Get ready for the locavore movement to move right on into your house. The Daily Mail looks at how future home cooks will use biospheres to raise everything from their own seafood to their own produce.
The biosphere farm from Philips (the company that might have made your television) is a series of stacked compartments that act in a symbiotic fashion. The plants produce oxygen for the tank of fish beneath them. Shrimp in the tank clean up the fish waste and are also edible. The power source would be food waste from the kitchen and the natural byproduct of hydrogen could also be a fuel source.
The biosphere farm is one of three food suggestions that came out of the Philips Design probe program, which studies current cultural trends in an effort to anticipate the needs of society in the future and design products that meet those needs. In essence this is a design team charged with envisioning what society will require in 2030. It's a slightly more practical approach than Disney World's House of the Future.
In addition to the biosphere, the probe program has suggested the need
for a diagnostic kitchen that could help address a person's specific
dietary concerns. The diagnostic kitchen would use a wand to test the levels of nutrients
in your body and recommend the right food to keep you in balance.
There's also an idea for a food "printer." Inspired by "molecular gastronomists" (chefs who deconstruct food and then reassemble it in completely different ways), the food printer would:
Essentially accept various edible ingredients and then combine and "print" them in teh desired shape and consistency, in much the same way as stereolithographic printers create 3-D representations of product concepts.
The biosphere is the only idea for which current iterations exist -- although not yet from Philips. Here's a guide to making a table-top version and here's the moment when it failed to keep Pauly Shore's career alive.
[Image via Flickr: turley]
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