New Florence. New Renaissance.

High-tech foodie

Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, is a fascinating man I had profiled in The New Polymath.

Here's a really intresting interview with him (sub required) about his foodie side and his 6 volume, 2,400 page tome 

Some excerpts:

"A big menu for us is 30 to 50. I believe in rapid pacing. We have small courses, and we keep them coming. So we'll do 30 courses in 2½ to 3 hours."

"A lot of what we do involves cooking at low temperatures. That's fundamentally enabled by the fact you can make a digital thermostat that controls temperature really, really well. But not everybody can buy a $10,000 professional oven or a professional water bath for doing sous vide. There should be toaster ovens and other appliances, both small and large, that use controlled temperature technology."

"One reason to invent new kinds of food is to get people proper nutrition without costs -- costs in money, calories, fat, carbon emissions, take your pick. Eating is such a central problem for mankind that there will be invention in the basics of what we eat. By the way, this has already happened in the past. Everyone on earth eats food that isn't native to where they're from. In Italy, they eat polenta and tomatoes. They're both from South America. In China, Szechuan food has lots of chilies. Guess what? Those are also from South America. And if you go around the world, almost everyone eats an ersatz diet."

Photo Credit

Test-Tube Meat

But producing in vitro meat — muscle tissue that’s cultured from animal cells and grown in a laboratory — has none of those hang-ups. In fact, it’s mouthwateringly efficient compared with existing methods of meat production, using 45% less energy and 99% less land, according to some estimates. It’s even endorsed by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. In 2008 the advocacy group promised a $1 million prize to the first producer that could mass-market lab-grown meat — proof that vegetarians who currently shun pork might be open to, say, lab-grown bacon.

Nobody has claimed that prize yet. But physiologist Mark Post and his team at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who have already grown small amounts of meat tissue, say they’re months away from producing the first in vitro burger. Their challenge — aside from convincing consumers that lab meat isn’t as gross as it sounds — will be cost. Proper cell cultivation is pricey (development expenses for the burger are estimated at north of $100,000), so it’ll be tough to scale with conventional farming, which produces 50 billion hamburgers each year in the U.S

Time

Bhutan: Organic Bread Basket?

Bhutan plans to become the first country in the world to turn its agriculture completely organic, banning the sales of pesticides and herbicides and relying on its own animals and farm waste for fertilisers.

In the west, organic food growing is widely thought to reduce the size of crops because they become more susceptible to pests. But this is being challenged in Bhutan and some regions of Asia, where smallholders are developing new techniques to grow more and are not losing soil quality.

Systems like "sustainable root intensification" (SRI), which carefully regulate the amount of water that crops need and the age at which seedlings are planted out, have shown that organic crop yields can be doubled with no synthetic chemicals.

The Guardian

50 Shades of Caffeine

(Caffeine) now comes in so many forms that it’s hard to keep up: soft drinks, obviously, but also energy drinks, energy shots, chewing gum, sports gels, and nasal sprays. In all of them, the marquee ingredient is a white powder, delivered to our bloodstreams by a sophisticated global supply chain that few of us know anything about.

The scale of this industry is as eye-opening as a NoDoz. Americans plow through more than 15 million pounds of powdered caffeine annually—enough to fill a freight train 2 miles long, all 270 cars loaded to the brim.

Wired

Click on graph twice to enlarge

Lab-Created Eco-Foods

Over the last year, two of the most esteemed VC firms on Sand Hill Road, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Khosla Ventures, have backed nearly a dozen startups trying to engineer healthier and cheaper alternatives to eggs (as with Hampton Creek’s product in photo), chicken, cheese, salt, and candy. The companies, whose creations are subject to FDA regulation, “are trying to replicate the sensory experience of proteins that we have all eaten,” says Amol Deshpande, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins who joined the firm from the agriculture giant Cargill. “It’s not just fake meat. The goal is to have a no-compromise solution.”

BusinessWeek

Photo Credit (click to enlarge)

Craft Distilleries

Southwest Spirit Magazine has an excellent review of "micro" distelleries across the US - see bottom of article for full list

"In 2000, there were fewer than 30 craft distilleries in the U.S. Though that number has swelled exponentially in the past 12 years, Kinstlick believes it’s only the beginning. “It’s been a bootstrap industry so far,” he says. “Most of the people who have entered the market have no distilling experience at all. They’re hobbyists who might have played around with a stovetop still or taken a distilling course and then bought a bigger rig and got licensed.” The next wave, Kinstlick predicts, will take place when employees of fledgling distilleries leave to establish their own operations. Which is not to say that it’s easy. Gathering funds, acquiring the proper permits, perfecting recipes, and navigating complex channels of distribution often takes years. And if you’re a purist like Dan Garrison, you don’t skimp. Or rush. "

"The earliest mobile apps"

Think of wine as raindrops and fruit from decades ago. Think of cheese as milk from years ago. From places far away. They are the some of mankind’s early mobile apps. So said Jonathon Alsop, founder of the Boston Wine School, as he led an entertaining evening of wine, cheese and food tasting. Some of the wines and his humorous guide (this wine screams “shut up and drink me”) are in the photos below.

Judith Rothrock of JRocket Marketing organizes something fun for her periodic “Grape Escape” events where she organizes for analysts to get a briefing from some of her clients (this time Unit4 and SYSPRO). In 2009, she organized a meal which mirrored Obama’s first inauguration dinner.

She also patronizes the Nine Zero, which is a really nice boutique hotel (part of the Kimpton Group), a stone's throw from the Park Street Church and just beyond the historic Boston Common which dates back to 1634.

How do they feed everyone at industry events?

Every event I have gone to this summer like Oracle OpenWorld at Moscone in San Francisco to Cognizant Community at the Fairmont Scottsdale, I have wanted to get a tour of the logistics behind how they feed so many.

Have not managed that tour but happened to watch the History Channel show “Mega Meals” in stadiums, on sea and elsewhere -  a nice proxy. Especially impressive are the mobile kitchens Johnny Rocket can set up just about anywhere.

Fascinating watch…

Raising the Bar

Alcohol-infused whipped cream is among the more vile recent booze inventions, but that hasn’t stopped hard partiers from hitting the can, and it's just one example of how alcohol marketers continue to reinvent their elixirs in new formats and flavors.

Cassandra Daily lists Innovations in alcohol including Beer Concentrate (including Pat’s from Alaska) , Vapor Cocktails and Flavorless spirits.

Spotted by my nephew Nitesh Mirchandani, who travels even more (and therefore gets to see more concoctions) than I did at his age.

Edible Packaging

Apples and grapes, for example, come encased in protective layers, and we're fine munching through them. With that in mind, David Edwards, a biomedical engineer at Harvard University, created WikiCells, a pliable skin that combines small particles of dried fruit, chocolate shavings or other edibles and is held together by electrostatic force. (Samples of WikiCells-wrapped ice cream are available at the Lab Store in Paris; it will be for sale there this fall.) MonoSol's film, which is being tested with everything from drink powders (left) to oatmeal, is made from the same kinds of polymers drug companies use to cover pills. "We're not using anything that hasn't been used for human consumption before," says Sumeet Kumar, senior manager of technical marketing at MonoSol. And New York City--based Loliware's edible, biodegradable cups (above) are molded from natural pectins and cane juice, then infused with flavors.

Time (sub required)