion:

    Oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth, yet yield two percent of our total food. 2 percent? That’s puny, and that’s not because oceans are unproductive. It’s because they’re untapped. We humanoids don’t use what the ocean offers us — and I’m not talking about obscure fish or shellfish species.

    The roughly 80 million metric tons of fish landed each year by the world’s commercial fisheries derive from over 10,000 million metric tons of phytoplankton. In other words, phytoplankton —aka seaweed aka kelp — represents the overwhelming majority of the ocean’s food.

    With demographers predicting 9.1 billion people by 2050, with limited fresh water and arable land, marine plants — yes, that’s seaweeds — must become the primary crop for food, feed and other applications.

    This is an argument that I first heard from John Forster, a well-respected aquaculture scientist and consultant based in Port Angeles, Washington. Forster, a Brit, who worked for years in the farmed salmon industry, makes his case in a fascinating post “Towards a Marine Agronomy.” As those of you who read the “About Us” section might recall, this short talk with Forster was one of the reasons this site was created — to continue to investigate new food sources.

    As Forster points out in his essay “Towards a Marine Agronomy,” the only countries that farm seaweed at any significant scale are in Asia; the Chinese, the world leaders, produce about 10 million tons of seaweed each year. But according to Forster, the potential for growth is astronomical.

    Consider fact du jour #2:

    Laminaria, a seaweed species, can average nearly 20 metric tons of per hectare per year, according to data from Chinese aquaculturists.

    Pulling from this data, Forster offers that “only one percent of the Earth’s ocean surface would be needed to grow and amount of seaweed equal to all the food plants currently farmed on land.”

    The idea of marine agronomy isn’t new — kelp is widely believed to be the world’s fastest growing plants — but it’s an idea that has gained little traction in the United States. One of the few examples is Ocean Approved, a small Maine-company that is believed to be America’s only commercial kelp farm. Three years ago, two guys started cultivating kelp in Casco Bay and began marketing it as an exotic vegetable. They’re the first we’ve found that are pitching the idea of kelp noodles, kelp salad, kelp slaw.

    Next month:
    Beyond Seaweed Salad. What do marine vegetables taste like?

  • Forager’s Update

    Posted in: Beyond Mesclun

    The Killer App from the Wildman

    Wildman Steve Brill has given us some of the best  foraging guidebooks around. Now, the New York City foraging guru, and author of forager essential, Identifying and Harvest Edible and Medicinal Plants in the Wild (and Not So Wild) Places is going high-tech.

    In what could be the killer app of mobile technology, the Wildman had developed  “The Master Foraging Apps,” available in I-tunes.  You can go a la carte — for $2.99, for instance, you can get Steve’s edible shrubs guide — or you can get the complete Wild Edibles series for $7.99.

    It’s a user-friendly, hand-held tool — complete with illustrations and text — to aid in the search for fiddlehead ferns and pawpaws.

    The New Yorker Goes Foraging — And We Grow Envious

    Earlier this week, the New Yorker ran a fascinatingly detailed travelogue investigating the surging interest in foraging.  Writer Jane Kramer spent weeks traveling Europe — mushroom-hunting in England, searching for wild mint and asparagus in Umbria, scouring the beaches of Denmark for reindeer moss.  Kramer went wild food hunting with a forager’s dream team — including Rene Redzepi.   Reading it was painful –due to the striking pangs of jealousy.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    I ate reindeer moss at Noma, deep- fried, spiced with cèpes, and deliciously crisp. It was the third of twenty-three appetizers and tasting dishes I ate that night, the first being a hay parfait—a long infusion of cream and toasted hay, into which yarrow, nasturtium, camomile jelly, egg, and sorrel and camomile juice were then blended. The second arrived in a flower pot, filled with malted, roasted rye crumbs and holding shoots of raw wild vegetables, a tiny poached mousse of snail nestling in a flower, and a flatbread “branch” that was spiced with powdered oak shoots, birch, and juniper. I wish I could describe the taste of those eloquent, complex combinations, but the truth is that, like most of the dishes I tried at Noma, they tasted like everything in them and, at the same time, like nothing I had ever eaten. Four hours later, I had filled a notebook with the names of wild foods. Redzepi collected me at my table, and we sat for a while outside, on a bench near the houseboat, looking at the water and talking. I didn’t tell him that I’d passed on the little live shrimp, wriggling alone on a bed of crushed ice in a Mason jar, that had been presented to me between the rose-hip berries and the caramelized sweetbreads, plated with chanterelles and a grilled salad purée composed of spinach, wild herbs (pre-wilted in butter and herb tea), Swiss chard, celery, ground elder, Spanish chervil, chickweed, and goosefoot, and served with a morel-and-juniper-wood broth. I told him that it was the best meal I had ever eaten, and it was.

    The whole piece “The Food At Our Feet” is readable on the New Yorker’s site.   One takeaway note for Anglophile foragers: Get  The New Oxford Book of Food Plants.

  • A Good GMO: Allergen-Free Peanut Butter

    Posted in: Good GMOs, Things We HEART

     

    Since this is the inaugural post in the Good GMOs category, let’s briefly explain our position.

    You can use a computer to build a web site that raises money for starving refugees in Darfur.   You can also use a computer to create malware that destroys web sites, disables businesses, and thwarts efforts to raise money for starving refugees in Darfur. You can use airplanes to deliver food.  Or you can airplanes to deliver bombs.

    It’s true.  There are some bad genetically engineered crops out there. Some GMOs, circa 2011,  are created by rapacious petrochemical corporations.  They are herbicide and pesticide tolerant, so they encourage the spraying of more chemicals on crops, that, in turn, increase sales for these large petrochemical corporations. Intellectual property law, circa 2011, makes it possible for the wealthiest, most powerful corporations to own genes, the very building blocks of life. It’s true that GMOs, by and large, circa 2011, advance monoculture, thwart biodiversity and are not the ally of small farmers.

    Still,  as with computers, and other technologies, there are BAD THINGS and there are GOOD THINGS.

    One of the goals of The Taste of Tomorrow is to spotlight smart, safe, promising uses of GMO crops that can help protect the earth, improve food quality, and save lives.

    ***

    As many parents of  school-age children in the US know,  peanut butter – once a staple of school lunches – is often verboten.

    Peanuts and  peanut butter are banned by a number of schools across the country, and others have created so-called “nut-free zones.”  There’s some talk that the FAA will institute a total ban on peanuts on commercial airlines. This makes sense.  Although the numbers of people allergic to peanuts is small, those who are allergic have a a potentially life-threatening response.. Even trace amounts of peanut dust can leave a child covered in hives and gasping for air.

    (Personal encounter: When my four-year-old daughter mistakenly called her sunflower butter sandwich a peanut butter sandwich, we got an immediate call from a school administrator. Why? There’s a boy in her class with an extreme peanut allergy.

    But there is promising work  that could bring peanuts back to schools.  Even allowing Kate’s classmate to have a PB&J some day.

    For the past decade, Peggy Ozias-Akins of the University of Georgia in Tifton has been using genetic engineering to grow hypoallergenic peanuts.

    In research profiled widely in the biotech world,  Ozias-Akins and her team have developed peanuts that do not produce two proteins that are among the most intense allergens.   A story in Wired, summarizes the paper that appeared in the Journal of Food Chemistry:

    The biologists shot a customized DNA sequence into the plants with a gene gun, causing the legumes to produce hairpin-shaped RNA molecules, which halt the production of the two proteins. Messing with the genetic code of a plant could potentially cause the seeds to develop improperly, change the taste of the crop, or render it more susceptible to fungal infections. But Ozias-Akins’ team found that they grow normally and can resist a common mold without any problems.

    Still, getting rid of every allergy-causing substance in peanuts would not be easy, Ozias-Akins said. “Given the number of allergenic proteins in peanuts, I doubt that developing an allergen-free peanut is realistic.” Although it may be impossible to make a perfectly safe peanut, clipping the right genes out could make food accidents far less common.

  • For the best Sene-Gambian, Cameroonian, Ethiopian, and Sudanese food

    Posted in: African Cuisines

    As readers of The Taste of Tomorrow will find out in April of 2011 (sorry for blowing the suspense), Detroit is not a great city for African cuisine exploration.  Chicago is slightly better.   It is just not easy, in America circa 2011, to properly explore the range of sub-Saharan African cuisines.   So if you’re not traveling to the big continent, or to London, your best bet is probably D.C.

    DC has the highest concentration of Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants in the states.  One DC neighborhood, Adams Morgan, feels like a quasi-Little Ethiopia.  And DC has Bukom Café, which is, in my humble view, probably the best place for an introduction to West African food. ( Not only does Bukom, fyi, offer consistent pan-West African food (Ghanaian, Nigerian, Sierra Leonean, Gabon), it’s friendly, spirited serves African ginger beer and beer-beer and has music most nights of the week.  (A must-try).  But I am even more convinced that my old home-town is the best place for African food after searching through Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide.   Cowen, economist,  uber-blogger, and regular NY Times contributors, also has a side passion for ethnic food exploration.  Cowen, author of one of my favorite statement ever “All food is ethnic food” has been eating-through DC’s ethnic option with Chowhound-like intensity for years, and he has surprisingly extensive coverage of sub-saharan African food.   Judging from Tyler’s site,  DC has a pretty good range of West African options —Ghanaian, Seneglasese, Sierra Leonean.  Most intriguingly, DC had a Cameroonian restaurant, the Roger Miller Restaurant, named after a Cameroonian football star (according to web report, Roger Miller is “relocating”) and a Sudanese place, called El Khartoum.  Not to mention African specialty stories.

    The TofT magazine will report back on the sub-Saharan African foodstuffs of DC during a fact-finding visit this February.   Also, fyi, good reading found:  extensive coverage of Ethipian restaurants and markets in the U.S.


     

  • TofT First Genius Award: The Window Farm Project

    Posted in: Urban Ag.

    It’s such a simple, elegant, self-evidently brilliant idea that it caused an overwhelming sense of why-didn’t-we-think-of-that-envy in both of us.

    The Windowfarm is, quite literally, a mini-farm in your window.  It is moron-friendly hydroponic growing system, which allows people, who live in studio apartments in places like Battery Park City, to experience the thrill of DIY food production.  We love it because it gives people the chance to experience first-hand the type of recirculating agriculture (controlling inputs, varying light, climate) that we believe will be key to achieving sustainability and food security.  The motto of Windowfarm _- Know Your Food Source. Grow Organic Food in your window.

    You can try the Windowfarm yourself for as little as $140.  If you’re more comfortable in your shop skills, you can do it for less.  The Windowfarm site provides details on how to build your own home unit from scratch.

    We shouldn’t over-enthuse about the Windowfarm until we actually produce some home-grown  butter lettuce.

    BUT, another reason why we’re so hot for the Windowfarm. It’s a nonprofit AND it’s bsed on the open-source method of user-collaboration.  The Windowfarms Project web site offers friendly user forums to help newbie’s figure out the optimal way of using their kits. In fact, the whole Windowfarms idea was founded on the idea that crowdsourcing could be harnessed to solve environmental problems, i.e.:  R&D-I-Y: Mass Collaboration to Solve Environmental Problems

    “The ultimate aim of the Windowfarms project is not primarily to create a perfected physical object or product. Rather, the targeted result is for participants to have a rewarding experience with crowsdsourced innovation. The team is interested to learn from participants’ experience as they design for their own microenvironments, share ideas, rediscover the power of their own capacity to innovate, and witness themselves playing an active role in the green revolution.

    The TofT editors aren’t the only ones gone ga-ga over the Windowfarms idea — Martha Stewart is also an enthusiast.  We’ll keep you posted on our road test of the Windowfarm .

     

  • SkyFarm Visionary: Think Smaller

    Posted in: Alt. Meat

    As urban-farming geeks know, one of the most audacious-sounding vertical farm plans was for Toronto, Canada. 58 floors, costing $1.5 billion. It was to be a pioneering test of the idea that the key to food security is not to connect ourselves to nature, but to depend on technological systems.

    It also would bring locally grown, organic raspberries and bananas to Ontario in January.

    Now, I’ve always thought that most likely spot for the inevitable debut of skyscraper farming would be Japan or Dubai: places with a dense population, limited arable,  a strong economic rational for a SkyFarm.

    Still, the idea that the Canadians could lead the way in vertical farms made sense. Canada, the Great White North, has been pioneering indoor farming for years.  If you buy a tomato in Chicago in January, there’s a decent chance it’s coming from a hydroponic farm in southern Ontario.  And the British Columbia-based company TerraSphere, a one-time medical marijuana grower, has been on the cutting edge of using hydroponic technology to develop highly efficient, eco-friendly urban-based growing systems.   (Plus, there’s plenty of locavore foodies in Toronto and Montreal who would love the idea of locally, produced organic greens in February)

    But last month, Gordon Graff, the young architect who conceived the SkyFarm, told The Walrus (my favorite Canadian magazine) that he now thinks it’s extremely unlikely the farm will ever happen. The space in downtown Toronto, slated for the farm, is now home to the Toronto International Film Festival.

    Graff thinks the economic rationale is simply not there for the Gates-ian expenditure necessary to justify SkyFarm.  Graff believes that for vertical farming to happen there will have to be a stronger economic incentive to support locally grown produce He also believes that the economic viability vertical farms hinges on their ability to produce their own electricity. One promising technology: A new waste disposal method called plasma arc gasification would allow vertical farms to recycle solid waste into usable energy without producing harmful emissions.

    Graff says he’s shifted focus to smaller scale urban indoor farms.

    For more on vertical farming, take a look at Dickson Despommier’s Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century.  Despommier, a prof. of public and environmental health at Columbia, and vertical farming’s biggest cheerleader, provides details and schemata on how high-rise farms could work.   To go inside a functioning indoor farm, circa 2011, here’s a short tour through this English farm,  a pioneer of small-scale vertical farming, which grows produce for a zoo..

     

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