Happy Plants and A Smiling Belly: Investigating the Probable Future of the Human Food System
Food sits at the center of human life. It fuels our days and is the root of social activities in restaurants and at family meals. Quite literally, it sustains us. Yet, as a culture, we have lost touch with where our food comes from and how a nutritious, delicious diet can be used to create a healthier, happier, more sustainable future. Bart Haney's thesis, Happy Plants and A Smiling Belly: Investigating the Probable Future of the Human Food System, proposes radical shifts in thinking about the design of public information.
Bart designed provocative solutions to heal ailing bodies, toxic lands, and a broken system in the service of happy plants and even happier bellies. Reimagining the production and distribution of fruits, vegetables, and synthetic proteins brings traditional foodstuffs in line with current and future needs, building absolutely toward a healthier future.
Crop Circles
Crop Circles is a modern farm share infrastructure that cultivates fruits and vegetables locally in precisely controlled indoor farms and delivers produce to customers' doors within hours of harvesting. This approach gives Crop Circles the capacity to provide seasonal favorites, all year round. Crop Circles' technologically integrated farming process enables users to be engaged with and informed of their produce's progress. Using a digital platform, shoppers select crops for the week, the month, even the year. Each piece of produce is then specifically grown for each customer, harvested, and delivered to the client's doorstep within 24 hours.
The latest advances in lighting, environmental controls, and nutritional delivery enable crops to be cultivated for each plant's demanding needs. The growing cycle for the produce uses a "Root Train" process. A series of sequential plants have the beginning of their growing cycles offset in such a way that enables picture-perfect produce ripening each and every week, all year long. This leads to a quality of product generally unachievable in typical grocery stores and CSAs. Moreover, because each piece of produce is grown on demand, customers aren't limited to the narrow selection at most groceries and farmers' markets.
BigFarma
BigFarma is a new tool for social medicine that closes the loop of care. Envisioned to help borderline symptomatic individuals struggling to manage the onset of chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, BigFarma uses food as the first level of prevention and to support medication in treatment. Subsidized by the national medical system, BigFarma provides prescribed fruits and vegetables that function like prescription medications. Using a connected ecosystem of health professionals, intelligent nutrition algorithms, and modern farming practices, BigFarma explicitly connects a client's overall health with food to fight the onset of diet-related diseases.
The BigFarma process is dynamic and straightforward. In concert with a user's doctor or healthcare professional, samples are taken to study the client's body chemistry, develop a DNA profile, and create a map of their gut biome. Data is aggregated into an app, illuminating the customer's current nutritional levels and a progress warning for chronic diseases. Intelligent nutrition algorithms then generate a unique ideal diet outline for the user, recommending healthy foods that deliver essential nutrients and driving overall physical health in a positive direction. The BigFarma app also allows users to assemble specific meals to be grown and delivered. A service like Crop Circles would grow produce to precise demands, even priming the growing environment to maximize nutritional yields for each piece of produce. Meal kits, including recipe cards and the nutritionally rich produce used to prepare them, are delivered to a customer's door within 24 hours of harvest for maximum nutrition.
UpRoots: Modular Farming GrowCarts
Imagine walking into a grocery store and pulling juicy grapes from the vine, plucking tart oranges from a tree, or ripping a sweet ear of corn right off its stalk. UpRoots modular farming GrowCarts provide an opportunity to realize this fantasy on the shopping floor, allowing users to literally pick the freshest, most nutritious produce possible. Created to enable businesses to grow produce on site, each modular UpRoots GrowCart is a foundation for a controlled-environment agriculture infrastructure and can be set up anywhere with access to a water supply and natural or artificial light.
Crops are grown under controlled lighting and are fed water uniquely engineered to give precise nutrients to each specific plant type, assuring healthy yields from happy plants. A "Root Train" process is employed to guarantee an uninterrupted supply of product. It allows for accurate calculation of production quantity while consistently delivering perfectly ripe fruits and vegetables to hungry customers, all within a single building.
GrowCarts can also be deployed to harvesting facilities for Crop Circles and BigFarma, trucked out to satellite grocery stores or moved down to the consumer grocery store floor. With portability built into their DNA, produce-laden GrowCarts from a central hub also have the flexibility to be loaded onto trucks and shipped to regional markets, providing options for users located in both high-consumption areas and food deserts.
Absurd Meats
Absurd Meats—a tongue-in-cheek take on synthetic meat's possibilities—rewrites the potential of lab-grown plant-based protein products, with each product inspired by an animal that exists outside of the mainstream food culture. With products like Freshly Clubbed Baby Seal, Cross-Cut Giraffe Neck Steak, and Nearly Extinct Panda Paw Nuggets, Absurd Meats provoke consumers and designers to reconsider the trend of recreating natural meat products with synthetic proteins.
Opportunities for edible adventures exist within the limits of the imagination. They can now be realized in engineering facilities with the cornucopia of flavors and textures available from modern food science. Absurd Meats exist as a challenge to the contemporary agricultural-industrial complex and a call to food science professionals committed to developing a spectrum of tasty, planet-friendly, highly nutritious range of meat alternatives for 21st-century consumers.
Snackreligious
We all crave junk food, be it cake, candy, or quesadillas, but science tells us that eating healthy is essential for a long battery life. Using the power of food science for good, Snackreligious transforms unappetizing, nutrient-rich foods into stealthy healthy junk food on demand. The consumer experience begins with a trip to the Snackreligious web site.
The interface allows users to list their most deeply desired junk foods and share some of the dietary goals they would like to realize. This data is then sent to the Snackreligious food lab, where the craveable snack's process, texture, flavor, and nutritional properties are engineered. Tasty, nutritious treats are then custom-manufactured and packaged in our plant-plant, and the newly designed craveable snack is prepared for shipping to the client. Customers can choose to set up recurring shipments weekly or monthly, with details managed through the consumer web interface.
To learn more about Bart Haney's work, take a look at his projects in more detail at bartscience.com.