INSPIRE / SHOWCASE

The Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking project is a mobile truck that collects food nearing their supermarket sell-by date and uses it in culinary experiments.

Surplus food truck

The Last Meal project looks at the last meal prisoners on death row chose to have.

The meal of all meals

Is it silk, or could it be milk? Anke Domaske has created a new material from milk protein.

Clothes made of milk

The Chronic Facility is an alternative system for treating people with chronic disease.

Food treatment

Using acrylic, collage, watercolour, ink and pen, illustrator David Meldrum documented everything he ate for a year.

Draw your food

Every month Turntable Kitchen sends their subscribers a "Pairings Box" of recipe and music combinations to try at home.

Sounds for eating

Arabeschi di Latte is a group of Italian women designers who use design concepts and food to explore situations and relationships.

Conviviality collective

Lucy and Jorge Orta's 70 x 7 The Meal takes its cue from an ancestral ritual and encourages networking, socialising and discussions around food.

Multiplying meals

The Wonderwater Cafe was a pop-up restaurant that aimed to raise awareness about global water issues.

The waterprint of food

Compost Mobile is a Miami-based initiative that collects household food scraps and turns it into compost for community gardens.

Compost truck

Renée Walker's food labels rethink how we receive nutritional information.

Nutritious labelling

Espresso for Marcel Proust, vinegar for Lord Byron, milk for Franz Kafka and other ingredients of good writing.

The ingredients of good writing

Can a vegetarian and an omnivore share the same meal without compromise? The Doppelganger Dinner makes it almost possible,

Seeing the meat for the peas

Speculative designer James King considers what the meat of the future might like look.

Meat you in vitro

Cheese made from human breast milk comments on the lack of self-reflection in food design.

Cheese from humans

What is really useless? How about the Cloaca machine that turns food into faeces?

Mechanical gut

Tuur van Balen's "Cook Me: Black Bile" is a recipe for controlling feelings of melancholy.

Blood pudding

Flour, coffee, cocoa and salt are some of the ingredients used in Formafantasma's Baked collection of containers.

Produced from food

If you can print fashion and furniture with 3D printing techniques, it follow that we should also be able to print food. The Fab@Home project investigates.

Food deskjet

Graphic designer John Jansen created a range of organic inks by using the juice of vegetables like carrots, spinach and red cabbage.

Veggie toner

More Showcases

Bookish

Showcase

Calling all book lovers! Take a look at this collection of interesting and alternative bookcases.

Highlights from Milan Design Week 2011

Showcase

Looking back at some of the highlights of the 2011 Milan Design Week when the International Furniture Fair celebrated its 50th anniversary.

Brain food

A vegetarian butchery, cheese made from human breast milk, a 3D food printer and a machine that turns food into faeces, food design is fascinating.

Topic:

Food Design

There are two neurobiological mechanisms that make us eat, one driven by need and the other by desire.

Based in the brain’s hypothalamus, the need to eat is sparked by metabolic messages from the digestive system.

The desire to eat, however, is controlled by higher brain centres such as the dopamine reward system. When food with high calories counts is taken in, the nucleus accumbens part of the brain is flooded with dopamine, thus increasing the eater’s pleasure.

Often the dopamine rewards system overrides the hypothalamus, which is why we carry on eating tasty food, even when we’re not hungry.