Our weekly serving of off-the-menu items—a few popular favorites from the week as well as a few morsels that may have slipped your notice.
Can Wine be Blue?
In Spain, the government has shut down the wine collective Gik’s production and marketing of their trademark product: blue wine. The product is entirely dervied by grapes and the blue color is achieved through two organic additives. The government has ruled that wine can only be Red, White or Rose but with the rise of small productions of Orange wines and the rise of natural wines, who get to decide on what’s real or not?
Illustration by Bruce McCall, courtesy of the New Yorker
Tour the Biggest Vertical Farm in the World
Doing what the New Yorker does best, this long form profile of the founders behind the world’s largest vertical farm sheds a light behind the vision, technology and business model for Newark-based AeroFarms.
How Pizza Robots Can Create Better Jobs for Humans
At Zume Pizza in Silicon Valley, engineers are building automated pizza robots, “a Domino’s without the labor component,” it’s CEO tells Quartz. Although red flags about the coming age of automation might be raised, the company is actually able to provide better benefits and pay for the human-side of their operation—delivery people, food prep—and apply those cost savings from labor to source locally-produced, high-quality ingredients without a huge difference in cost for their consumers.
How to Cook with Plankton
A breakdown of this green ingredient that is predicted to make a splash in 2017. Fine Dining Lovers breaks down what it is, why we should eat it and how to cook with it.
Dine with the Dead
A design company is offering a new way to commune with the dead: over dinner and a drink. The company has designed a set of ceramic tableware that is glazed with the ashes of the deceased so you can literally dine with the dead.
The 1%-ers Guide to Bottled Water
If there’s nothing else that gets us going, the waste and dystopic vision of our near future signaled by the rise of bottled water is enough to set off a firestorm of frustration. The food writers at New York Magazine give us a detailed “taste test” of the “Best Bottled Water” to prepare you for the apocalypse.
