While Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sascha Pohflepp, and Andrew Stellitano’s electrosynthetic fruit speculates as to the edible effects of gravitational flux during the journey to Mars, other designers and artists have skipped ahead to investigate Martian terroir itself. IMAGE: Installation view, Martian terroir, Carlos Monleon-Gendall. Earlier this summer, Carlos Monleon-Gendall, exhibiting as part of the always-intriguing […]

IMAGE: Seasons of the Void, by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sascha Pohflepp, and Andrew Stellitano. For scientists trying to send human beings to Mars, the question of food looms large. NASA’s Advanced Food Technology Project team at Johnson Space Centre in Houston is charged with trying to design meals that will provide adequate nutrients, prevent boredom, […]

IMAGE: Two heads of whole zha cai with chilli paste; photograph by Sjschen via Wikipedia. Chinese officials, charged with moving 250 million rural farmers into cities over the next decade under the central government’s sweeping “National Plan for Promoting Healthy Urbanization (2011-20),” have developed a “pickle index” for measuring the movement of migrant workers. According […]

Between 2001 and 2005, an anthropologist, two archaeologists, and one photographer conducted a detailed observation and visual enthnography of the material culture of thirty-two middle-class Los Angeles households. The researchers, based at the Center on Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA, set out to explore how American families interact with their houses, yards, and, above all, with the mountain of stuff that they acquire:

Bompas & Parr, the culinary magicians behind aerosolised gin-and-tonics, cake-obstacled miniature golf, and architectural punchbowls, have published a new book exploring the olfactory, aesthetic, historical, and spectacular implications of fruit salad: Tutti Frutti with Bompas & Parr and Friends. IMAGE: Two of the book’s four fruity covers, complete with peel-able sticker. I am honoured to […]

The past week has brought two intriguing updates from London’s subterranean infrastructure of excretion. In a triumphant press release, Thames Water announced the removal of the world’s largest fatberg — a sewer-blocking, bus-sized lump of congealed cooking oil and wet wipes — from the drains under London Road in Kingston, Surrey. IMAGE: The UK’s biggest fatberg. […]

IMAGE: “Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, Texas” (2013), Mishka Henner (archival pigment print, 102x122cm). British photographer Mishka Henner’s most recent work shows the astonishing and terrible beauty of two of Texas’s most valuable landscapes — its feedlots and its oilfields — from above. IMAGE: “Coronado Feeders, Dalhart, Texas” (2013), Mishka Henner (detail). Even more astonishingly, the aerial […]

IMAGE: Misfortune cookies by Miss Insomnia Tulip. Miss Cakehead, a publicist specialising in edible stunts (why didn’t that job exist when I was in school?) has organised a network of pop-up Depressed Cake Shops, which will take over bakeries around England in August with an array of all-grey cakes. IMAGE: Black Dog macarons by Miss […]